Jacob Stern

By this point, the many defects of AI-based language models have been analyzed to death—their incorrigible dishonesty, their capacity for bias and bigotry, their lack of common sense. GPT-4, the newest and most advanced such model yet, is already being subjected to the same scrutiny, and it still seems to misfire in pretty much all the ways earlier models did. But large language models have another shortcoming that has so far gotten relatively little attention: their shoddy recall.

Since the hit sitcom Seinfeld went off the air in 1998 after nine seasons, the show’s devoted followers have long mused about an alternate reality: What if the original “show about nothing” had never ended?Now they’ve gotten what they wished for—well, sort of. In mid-December, a never-ending AI-generated reboot, aptly named Nothing, Forever, launched on the streaming platform Twitch.

Somehow, in a few short days, gas stoves have gone from a thing that some people cook with to, depending on your politics, either a child-poisoning death machine or a treasured piece of national patrimony. Suddenly, everyone has an opinion. Gas stoves! Who could have predicted it?The roots of the present controversy can be traced back to late December, when scientists published a paper arguing that gas stoves are to blame for nearly 13 percent of childhood-asthma cases in the United States.

Somehow, in a few short days, gas stoves have gone from a thing that some people cook with to, depending on your politics, either a child-poisoning death machine or a treasured piece of national patrimony. Suddenly, everyone has an opinion. Gas stoves! Who could have predicted it?The roots of the present controversy can be traced back to late December, when scientists published a paper arguing that gas stoves are to blame for nearly 13 percent of childhood-asthma cases in the United States.

These days, it’s a real headache to keep tabs on the coronavirus’s ever-shifting subvariants. BA.2, BA.4, and BA.5, three Omicron permutations that rose to prominence last year, were confusing enough. Now, in addition to those, we have to deal with BQ.1.1, BF.7, B.5.2.6, and XBB.1.5, the version of Omicron currently featuring in concerned headlines. Recently, things have also gotten considerably stranger.

Winter is here, and so, once more, are mask mandates. After last winter’s crushing Omicron spike, much of America did away with masking requirements. But with cases once again on the rise and other respiratory illnesses such as RSV and influenza wreaking havoc, some scattered institutions have begun reinstating them. On Monday, one of Iowa’s largest health systems reissued its mandate for staff.

Move over Siri and Alexa, there’s a new AI in town and it’s ready to steal the show—or at least make you laugh with its clever quips and witty responses.That is how ChatGPT, the powerful chatbot released last week by the AI company OpenAI, suggested that I begin this story about ChatGPT.

Well, that didn’t take long.Less than two minutes into Sunday’s World Cup opening match, between Ecuador and the host country, Qatar, the Ecuadorians won a free kick just beyond half field. Their left back lofted a dangerous ball toward goal, Qatar’s keeper came sprinting off his line to punch the ball away, and one of Ecuador’s center backs leaped to challenge for it with his head. From there, pandemonium: Several players collided; the ball shot straight up in the air.

On Tuesday evening, I logged on to PredictIt, America’s favorite political-betting site, to watch the Election Night chaos ensue. People were betting on control of the Senate. People were betting on who’d be elected mayor of San José, California. People were betting on whether Donald Trump would file for another run at the presidency this year.

In 2020, and again in 2021, the dreaded twindemic never came. The worry among experts was that a winter COVID surge layered on top of flu season—or even, in worst-case scenarios, a flu outbreak of pandemic proportions—would push already strained hospitals to the brink. Thankfully, we got lucky. Flu season simply didn’t materialize in 2020: The United States recorded only about 2,000 cases, a jaw-dropping 110 times fewer than it had the season prior.

On one level, the world’s response to the coronavirus pandemic over the past two and half years was a major triumph for modern medicine. We developed COVID vaccines faster than we’d developed any vaccine in history, and began administering them just a year after the virus first infected humans. The vaccines turned out to work better than top public-health officials had dared hope.

Editor’s Note: Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here. Several days after President Joe Biden declared that “the pandemic is over,” Anthony Fauci weighed in on the president’s controversial remarks during an interview at The Atlantic Festival, an annual live event in Washington, D.C.

At first, Damon DuBois’s fantasy-football league kept the punishment for the last-place finisher fairly tame. The loser would have to let the champion select their team name for the following year, take care of the housekeeping at the next draft, or, at worst, sport an I suck at fantasy football license plate all off-season. Nothing crazy.But by the final weeks of each season, league members already eliminated from playoff contention were checking out. DuBois wanted to raise the stakes.

School is in session, pumpkin spice is in season, and Americans are heading to pharmacies for what may soon become another autumn standby: your annual COVID shot. On Tuesday, the White House announced the start of a “new phase” of the pandemic response, one in which “most Americans” will receive a COVID-19 vaccine just “once a year, each fall.

Pick a memory. It could be as recent as breakfast or as distant as your first day of kindergarten. What matters is that you can really visualize it. Hold the image in your mind.

At first, it was all very exciting. In 1971, a team of Danish researchers stationed on Greenland’s northwest coast found that a local Inuit community had remarkably low levels of diabetes and heart disease. The reason, the researchers surmised, was their high-marine-fat diet—in other words, fish oil. Incidence of heart disease, which once afflicted relatively few Americans, had shot up since the turn of the century, and here, seemingly, was a simple solution.

At first, it was all very exciting. In 1971, a team of Danish researchers stationed on Greenland’s northwest coast found that a local Inuit community had remarkably low levels of diabetes and heart disease. The reason, the researchers surmised, was their high-marine-fat diet—in other words, fish oil. Incidence of heart disease, which once afflicted relatively few Americans, had shot up since the turn of the century, and here, seemingly, was a simple solution.

In September 2020, the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office published a hypothetical weather forecast for a mid-July day in the year 2050. Forty degrees Celsius in London. (That’s 104 degrees Fahrenheit.) Thirty-eight in Hull (100 degrees F). Thirty-nine in Birmingham (102 degrees F). These were preposterous numbers, never before seen in U.K. weather forecasts, much less felt in reality—until last week.

Ben Dantzer had spent several frustrating days trying to capture a single squirrel when the epiphany arrived. Dantzer, a rodent researcher at the University of Michigan, was standing in the Canadian Yukon, scrutinizing the uncooperative squirrel, which was perched high in a spruce tree. Then, all of a sudden, he felt as though he was looking at an optical illusion: When he viewed the squirrel one way, he saw a squirrel; when he viewed it another way, he saw a rat.

Ben Dantzer had spent several frustrating days trying to capture a single squirrel when the epiphany arrived. Dantzer, a rodent researcher at the University of Michigan, was standing in the Canadian Yukon, scrutinizing the uncooperative squirrel, which was perched high in a spruce tree. Then, all of a sudden, he felt as though he was looking at an optical illusion: When he viewed the squirrel one way, he saw a squirrel; when he viewed it another way, he saw a rat.

The maskless man a few rows back was coughing his head off. I had just boarded the train from D.C. to New York City a couple of weeks ago and, along with several other passengers, was craning my neck to get a look at what was going on. This was not the reedy dregs of some lingering cold. This was a deep, constant, full-bodied cough. Think garbage disposal with a fork caught inside.No one said anything to the man (at least to my knowledge).

Updated at 5:38 p.m. on May 3, 2022.If you had told me last Wednesday afternoon, when my Twitter account had a grand total of three tweets and 200-something followers, that roughly 24 hours later the account would have tweeted 577 times and boosted its follower count to 42,000, I would not have believed you.

When they last sat down for an interview, in November 2020, Barack Obama told Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg that disinformation is “the single biggest threat to our democracy.” The threat was not a new one, he said, but it was accelerating. It has continued to accelerate since. A month and a half after that conversation, a violent mob stormed the Capitol, driven by the false belief that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump and could be taken back by force.

There is no good time for a war, but there are certainly bad ones. Even as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine enters its second month and the civilian death toll nears 1,000, the pandemic churns on. In Europe and parts of Asia, cases have shot up in recent weeks. A new and seemingly more transmissible variant has emerged, as we always knew it eventually would.

This article was updated at 11:39 p.m. ET on December 20, 2021.Just a few minutes before tip-off on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the PA announcer for the Oklahoma City Thunder broke the news to the gathered fans: That night’s NBA game between the Thunder and the visiting Utah Jazz was canceled “due to unforeseen circumstances.” A Jazz player, it would soon come out, had tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

Perhaps the oddest consolation prize of America’s crushing, protracted battle with the coronavirus is the knowledge that flu season, as we’ve long known it, does not have to exist.It’s easy to think of the flu as an immutable fact of winter life, more inconvenience than calamity. But each year, on average, it sickens roughly 30 million Americans and kills more than 30,000 (though the numbers vary widely season to season).

Last week, the psychologist Steven Taylor was at a socially distanced get-together with some relatives and their friends when the conversation turned to the chaos in Afghanistan. Someone mentioned the sickening footage of desperate Afghans clinging to American military aircraft as they departed. Then one man made a remark that caught Taylor off guard: The videos, he said, were funny. Others agreed.Taylor was appalled. It was one of the most disturbing things he’d heard all week.

One morning in March, I woke up feeling horrible. Head: pressurized. Limbs: leaden. Nose: runny. Oh no, I thought, as I lay in bed. I rubbed my eyes. They were … itchy! I got up and went to the bathroom mirror. Red, too! Thank God, I thought. Allergies!I don’t usually get so excited about the onset of my seasonal allergies. Most years, it goes something like this: I wake up feeling sick. I assume it’s a cold.

It can begin almost imperceptibly, with the turning of the leaves or the first heat of summer, an ambient anxiety with no clear cause. Other times the feeling comes on suddenly, when a news story about the disaster’s anniversary stirs memories of trauma. Some people have nightmares or flashbacks. After 9/11, PTSD rates crested at the one-year mark. Psychologists call this phenomenon the “anniversary reaction.

It was anarchy at the deli counter. On Sunday afternoon in Washington, D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood, a couple dozen masked people had crowded into a corner of a Giant supermarket, where they swiveled their heads warily. As I approached them, a slightly haggard man in an orange down jacket stopped me. “Here for the extra vaccine doses?” asked the man, who was part of the group, not a Giant employee. He handed me a scrap of paper with the number 24 scrawled on it.