She’s everything. He’s just Doug.
Don’t take it from me—that’s his official title. Here at the United Center in Chicago, state delegates at the Democratic National Convention are given placards to wave during the speeches. The first night was dominated by We Love Joe and Union Yes!, interspersed with the campaign’s battle-cry: We Fight, We Win.
For the speech by the second gentleman, however, the signs simply read DOUG.

Listening to Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention last night was like stumbling upon a man from another time. His evocation of the importance, the centrality even, of searching for humanity in our fellow Americans, particularly those on the far side of our partisan divide, was moving because it felt so foreign.
“Mutual respect has to be part of our message,” he said.

Since the start of the AI boom, the attention on this technology has focused on not just its world-changing potential, but also fears of how it could go wrong. A set of so-called AI doomers have suggested that artificial intelligence could grow powerful enough to spur nuclear war or enable large-scale cyberattacks. Even top leaders in the AI industry have said that the technology is so dangerous, it needs to be heavily regulated.
A high-profile bill in California is now attempting to do that.

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In his DNC address, former President Barack Obama warned about putting a premium on “money, fame, status,” and “likes.” At the same time, his fellow Democrats are shrewdly deploying celebrities and influencers to help propel Kamala Harris to victory this November.

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The 24-year-old Diné poet Kinsale Drake’s “Making a Monument Valley,” which appears in The Atlantic’s September issue, maps the Indigenous history of Los Angeles with pulsing, kinetic language.

During Donald Trump’s crude and shambolic first run for president in 2016, Michelle Obama offered a mission statement for the Democratic Party that doubled as a pithy summary of her family’s political project: “When they go low, we go high.” A decade and a half before that, Barack Obama announced himself as a major figure by declaring at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America.

Here’s the thing about political conventions: They are, foremost, productions—obsessively planned and guided heavily to what looks pretty on screens. But here’s the thing about the Democratic Party: Now, as ever, it is a bit of a mess.
A seemingly happy mess. But a mess nonetheless. And this can make for an awkward production.

On top of the stairs of Chicago’s elevated Green Line yesterday, I had a fine view of the 13-acre Union Park. I squinted, looking for the promised cauldron of Democratic National Convention protesters, the tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian “Crashing the Party” masses ready to rumble at what was billed by the Democratic Socialists of America on social media as the “event of the season.”
I spotted a clump of protesters around a soundstage.

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Lora Kelley: Observers in the media have talked about the Harris campaign’s “vibes” as a way to describe the newfound energy she’s brought to the ticket.

For the past few nights, I’ve concerned myself with the private lives of autonomous vehicles.
It started when I read a news story about a San Francisco apartment complex whose residents were repeatedly awoken at 4 a.m. by honking self-driving taxis. The building overlooks an open-air parking lot that Waymo recently leased to store its vehicles.