Tag: past month
In South Carolina Nikki Haley’s Bill Comes Due
The afternoon before Donald Trump’s blowout win in South Carolina’s primary, Shellie Hargenrader and Julianne Poulnot emerged from a rally for the former president bubbling with righteous conviction.
They had spent the previous hour listening to the candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr. regale supporters at the campaign’s headquarters in an office park outside Charleston. The crowd had been energized, frequently calling out in response to his words as if at a church service as Trump Jr. lacerated President Joe Biden,
American Universities Are Post-truth – The Atlantic
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Over the past few years, conservatives have rapidly lost trust in higher education. From 2015 to 2023, Gallup found that the share of Republicans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell by 37 points, from 56 to 19 percent. As conservatives have come to look negatively at these institutions, Republicans have engaged in political attacks
America’s hottest city is still booming.
In Phoenix, a high of 108 degrees Fahrenheit now somehow counts as a respite. On Monday, America’s hottest major city ended its ominous streak of 31 straight days in which temperatures crested past 110. The toll of this heat—a monthly average of 102.7 degrees in July—has been brutal. One woman was admitted to a hospital’s burn unit after she fell on the pavement outside her home, and towering saguaros have dropped arms and collapsed. Over the past month, hospitals filling
Gödel, Escher, Bach, and AI
By now, you are most likely hyper-aware of the recent stunning progress in artificial intelligence due to the development of large language models such as ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Bard, and at least somewhat aware of the dangers posed by such systems’ frequent hallucinations and their predictable tone of supreme self-confidence and infallibility.
This tone can unfortunately lead highly intelligent people to believe that such systems, despite their propensity to hallucinate, are on a par, as thinkers, with … Read more
AI Could Save Politics—If It Doesn’t Destroy It First
Depending on whom you ask in politics, the sudden advances in artificial intelligence will either transform American democracy for the better or bring about its ruin. At the moment, the doomsayers are louder. Voice-impersonation technology and deep-fake videos are scaring campaign strategists, who fear that their deployment in the days before the 2024 election could decide the winner. Even some AI developers are worried about what they’ve unleashed: Last week the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT practically begged Congress
11 COVID Questions People Still Have, Answered
For almost two years, answering readers’ COVID-19 questions was part of my job as the writer of this magazine’s daily newsletter. We discussed what activities were safe in the early days of the pandemic, when and where to slap on a mask, what to make of new coronavirus variants, and more. So when my partner came down with a fever one night this summer, I thought it was my time to shine.
Things didn’t quite go that way.
What If Russia Uses Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine?
The 12th Main Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense operates a dozen central storage facilities for nuclear weapons. Known as “Object S” sites and scattered across the Russian Federation, they contain thousands of nuclear warheads and hydrogen bombs with a wide variety of explosive yields. For the past three months, President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have been ominously threatening to use nuclear weapons in the war against Ukraine. According to Pavel Podvig, the director of the
The Battle for the Donbas Demands Impossible Choices
Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, Pavlo Kyrylenko and Serhiy Gaidai received phone calls from men they believed to be Russians, based on their accents. Kyrylenko and Gaidai, the governors of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, respectively, were being enticed to defect. The pair—the top Ukrainian officials in parts of their country racked for years by conflict with Moscow-backed separatists—were offered the chance to join what the Russians were convinced would be their inevitable victory.
“This was before
Why the Delta Variant Is a Serious Threat to Kids
Two and a half weeks ago, as the next school year approached, a pediatric cardiologist from Louisiana headed into the Georgia mountains with her husband, their three young children, and their extended family. It was, in many ways, a fairly pandemic-sanctioned vacation: All nine adults in attendance were fully vaccinated. The group spent most of the trip outdoors, biking, swimming, and hiking.
Then, on the last night of the outing—July 27, the same day the CDC pivoted back to asking
Doja Cat, Dr. Luke, and the Murky Ethics of Pop
Eras of music are commonly defined by particular sounds. The ’80s had gated reverb, the aughts had Timbaland’s beats, and the early 2020s have had the froggy, rasping splendor of Doja Cat’s voice. On a slew of recent hits and on her new, third album, Planet Her, the 25-year-old rapper and singer continues to prove she has an extremely now sensibility: steeped in online humor, thrilled by physical pleasure, and adaptable to whatever sound or situation gets thrown at