This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
The outer solar system is awash with liquid water. A briny ocean is concealed beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, Europa—with more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. A subsurface sea on Saturn’s moon Enceladus spews plumes of water vapor into space. And there are tantalizing hints that oceans could exist on Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, and other distant moons, too.

Sixty years ago, on August 22, 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black former sharecropper from Sunflower County, Mississippi, who had become a civil-rights activist, delivered one of the most eloquent addresses on race relations ever heard. Testifying before the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, where President Lyndon B.

Last September, I got a message from my brother’s memorial Facebook group. The group chat had been created by my aunt shortly after Ben died, nearly a decade ago, so that the people closest to him could share photos and memories. The group is not as active as it once was, but people still post.

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Before the DNC kicks off on Monday, let’s quickly recap the sheer eventfulness of the past few weeks for the Democratic Party. Less than one month ago, President Joe Biden announced that he was exiting the presidential race.

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At this point, AI art is about as remarkable as the email inviting you to save 10 percent on a new pair of jeans.

AI entered the presidential race this week, but not in the way many might have been expecting. In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump falsely claimed that Kamala Harris had “CHEATED” and “A.I.’d” an image showing a large crowd of people cheering for her at a campaign stop in Michigan.

This week, X launched an AI-image generator, allowing paying subscribers of Elon Musk’s social platform to make their own art. So—naturally—some users appear to have immediately made images of Donald Trump flying a plane toward the World Trade Center; Mickey Mouse wielding an assault rifle, and another of him enjoying a cigarette and some beer on the beach; and so on. Some of the images that people have created using the tool are deeply unsettling; others are just strange, or even kind of funny.

Until recently, the Kamala Harris campaign seemed allergic to setting a policy agenda. Finally, the campaign is starting to roll out its economic platform, and the substance likely won’t appeal to many people who actually know about economics. But it’s hard for me to argue with the politics. As someone who has often said Democrats need to compromise their ideals to win, I don’t exclude my own ideals from that.