Robert Redford ruled the golden-boy category, whether he was twirling a Colt revolver or directing a camera’s glance. He sure looked like one of life’s winners. As others have pointed out in their remembrances of the actor and director, he was a “quintessential leading man” who possessed “near-iconographic physical beauty.” But the sheen was slippery, as he was well aware.

Sarah Topol is the winner of the 22nd annual Michael Kelly Award for “The Deserter: An Epic Story of Love and War,” published last year by The New York Times Magazine. Topol’s moving, five-part feature is about a combat officer who deserted from the Russian army and, together with his wife, defected to the West; Topol also spoke with 18 other Russian defectors for her reporting.
The award was announced this morning at the 16th annual Atlantic Festival in New York City.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Book publishing has, let’s say, a complicated relationship with artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Anthropic settled a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion after training its chatbot, Claude, on pirated text; hundreds of such copyright lawsuits against data-scraping tech companies are still making their way through the courts.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts
Yesterday, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was suspended indefinitely. It’s a shocking moment for free speech, given the order in which events unfolded. Earlier that day, FCC Chair Brendan Carr had suggested on a conservative podcast that ABC and its affiliates consider taking steps against Kimmel, saying, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.

Three months into its tenure, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s handpicked vaccine advisory committee has taken down one of its easiest targets.
Today, its members voted to limit the national guidance for a childhood vaccine that has helped protect infants against some of the most dangerous and fast-spreading viral diseases in the United States.

On Tuesday afternoon, three parents sat in a row before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. Two of them had each recently lost a child to suicide; the third has a teenage son who, after cutting his arm in front of her and biting her, is undergoing residential treatment. All three blame generative AI for what has happened to their children.
They had come to testify on what appears to be an emerging health crisis in teens’ interactions with AI chatbots.

In a conversation with Tim Alberta at The Atlantic Festival, former Vice President Mike Pence discussed his conservatism, the state of free speech on the right, and his relationship with President Donald Trump.
Alberta asked Pence about ABC’s decision last night to “indefinitely suspend” the comedian Jimmy Kimmel. The network’s move came after Kimmel said “the MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.