Tag: past year
Jodie Foster’s Life On-screen – The Atlantic
Jodie Foster has spent much of her career playing the lonely woman under pressure. A young FBI agent-in-training having an underground tête-à-tête with a cannibalistic serial killer. A scientist launching into space, solo. A mild-mannered radio host who becomes a vigilante after strangers assault her and kill her boyfriend. A mother whose child vanishes in the middle of a transatlantic flight. A wife whose husband is having a suicidal psychotic break and will talk to her only through a
America’s Immigration Reckoning Has Arrived
In the summer of 2014, I joined a group of journalists in an organized visit to a Border Patrol warehouse in Nogales, Arizona. My daughter had just turned 5 the day before. As I walked out the door, I remember using my hands to smooth out the wrinkles on her school uniform as tenderly as if I were waking her up from sleep. I remember writing my daily note to her in our shared language—Eu te amo—with
You Should Go to a Trump Rally
If Donald Trump has benefited from one underappreciated advantage this campaign season, it might be that no one seems to be listening to him very closely anymore.
This is a strange development for a man whose signature political talent is attracting and holding attention. Consider Trump’s rise to power in 2016—how all-consuming his campaign was that year, how one @realDonaldTrump tweet could dominate news coverage for days, how watching his televised stump speeches in a suspended state of fascination or
The House Republicans Who’ve Had Enough
House Republicans didn’t exactly have a banner year in 2023. They made history for all the wrong reasons. Last January, they presided over the most protracted election for speaker in a century, and nine months later, for good measure, lawmakers ejected their leader, Kevin McCarthy, for the first time ever. Last month, the House expelled one of its own, George Santos, for only the sixth time.
The rest of the year wasn’t any more productive. Thanks in part to
The Nine Breakthroughs of the Year
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The theme of my second-annual Breakthroughs of the Year is the long road of progress. My top breakthrough is Casgevy, a gene-editing treatment for sickle-cell anemia. In the 1980s and early 1990s, scientists in Spain and Japan found strange, repeating patterns in the DNA of certain bacteria. Researchers eventually linked these sequences to an immune defense system that
The Invisible Forces Behind the Books We Read
The ownership of the American publishing house Simon & Schuster has been much in the news over the past couple of years. First Penguin Random House tried to swallow it up, then a fascinating antitrust trial put a bunch of agents and writers on the witness stand. A judge eventually quashed that merger as potentially monopolistic, and more recently, a private-equity fund, KKR, swooped in to buy the company.
If you’re a shareholder or an employee of any of
Ron DeSantis Does Not Seem to Be Enjoying Himself
On Saturday afternoon, with just over six weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, Ron DeSantis told a story about how he once bravely stood up to the Special Olympics.
He was speaking atop a small platform in a partitioned-off section of a former roller rink in Newton, Iowa, dubbed “the Thunderdome.” The anecdote, like so many, had something to do with the tyranny of vaccine mandates. DeSantis said he had met a family at the Iowa State Fair,
How ChatGPT Fractured OpenAI – The Atlantic
Updated at 10:39 p.m. ET on November 19, 2023
To truly understand the events of the past 48 hours—the shocking, sudden ousting of OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, arguably the figurehead of the generative-AI revolution, followed by reports that the company is now in talks to bring him back—one must understand that OpenAI is not a technology company. At least, not like other epochal companies of the internet age, such as Meta, Google, and Microsoft.
OpenAI was deliberately structured to resist
The New AI Panic – The Atlantic
For decades, the Department of Commerce has maintained a little-known list of technologies that, on grounds of national security, are prohibited from being sold freely to foreign countries. Any company that wants to sell such a technology overseas must apply for permission, giving the department oversight and control over what is being exported and to whom.
These export controls are now inflaming tensions between the United States and China. They have become the primary way for the U.S. to throttle
This the Trump Indictment That Really Matters
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Donald Trump stands indicted for attempting to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and subvert the rights of American citizens. This is the moment that will decide our future as a democracy.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
This Is