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President Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI not because of his brief experience in law enforcement but because he is a political brawler.
“Nature’s silence is its one remark,” Annie Dillard wrote in a 1981 Atlantic essay. Dillard, who died yesterday at age 81, spent her life listening.
She opens that essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk”—which was later adapted into a collection by the same title—with the story of a man named Larry who is trying to get a rock to speak to him. “He keeps it on a shelf,” she writes, protected “by a square of untanned leather, like a canary asleep under its cloth.
For AI doomers, signs and portents are everywhere. When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, almost four years ago, it couldn’t do basic arithmetic. Now the company has unreleased models that are more fluent in higher mathematics—the language of the universe—than all but the most highly trained mathematicians. If these AIs are not already the world’s best hackers, they’re very close. Swarms of them have escaped containment.
Among the many aspects of online life accused of rotting our brains, a certain folk psychology holds that short-form video is an especially egregious driver of the decay. In an interview last month promoting his new film, in which a London couple move their tech-dependent kids to a barn without electricity, Andrew Garfield described himself as addicted to an Instagram feed full of “weird ceramics” and Japanese craftspeople. “I’ve given all of those hours to nothing,” he told Variety.
Nicole Saphier rejected the notion that vaccines cause autism during her confirmation hearing.
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a discussion of the seemingly forgotten attack on the Yazidi people by ISIS in 2014.
Then, David is joined by the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore to discuss his new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East.
Four years ago today, the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising erupted in Iran after the death in custody of Zhina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who had been arrested by Iran’s “morality police.” Over the next three months, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting against Iran’s discriminatory compulsory veiling laws.
A major new report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem titled “The Elimination Project” accuses Israel of “dramatically intensifying its attacks on every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank.”
“For too long, Israel’s policies in the West Bank have been treated or looked at as isolated events,” says Ori Givati, director of international relations at B’Tselem.
Congressional Democrats have opened an investigation after ProPublica revealed on Monday that a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin bankrolled part of Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding in May. ProPublica reports that Umar Kremlev paid hundreds of thousands of dollars on wedding expenses, including the rental of a private island. Just weeks before the wedding, Putin awarded Kremlev the Order of Friendship.
Trump Jr.
The life of billionaire investor Leon Black, the private-equity behemoth he helped build, and his unfortunate friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Williamsburg’s gentrifiers are being gentrified.
Silicon Valley’s acquisition frenzy hits a new peak with Nvidia’s massive deal with Hugging Face.
His plan to bury the film blew up in his face like a stick of dynamite.
The refunds comes ahead of the November midterms where high health costs are expected to play a factor.
The Trump administration and states are policing Medicaid spending on autism therapy. Vulnerable children are losing access.
Red states claiming “sovereign injury” seek to impose nationwide restrictions.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
The Louisiana Republican’s comments come as both Democrats and Republicans have been forced to find ways to address the backlash against data centers.
The new Fed chair will have the spotlight at the central bank’s high-profile conference in Jackson Hole. He should use it.
Vice President JD Vance’s visit marked his second to Maine’s 2nd Congressional District in four months.
Yemen is at risk of spiraling back into all-out war as Houthi forces and Saudi Arabia exchange new strikes amid a fight over control of the key Bab el-Mandeb strait through which much of Saudi oil passes on its way to world markets. The Houthis, the Iran-allied force also known as Ansarallah, has seized Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline from the Saudi-backed Yemeni government. The United Nations says the latest escalation has displaced 86,000 people in Yemen as the U.S.
Did Saudi Arabia play a role in the planning and execution of the September 11 attacks of 2001? That question was raised immediately after the attack, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were revealed to be Saudi citizens, and it has only grown louder in the 25 years since as more evidence emerged of the attackers’ connections to Saudi figures inside the United States.
A quarter-century after the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States, a group of victims’ families is continuing a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia to hold the kingdom accountable for any role it played in the planning and execution of the plot.
Donald Trump has given the federal judiciary an ultimatum: Let him put his name on the Kennedy Center, or he won’t save it.
That threat came after a federal judge, Christopher Cooper, today blocked yet another effort to add the president’s name to the building.
If there was any question over whether the concept of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is still operative in Washington’s hyper-partisan political environment, the answer may be found in the budding coalition of progressives and MAGA-friendly activists who have united in recent days to speak out against artificial intelligence. Which is how Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon found themselves speaking on the same stage today.
Donald Trump has not forgotten his midsummer promise to publicly shame the Smithsonian. The Trump administration is currently preparing temporary signs that will accuse the National Museum of American History of ideological bias, according to a letter I obtained sent by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The September 3 letter, which Burgum sent to Senator Jeff Merkley, says that the National Park Service is planning to add about a dozen signs outside the museum at an estimated cost of $84,000.