Tag: recent months
AI’s Spicy-Mayo Problem – The Atlantic
One day in July, a developer who goes by the handle Teknium asked an AI chatbot how to make mayonnaise. Not just any mayo—he wanted a “dangerously spicy” recipe. The chatbot, however, politely declined. “As a helpful and honest assistant, I cannot fulfill your request for ‘dangerously spicy mayo’ as it is not appropriate to provide recipes or instructions that may cause harm to individuals,” it replied. “Spicy foods can be delicious, but they can also be dangerous
What’s Next in Gaza – The Atlantic
Just as there are stages of grief, there are stages of war. Not yet two weeks after Hamas’s surprise attack, Israel is still in a raw, early stage. My colleague Graeme Wood, who arrived in Jerusalem this week, described it to me this way: “Israel is still reeling from the trauma of the attack on October 7. That manifests in a number of ways. And one is that there’s a certain amount of Israeli policy that is driven right now
Poland’s Election Is Neither Free nor Fair
State capture is a clean, formal phrase that describes a messy, ugly process. A political party or clique typically consolidates control over a state’s institutions only after years of bad legislation, concentrated propaganda, and many different forms of corruption. In some cases, constitutions have to be broken. Occasionally violence is required. Whole swaths of the public have to be persuaded, bribed, or frightened into going along.
In Poland, this process has been under way for eight years. After the
Why Biden Just Can’t Shake Trump in the Polls
Like so many bands of wind and rain, hurricane-strength squalls of bad news have battered former President Donald Trump all year. Since April, he’s been indicted four times, on 91 separate felony charges, compared with zero counts for all of his White House predecessors. Trump often likes to claim that anything associated with him is the most spectacular, even when it’s not, but when it comes to accumulating criminal charges, he’s the undisputed champ of former presidents.
President Joe Biden,
The Next Crisis Will Start With Empty Office Buildings
“I’m about to cancel all my Zoom meetings.” It was May 2021, and Jamie Dimon had had enough. The JPMorgan Chase CEO expected that “sometime in September, October,” the company’s office would “look just like it did before.” Two years later, his company is slashing its Manhattan footprint by a fifth.
Post-pandemic, kids are back in school, retirees are back on cruise ships, and physical stores are doing better than expected. But offices are struggling perhaps more than most casual
What Carl Sagan Understood About Human Cruelty
An infrequent astronomical event offers a new way of processing the unthinkable.
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Question of the Week
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Why Didn’t Anyone Do Anything About Silicon Valley Bank?
On January 18, a prominent financial newsletter noted that if Silicon Valley Bank were liquidated that day, “it would be functionally underwater.” Months before the nation’s 16th-largest bank collapsed, incomplete information provided to regulators indicated that the bank was stable, whereas public signals—such as SVB’s overreliance on longer-term securities hammered by rising interest rates—told a very different story. So why didn’t anyone do something?
To help answer this question, I turned to Natasha Sarin, a lawyer and an economist teaching
The next stage of COVID is starting now
To be a newborn in the year 2023—and, almost certainly, every year that follows—means emerging into a world where the coronavirus is ubiquitous. Babies might not meet the virus in the first week or month of life, but soon enough, SARS-CoV-2 will find them. “For anyone born into this world, it’s not going to take a lot of time for them to become infected,” maybe a year, maybe two, says Katia Koelle, a virologist and infectious-disease modeler at Emory University.
Long COVID is the emergency that won’t end
In the early spring of 2020, the condition we now call long COVID didn’t have a name, much less a large community of patient advocates. For the most part, clinicians dismissed its symptoms, and researchers focused on SARS-CoV-2 infections’ short-term effects. Now, as the pandemic approaches the end of its third winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the chronic toll of the coronavirus is much more familiar. Long COVID has been acknowledged by prominent experts, national leaders, and the World Health
Is COVID Immunity Hung Up on Old Variants?
In the two-plus years that COVID vaccines have been available in America, the basic recipe has changed just once. The virus, meanwhile, has belched out five variants concerning enough to earn their own Greek-letter names, followed by a menagerie of weirdly monikered Omicron subvariants, each seeming to spread faster than the last. Vaccines, which take months to reformulate, just can’t keep up with a virus that seems to reinvent itself by the week.
But SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary sprint might not be