At Joe Biden’s rally in Madison, Wisconsin, this afternoon, the men and women who had crammed into a middle-school basketball gym dutifully clapped, yelled words of support, and waved signs bearing the president’s name. But when it came time to chant “four more years,” they sounded as if they were merely going through the motions. Most of the rally-goers I spoke with said they were more committed to the Democratic Party than its 81-year-old leader.

No interview could reverse the damage that Joe Biden did to his campaign in the first presidential debate, but his conversation with George Stephanopoulos tonight showed that the president doesn’t even understand how profound the damage is.
The 20-minute interview, which aired this evening on ABC, featured a combative Biden, more like the president who gave a widely praised State of the Union address in March than the one who crumbled on a debate stage last week.

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Arthur C. Brooks, an expert on leadership and happiness, discusses the trap of staying on too long.

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Generative AI could do many things to our world. But one thing it has certainly done already is facilitate endless (and endlessly strange) representations of Jesus Christ.

Following a landslide victory for the Labour Party, Britain has a new leader. The moment Keir Starmer is officially made prime minister of the United Kingdom, he will be given a flurry of briefings, piles of documents, and the urgent business to run the country. Lurking among those papers is a moral land mine.
Starmer will be given a pen and four pieces of paper. On each paper, he must handwrite identical top-secret orders that—hopefully—no other human being will ever see.

When Ron Klain admitted to me a year ago that the White House could have worked harder to elevate Kamala Harris’s profile, he didn’t know that the Democratic Party, and perhaps American democracy itself, would soon be riding on her readiness to be president. But perhaps he should have.
It was July 2023, and while interviewing President Joe Biden’s former chief of staff in his law office in downtown Washington, D.C.

The last time Britain traded a Conservative government for a Labour one, back in 1997, the mood was so buoyant that the new prime minister, Tony Blair, declared: “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” His successor Keir Starmer is far less of a showman, and even many of his supporters feel pessimistic about Britain’s future prospects. Yet the scale of Starmer’s victory today appears comparable to Blair’s landslide.

Weird things happen on the debate stage—just ask Joe Biden. So when Donald Trump used Palestinian as a slur against the president during last week’s debate, it was hard to know whether the insult was planned or just an ad-lib.
“As far as Israel and Hamas, Israel’s the one that wants to go—he said the only one who wants to keep going is Hamas. Actually, Israel is the one. And you should let them go and let them finish the job,” Trump said. “He doesn’t want to do it.

As a hamburger enthusiast, I often need directions to some burger joint I’ve never tried. Recently, my phone’s instructions sent me toward the on-ramp for the interstate. Then the app urged me, in 500 feet, to merge onto the freeway. By that time, though, what else could I have done? Did the app imagine that I might get confused, and turn around instead?
Mapping software is incredible.

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Two years ago, I had a conversation that I have thought about almost every day since. Some pals and I were playing a board game, and—don’t worry, I will not try to explain the rules of a board game to you here. But suffice it to say, it involved naming colors.