Because of my reverence for Alice Munro’s work, I was often asked if I’d ever met her. I felt that I had totally met her in her books and said as much. I never desired to meet her in person, for what I loved would not necessarily be there. The one time I was scheduled actually to meet her—at a reading and ceremony in her honor—she canceled. Stupidly, I was relieved.

Earlier today, Google presented a new vision for its flagship search engine, one that is uniquely tailored to the generative-AI moment. With advanced technology at its disposal, “Google will do the Googling for you,” Liz Reid, the company’s head of search, declared onstage at the company’s annual software conference.
Googling something rarely yields an immediate, definitive answer.

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New polling shows Joe Biden trailing Donald Trump in five out of six key swing states. Voters there say they want change—which presents a challenge for the candidate who won in 2020 on the promise of normalcy.

On Sunday at Duke University, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld delivered a commencement address that was, bizarrely, overshadowed in the media by a tiny, nondisruptive protest.
Seinfeld gave a compliment and a warning to his Gen Z audience.
First came the compliment. “I totally admire the ambitions of your generation to create a more just and inclusive society,” he said.

America’s young voters are fired up about the war in Gaza—aren’t they? Campus protests and the controversies around them have dominated media attention for weeks. So has the possibility that youth anger about the war will cost President Joe Biden the election. “Joe Biden Is Losing Young Voters Over Israel,” a USA Today headline declared last month. The New York Times columnist Thomas B.

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For the first time in 221 years, two different groups of cicadas are emerging simultaneously and screaming from the treetops. More after these three stories from The Atlantic:
This is the next smartphone evolution.
Russell Berman: Attack a Democrat charged with corruption? Republicans wouldn’t dare.

Earlier today, OpenAI announced its newest product: GPT-4o, a faster, cheaper, more powerful version of its most advanced large language model, and one that the company has deliberately positioned as the next step in “natural human-computer interaction.

This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here.
Not all that long ago, I thought that the trial currently being held in The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump would be the last one I’d want to see as the first one tried against the former president. It seemed the least serious of the cases against him. Here’s a man who tried to overthrow American democracy by launching a coup to stay in power.

Earlier this month, federal prosecutors bestowed on Republicans what seemed like an election-year gift: charging a senior House Democrat in a competitive district with accepting $600,000 in bribes and acting as a foreign agent. For a party clinging to a threadbare majority in the House, the indictment offered an obvious opportunity for an America First attack.

It took Conan O’Brien less than 90 seconds to upend Hot Ones. The YouTube interview show’s gimmick is simple: Celebrities eat successively hotter chicken wings while the host, Sean Evans, asks them well-researched questions about their life and career. Most guests are happy to endure painful spice while answering never-before-asked questions. O’Brien, on the other hand, shamelessly infused his own zany sensibility into the show’s design by immediately introducing “Dr.