The story behind the cartoon
Cade Metz graduated from Duke University with a degree in English in 1994, an unlikely starting point for a career spent inside the machine room of the internet. He went to Wired, where in 2011 he launched Wired Enterprise, a beat devoted to the unglamorous machinery under the web: the data centers, cloud systems and companies driving the next generation of computing.
The New York Times hired him in 2017 to cover emerging technology — artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics and the people building them. In March 2021 Dutton published Genius Makers, his reported history of the researchers, labs, executives and money that pushed modern AI from the academic margins into Silicon Valley.
In 2024 he led the Times investigation into how OpenAI, Google and Meta gathered data from across the internet to train their AI systems, tracing the harvest behind the models. In August 2026 the Times moved him to the Science desk to inaugurate a dedicated AI beat, framing AI itself as a major scientific development to be covered alongside its achievements, failures and mysteries.
The joke in Zimbo's strip is the arc itself: the English major who started out carrying Shakespeare, Milton and Austen ends up as the man who documented the machines — and the punchline is that the machines, having read his homework, have now started writing their own newspapers and their own history, while he and a small robot dog watch from a lookout reached by cable car.
HE WATCHED THEM GROW UP
THE FADING PORTRAIT
THE BURGLAR AND THE FENCE
THE PRECEDENT THAT WASN'T THERE