Humanity’s real problem, the great biologist Edward O. Wilson once remarked, is that “we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” There is no better proof for this aphorism than the American military’s escalating spat with Anthropic, the creator of the artificial-intelligence model Claude.
If the most fervent believers are correct, AI might one day challenge the power and sovereignty of nation-states.

At the age of 30, I became an editor. On my first day, while I was at lunch, a colleague tossed a photocopy of an essay onto my office chair, with a passage underlined. She’d highlighted a quote from a letter that Harold Ross, the founding editor in chief of The New Yorker, wrote to Katharine White, who ran the magazine’s fiction department: “An editor’s life is certainly a life of disappointment.

Around the world, powerful men are facing consequences for their actions. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of trying to overthrow the government in a January 6–style coup, as was his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yuol. Marcin Romanowski, the former deputy justice minister in the right-wing Polish government, is in hiding in Hungary, accused of misusing public funds.

Casey Means has, to say the least, modified her tone. When she testified today in front of the Senate’s health committee, the nominee for surgeon general didn’t, as she is normally wont to do, delve into her experiences with psychedelics or endorse raw milk. She also did not rail at length against birth control.

The middle-aged man in a giraffe costume removed his sunglasses and told the crowd that he was breaking character in order to deliver an earnest message about the most effective way to counteract President Trump. “We do not fight absurdity with valor,” Rob Potylo, a comedian and political activist also known as Robby Roadmaster, said last night as Trump was delivering his State of the Union address. “We fight absurdity with more absurdity!” He then turned around and began to twerk.

On Monday night, someone placed a peculiar bet on the prediction market Kalshi. At 7:45 p.m. eastern time, a single trader put down nearly $100,000 on the claim that, by the end of December, the Trump administration will confirm that alien life or technology exists elsewhere in our universe. According to The Atlantic’s review of Kalshi’s trading data, about 35 minutes after this bet was executed, it was followed by another that was almost twice as large (possibly from the same person).

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Realizing that your brain is slowing down can be jarring. After the age of, say, 45, anyone might start forgetting names, misplacing items, or struggling to pay attention, and the onset of such symptoms can often prompt a visit to a doctor, if only to confirm a patient’s hunch that the passage of time is to blame.