On June 3, 2021, a roughly 60-year-old man in the riverside city of Magdeburg, Germany, received his first COVID vaccine. He opted for Johnson & Johnson’s shot, popular at that point because unlike Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines, it was one-and-done. But that, evidently, was not what he had in mind. The following month, he got the AstraZeneca vaccine. The month after that, he doubled up on AstraZeneca and added a Pfizer for good measure.
Artificial intelligence can appear to be many different things—a whole host of programs with seemingly little common ground. Sometimes AI is a conversation partner, an illustrator, a math tutor, a facial-recognition tool. But in every incarnation, it is always, always a machine, demanding almost unfathomable amounts of data and energy to function.
AI systems such as ChatGPT operate out of buildings stuffed with silicon computer chips.
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No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.
But that didn’t prevent a crowded primary.
We speak with Palestinian novelist, poet and activist Susan Abulhawa, who is in Cairo and just returned from two weeks in Gaza. “What’s happening to people isn’t just this death and dismemberment and hunger. It is a total denigration of their personhood, of their whole society,” says Abulhawa. “What I witnessed personally in Rafah and some of the middle areas is incomprehensible, and I will call it a holocaust — and I don’t use that word lightly. But it is absolutely that.
We look at Monday’s unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that states do not have the authority to remove Donald Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment with Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern, who calls the decision a “disaster” that appears tailor-made to let Trump avoid accountability for the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
On Super Tuesday, millions of voters cast ballots in primaries across the United States, and we look at key contests in California, North Carolina, Arizona and elsewhere with American Prospect executive editor David Dayen.
The president’s team thinks it’s had a historically successful first term, delivering victories on the economy, climate, drug pricing and more. But many Americans aren’t feeling it.
Opponents of the reproductive rights referendum are waging a campaign to discourage voters from signing petitions.
The announcement is expected to be touted this week, alongside efforts to increase competition in food, housing and other kitchen table issues.
Eighty-six percent of those surveyed said IVF should be legal for women trying to get pregnant.
The move comes just weeks before the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that could prohibit brick-and-mortar pharmacies from dispensing the commonly used abortion pill.
The guidance for Covid now aligns with RSV and the flu and comes amid a marked decrease in Covid-related hospitalizations and deaths, and as many people tell officials they don’t bother to test when ill.
Policymakers were determined to avoid the mistakes of the Great Recession — and they succeeded. But now they are in a mood of “fear and introspection.
“You can’t blame the president when policies go wrong, and then say he’s not responsible if things are going right.
The unemployment rate stayed at 3.7%, just above a half-century low.
The strategy shift focuses on Trump’s tax law and poses a simple question to voters: Whose side are you on?
Reproductive health and medical groups are asking the Alabama Supreme Court to rehear the case in which the justices ruled frozen embryos should be considered children. The decision sent shockwaves through the world of reproductive medicine regarding potential effects on access to in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments. We speak with Abbey Crain, a journalist and artist who had been undergoing IVF treatments for nearly two years when the court made its ruling.
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After Super Tuesday, all of the pointless wishing for a lightning strike to change the 2024 race should end: The contest is once again an existential test of American democracy.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The Houthis are very, very pleased.
Democrats are working to make abortion and reproductive health care a central issue in the 2024 election.
This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here.
You can’t always get what you want. What Mick Jagger said about life applies with equal, perhaps even greater, force to litigation. Like life, litigation has its ups and downs. It reflects human fears and frailties—because judges, lawyers, and litigants are human. Law is never perfect, and never will be.
When scientists first created the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, they told a tidy story about how the medications would work: The gut releases a hormone called GLP-1 that signals you’re full, so a drug that mimics GLP-1 could do the exact same thing, helping people eat less and lose weight.
The rest, as they say, is history.
In the fall of 2021, the American writer and translator Jennifer Croft published an essay in The Guardian that provoked a spirited conversation within the English-speaking literary world. Why, she asked, were translators expected to remain coyly, politely invisible, with their names more often than not cast off from book covers by publishers? This practice, she pointed out, overlooks the labor that goes into these books: It is the translators, after all, who “choose every word they will contain.
Ahead of the 96th Academy Awards, we’re joined by James Wilson, producer of the Oscar-nominated film The Zone of Interest, who raised Israel’s assault on Gaza in his BAFTA Award acceptance speech last month. The film follows the fictionalized family of real-life Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss as they live idyllically next to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Federal prosecutors in New York have rested their case against former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is accused of turning the Central American country into a narco-state. Hernández is on trial for cocaine trafficking and weapons charges and is the first former head of state to stand trial in the United States since Panamanian dictator and U.S. ally Manuel Noriega was also tried on drug charges after a U.S.-led ouster. Prosecutors accuse Hernández, a longtime U.S.
Haiti is under a state of emergency after the country’s gangs freed thousands of people from the country’s largest prisons and are reportedly uniting to bring down Haiti’s de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who has yet to return to the country since he traveled to Kenya last week to discuss a deal to bring a U.N. force of 1,000 Kenyan police to the island. “It is a desolation that we are feeling.
Eighty-six percent of those surveyed said IVF should be legal for women trying to get pregnant.
The move comes just weeks before the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that could prohibit brick-and-mortar pharmacies from dispensing the commonly used abortion pill.
The guidance for Covid now aligns with RSV and the flu and comes amid a marked decrease in Covid-related hospitalizations and deaths, and as many people tell officials they don’t bother to test when ill.
The votes in the House and the Senate come nearly two weeks after the state Supreme Court ruled that frozen eggs are children, setting off a national debate about how IVF is performed in the U.S.
Policymakers were determined to avoid the mistakes of the Great Recession — and they succeeded. But now they are in a mood of “fear and introspection.