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“Anybody who studies history learns two things: They learn to do research and they learn to write,” Richardson said. “The reason that matters now is that most people who are in college now are going to end up switching jobs a number of times in their careers.”

What history will give you is the ability to pivot into the different ideas, the different fields, the different careers as they arise.”

A historian will also know how to metabolize confounding situations, distill them to their essence and communicate that information to others

the more I learn about science, the more I discover basic mysteries that I assumed were solved long ago. Perhaps we’ve exited the Dark Ages, but our own age still seems rather dim.

How do you make sense of a world where the scientific sands are always shifting and where so much remains unknown? It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve made my peace with it by learning to hold everything loosely, to remain ever humble about what we do know and ever optimistic about what we will.

What sustains me now is neither certainty nor hopelessness, but a determined, humble optimism. The right answers are often simply unknown, and I might die without getting to know the truth

it quickly becomes clear that what “The Maniac” is really trying to get a lock on is our current age of digital-informational mastery and subjection

When von Neumann proclaims that, thanks to his computational advances, “all processes that are stable we shall predict” and “all processes that are unstable we shall control,” we’re being prompted to reflect on today’s ubiquitous predictive-slash-determinative algorithms.

When he publishes a paper about the feasibility of a self-reproducing machine — “you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being” — few contemporary readers will fail to home straight in on the fraught subject of A.I.

WhatsApp, the most popular messaging service worldwide, gained more than two and a half billion active users from 2012 to 2023, and is projected to grow 18 percent more by 2025

In a recent survey of roughly 1,000 Americans, 66 percent said they’ve felt overwhelmed by their group messages, and 42 percent said that group chats can feel like a part-time job.

with X (formerly known as Twitter) in a state of disarray, Facebook falling out of favor, and Instagram taken over by ads, social media is feeling less and less social.

Congress needs to develop a way of better funding the F.D.A. review process. Perhaps a small excise tax could be levied on over-the-counter sales or fees assessed to makers of over-the-counter drugs to fund the F.D.A. review process or to fund studies into drugs that went on the market before 1962. Leaders need to suggest more options. There should also be a way to prioritize which drugs to look at first. The agency should review old drugs for which there are already many complaints about lack of effectiveness in the manner it did recently for phenylephrine.

Right now, Americans spend billions on drugs that contain ingredients that will not help them. That’s not just a waste of money — it could mean they are delaying appropriate treatment, which can lead to more severe illnesses. This is risky not only for health but also for trust. The American public deserves medicines that do what they are advertised to do.

Schools and parenting guides instruct children in how to cultivate empathy, as do workplace culture and wellness programs. You could fill entire bookshelves with guides to finding, embracing and sharing empathy. Few books or lesson plans extol sympathy’s virtues.

“Sympathy focuses on offering support from a distance,” a therapist explains on LinkedIn, whereas empathy “goes beyond sympathy by actively immersing oneself in another person’s emotions and attempting to comprehend their point of view.”

In use since the 16th century, when the Greek “syn-” (“with”) combined with pathos (experience, misfortune, emotion, condition) to mean “having common feelings,” sympathy preceded empathy by a good four centuries

Beneath almost all of the testimony, the manifestoes, the blog posts and the public declarations issued about A.I. are battles among deeply divided factions

Some are concerned about far-future risks that sound like science fiction.

Some are genuinely alarmed by the practical problems that chatbots and deepfake video generators are creating right now.

as Netanyahu soon made clear, when it comes to AI, he believes that bad outcomes are the likely outcomes. The Israeli leader interrogated OpenAI’s Brockman about the impact of his company’s creations on the job market. By replacing more and more workers, Netanyahu argued, AI threatens to “cannibalize a lot more jobs than you create,” leaving many people adrift and unable to contribute to the economy. When Brockman suggested that AI could usher in a world where people would not have to work, Netanyahu countered that the benefits of the technology were unlikely to accrue to most people, because the data, computational power, and engineering talent required for AI are concentrated in a few countries.

“You have these trillion-dollar [AI] companies that are produced overnight, and they concentrate enormous wealth and power with a smaller and smaller number of people,” the Israeli leader said, noting that even a free-market evangelist like himself was unsettled by such monopolization. “That will create a bigger and bigger distance between the haves and the have-nots, and that’s another thing that causes tremendous instability in our world. And I don’t know if you have an idea of how you overcome that?”

The other panelists did not. Brockman briefly pivoted to talk about OpenAI’s Israeli employees before saying, “The world we should shoot for is one where all the boats are rising.” But other than mentioning the possibility of a universal basic income for people living in an AI-saturated society, Brockman agreed that “creative solutions” to this problem were needed—without providing any.

Nicolas de Villiers said the theme park – whose subject matter includes Clovis, king of the Franks, and a new €20m (£17m) show about the birth of modern cinema – was not about politics. He said: “What we want when an audience leaves our shows – which are works of art and were never history lessons – is to feel better and bigger, because the hero has brought some light into their hearts … Puy du Fou is more about legends than a history book.”

He said the park’s trademark high-drama historical extravaganzas worked because, at a time of global crisis, people had a hunger to understand their roots and traditions. “The artistic language we invented corresponds to the era we live in. People have a thirst for their roots, a thirst to understand what made them what they are today, which means their civilisation. They want to understand what went before them.” He called it a “profound desire to rediscover who we are”.

e added: “People who come here don’t have an ideology, they come here and say it’s beautiful, it’s good, I liked it.”

Tony Veale, a computer scientist who wrote a book on comedy and A.I., “Your Wit Is My Command,” is impressed with new large-language models’ ability to imitate genre and voice, analyze and generate metaphors, explain itself and even admit mistakes. He’s bullish on computers making professional-level jokes in five years and when asked about originality responded that A.I.’s process isn’t any different from that of young artists. “Many comedians, such as Eddie Murphy and Jerry Seinfeld, trained themselves by repeatedly listening to and repeating Bill Cosby’s early comedy albums,” he wrote in an email. “We all learn from those we aim to emulate and transcend.”

Plus: Much comedy doesn’t get that far past the imitation stage. People like old jokes. Sitcoms and stand-up are often derivative. Topical comedy often leans on formulaic phrasing and predictable rhythms

Christian Petzold likes terrible, irreversible events: accidents, suicides, eternal separations. In his melodramas, Petzold has established a fascination with the trope of love lost at the hands of misrecognition. At the crossroads of historical circumstance and feelings of personal guilt and shame, his protagonists carry burdensome secrets, with devastating consequences.

His latest film at first appears to diverge from recent work. Set in contemporary seaside Germany, Afire takes a break from the backdrops of extreme repression and deprivation that the director has favored for at least a decade

fire is really a slow build to the disaster that Petzold does so well. Only by dint of calamitous events, it seems, can Leon awaken to the reality he resolutely shuts out. The arrival of a forest fire, suddenly overwhelming the plotless plot, seems to satisfy a perverse fantasy grounded in the belief that extremity is required for a life lived fully.

Sexual desire and frustration, familiar feelings for the outcast teenage nerd, pervade the social internet. S3xy-ness is everywhere. Posts by women are dismayingly likely to produce advances, or threats, from creepers on all platforms; at the same time, sex appeal is a pillar for the influencer economy, or else a viable and even noble way to win financial independence. The internet is for porn, as the song goes.

In all these ways, online life today descends from where it started, as a safe harbor for the computer nerds who made it. They were socially awkward, concerned with machines instead of people, and devoted to the fantasy of converting their impotence into power.

When that conversion was achieved, and the nerds took over the world, they adopted the bravado of the jocks they once despised. (Zuck-Musk cage match, anyone?) But they didn’t stop being nerds. We, the public, never agreed to adopt their worldview as the basis for political, social, or aesthetic life. We got it nevertheless.

Had the doctoring been done by someone from the insurer, as Ariely implied? There didn’t seem to be a way to dispute that contention, and the company itself wasn’t saying much. Then, last week, NPR’s Planet Money delivered a scoop: The company, called The Hartford, informed the show that it had finally tracked down the raw numbers that were provided to Ariely—and that the data had been “manipulated inappropriately” in the published study.

The analysis of insurance data from The Hartford appeared as “Experiment 3” in the paper. On the preceding page, an analysis of a different dataset—the one linked to Gino—was written up as “Experiment 1.” The scientists who say they discovered issues with both experiments—Leif Nelson, Uri Simonsohn, and Joe Simmons—dubbed the apparent double fraud a “clusterfake.” When I spoke with the scientific-misconduct investigator and Atlantic contributor James Heathers, he had his own way of describing it: “This is some kind of mad, fraudulent unicorn.”

When they set about reviewing Ariely’s work on the 2012 paper, a few quirks in the car-insurance data tipped them off that something might be amiss. Some entries were in one font, some in another. Some were rounded to the nearest 500 or 1,000; some were not. But the detail that really caught their attention was the distribution of recorded values. With such a dataset, you’d expect to see the numbers fall in a bell curve—most entries bunched up near the mean, and the rest dispersed along the tapering extremes. But the data that Ariely said he’d gotten from the insurance company did not form a bell curve; the distribution was completely flat. Clients were just as likely to have claimed that they’d driven 1,000 miles as 10,000 or 50,000 miles. It’s “hard to know what the distribution of miles driven should look like in those data,” the scientists wrote. “It is not hard, however, to know what it should not look like.”

If heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning. Yet here we are

Humans have shown remarkable resilience and adaptation—at least until modern times, when half of society lost its cool over climate change.

it’s alarmist stories about bad weather that are fueling mental derangements worthy of the DSM-5—not the warm summer air itself.