Well, that was a nice idea in theory. Paris held the first-ever Olympics opening ceremony to take place outside a stadium—and on one of the loveliest settings in the world, the Seine. Athletes paraded not by foot but by boat, waving flags from sleek cruising pontoons, as pageantry unfolded on bridges and riverbanks. The aquatic format promised to do more than just showcase the architectural beauty of Paris or convey the magic of strolling across the Pont Neuf with fresh bread in hand.

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The current political climate is suffused with nostalgia for supposedly better times. I remember my own childhood, and those days weren’t better—but they had their sugary moments.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
All airlines are now the same.

François-Xavier Marit / AFP / Getty
Following the Parade of Nations on the Seine River, athletes and spectators watch as lasers light up the sky around the Eiffel Tower, at the Trocadero venue, during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 26, 2024.

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Yesterday OpenAI made what should have been a triumphant entry into the AI-search wars: The start-up announced SearchGPT, a prototype tool that can use the internet to answer questions of all kinds. But there was a problem, as I reported: Even the demo got something wrong.

Yesterday, NASA announced that one of its Mars rovers had sampled a very, very intriguing rock. At first glance, the rock looks much like the rest of the red planet—rugged, sepia-toned, dry. But it’s arguably the most exciting one that robotic space explorers have ever come across. The rock, NASA said in a press release, “possesses qualities that fit the definition of a possible indicator of ancient life.”
Of course it would happen like this.

Monday was likely the hottest day on Earth since modern recordkeeping began. On that day, the planet was 17.16 degrees Celsius, or 62.89 degrees Fahrenheit, on average, according to the European climate service Copernicus, narrowly beating out the previous record, set just the day before, by about 0.1 degrees. That news, like previous records of its kind, was quickly characterized as the hottest day in millennia—since the peak of the last interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago.

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J. D. Vance’s veteran status could be an advantage for the GOP—unless he trumpets his years of service too much and annoys his fellow vets in the process.
Breaking the Code
J. D. Vance is a U.S. Marine, and he wants you to know it.

Whenever AI companies present a vision for the role of artificial intelligence in the future of searching the internet, they tend to underscore the same points: instantaneous summaries of relevant information; ready-made lists tailored to a searcher’s needs. They tend not to point out that generative-AI models are prone to providing incorrect, and at times fully made-up, information—and yet it keeps happening.

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“I shall not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
Those are the words not of President Joe Biden, who announced his withdrawal from the 2024 campaign on Sunday, but of a previous president who took himself out of the running: Lyndon B.

Kamala Harris is not an anti-Semite. It feels absurd to have to say this. After all, she is married to an actual Jew, and I’m certain he would happily vouch for her. But in the days since she took over Joe Biden’s spot as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, there has been a surge of innuendo that Harris bears a secret antipathy for Jews.
Leave it to Donald Trump to utter the quiet part out loud—he always does.