Tag: people’s lives
The Vanishing American Rabbi – The Atlantic
In November 2021, Temple Israel in Springfield, Missouri, began looking for a new rabbi. A quick perusal of job listings from other Reform synagogues left the search committee stunned: Scores of congregations, many offering higher salaries in larger cities, had been unable to fill their positions for months, sometimes longer. Eventually, Temple Israel entered into a fee-for-service agreement with a rabbi two hours away. He would come in for Shabbat, High Holiday services, and adult-education classes, but he
Washington Can Stop the AI Free-for-All
In April, lawyers for the airline Avianca noticed something strange. A passenger, Robert Mata, had sued the airline, alleging that a serving cart on a flight had struck and severely injured his left knee, but several cases cited in Mata’s lawsuit didn’t appear to exist. The judge couldn’t verify them, either. It turned out that ChatGPT had made them all up, fabricating names and decisions. One of Mata’s lawyers, Steven A. Schwartz, had used the chatbot as an assistant—his first
Richard E. Grant’s Most Powerful Performance
On camera, the actor Richard E. Grant tends to emit an unknowable, tenebrous quality: No matter how much his characters express, you always sense something between the lines that can’t quite be calibrated. In his new memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness, Grant elegantly summarizes his career as several decades of “minimalist villainy.” His characters have run the gamut from hedonistic wastrel thespian (Withnail and I) to authoritarian girl-band manager (Spice World) to utterly charming criminal
Russia Is Making Abducted Ukrainian Children Impossible to Find
Amid the bombast of Russia’s one-year celebration of its war in Ukraine, a 15-year-old with thick, black hair and a gray hooded jacket was handed a microphone. In front of thousands of cheering people, Anya Naumenko thanked “Uncle Yuri”—a Russian soldier known as Yuri Gagarin—for saving her, her sister, and “hundreds of thousands of children in Mariupol,” the Ukrainian city that fell under heavy attack from the first day of Russia’s cross-border invasion, in February 2022.
Having recited words
Why Did Cotopaxi Leave San Francisco?
Hayes Valley is an aspirational neighborhood located in central San Francisco, the main strip of which is lined with trendy stores and restaurants. It’s also a neighborhood where, according to Davis Smith, the CEO of the outdoor-gear brand Cotopaxi, retailers have begun to lock their doors during the day for fear of being robbed in broad daylight.
Last week, Smith announced that he would be temporarily closing his company’s flagship outpost on Hayes Street, which he says has been robbed
The Doctors Who Are Now Prisoners of War
When Russia’s siege of Mariupol began in February, Ivan Demkiv was the senior surgeon at a military hospital known simply by its number: 555. The hospital took in 20 wounded on the first day of the war. The number kept going up from there. For weeks, Demkiv hardly left the operating theater. His days were an endless succession of limb amputations and other lifesaving interventions, the sound of Russia’s bombardment of the city always in the background. Demkiv stayed
The Retail Industry’s ‘Shoplifting Surge’ Claims Are Fuzzy at Best
You’ve probably seen the shoplifting stories, if only because there are a lot of them. On local news and in national publications, they paint a shocking picture: Across the United States, retail stores are fighting a war against large, violent, highly organized criminal gangs. The attacks are common, and they’re escalating in severity. Thieves smash windows at luxury clothing stores, go full-on Supermarket Sweep in the aisles of drugstores, and sell their wares undetected on Amazon or eBay or Facebook
COVID Parenting Is Reaching a Breaking Point
Parents know that winter is the season of sickness. Your kid will have approximately infinite colds. You, too, will have approximately infinite colds. Last winter, COVID precautions kept sickness at bay. But this year, school is in session, day-care colds are spreading fast, and the only cohort of people in America not yet eligible for COVID vaccination is our youngest children.
Aside from promises of clinical-trial data by the end of the year, the timeline on which children younger than
Amanda Knox: ‘My Identity Continues to Be Exploited’
Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions again and again because others continue to profit off my identity, and my trauma, without my consent. Most recently, there is the film Stillwater, directed by Tom McCarthy and starring Matt Damon and Abigail Breslin, which was, in McCarthy’s words, “directly inspired by the Amanda
Arkansas’s COVID-19 Cases Are Undoing Unvaccinated Places
At a county health department near my hometown in rural Arkansas, almost everyone who comes in for a COVID-19 test is congested and short of breath, with a sore throat and muscle aches. They might have the flu, except for the added telltale symptom of this coronavirus: the loss of taste and smell. Many of the patients now are younger than those in previous months; a nurse who works there told me she saw two cases of young children in