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on a Zoom call with Wanyu He, an architect based in Shenzhen, China, and the founder of XKool, an artificial intelligence company determined to revolutionise the architecture industry. She freezes the dancing blocks and zooms in, revealing a layout of hotel rooms that fidget and reorder themselves as the building swells and contracts. Corridors switch sides, furniture dances to and fro. Another click and an invisible world of pipes and wires appears, a matrix of services bending and splicing in mesmerising unison, the location of lighting, plug sockets and switches automatically optimised. One further click and the construction drawings pop up, along with a cost breakdown and components list. The entire plan is ready to be sent to the factory to be built.

I applaud He on what seems to be an impressive theoretical exercise: a 500-room hotel complex designed in minutes with the help of AI. But she looks confused. “Oh,” she says casually, “that’s already been built! It took four and a half months from start to finish.”

AI is already being deployed to shape the real world – with far-reaching consequences.

The cost of repairing damages from the attack on the U.S. Capitol and related security expenses have already topped $30 million and will keep rising, Architect of the Capitol J. Brett Blanton told lawmakers on Wednesday.

The price tag will go even higher, Blanton told lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee, if the fence and other security measures are needed beyond March.

In the Capitol building complex, historical statues, murals and furniture were damaged, mainly from pepper spray accretions and residue from chemical irritants and fire extinguishers, requiring expert cleaning and conservation.

by emphasizing politics over policy as he did, Rove shifted Bush—and therefore the party—from centrist to hard right. “Instead of having a permanent majority,” Tom Pauken, the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas during the 1990s, told me,Rove has potentially put in place a situation that will lead to the destruction of the Republican party as we’ve known it in the Barry Goldwater-Ronald Reagan tradition. Rove has taken what people have worked thirty years to achieve . . . and squandered it all away. He’s participated in the potential destruction of the conservative movement in the long term.

Matt Towery, a protégé of Gingrich, said, “Every Republican I know looks at the Bush administration as a total failure. I felt like the political operation was running things, so they never created policy goals. Political consultants are paranoid by nature. That’s the thing about the Bush White House—no one knew who was in charge and yet everyone knew: Karl Rove.”

“I think the legacy,” said Ed Rollins, a longtime Republican political consultant, “is that Karl Rove will be a name that’ll be used for a long, long time as an example of how not to do it. Rove could have broadened the base of the party. He had an opportunity to strengthen state parties. But, I think, at the end of this, the party will be weaker in numbers in the Congress . . . and numbers of Republicans.

the ever-expanding number of houses the size of Hyatt resorts rising in the most expensive precincts of Los Angeles

“Twenty-thousand-square-foot homes have become teardowns for people who want to build 70-, 80-, and 90,000-square-foot homes,” Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz said. So long, megamansion. Say hello to the gigamansion.

Why are people building houses the size of shopping malls? Because they can. “Why do you see a yacht 500 feet long when you could easily have the same fun in one half the size?”

The Taj Mahal is a beautiful, white-marble mausoleum built by Mughul emperor Shah Jahan for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

It was in 1607, that Shah Jahan, grandson of Akbar the Great, first met his beloved. At the time, he was not yet the fifth emperor of the Mughal Empire.

Sixteen-year-old, Prince Khurram, as he was then called, flitted around the royal bazaar, flirting with the girls from high-ranking families that staffed the booths.

The former Walmart executive last week unveiled plans for Telosa, a sustainable metropolis that he hopes to create, from scratch, in the American desert. The ambitious 150,000-acre proposal promises eco-friendly architecture, sustainable energy production and a purportedly drought-resistant water system. A so-called "15-minute city design" will allow residents to access their workplaces, schools and amenities within a quarter-hour commute of their homes.

Although planners are still scouting for locations, possible targets include Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Texas and the Appalachian region, according to the project's official website.

The first phase of construction, which would accommodate 50,000 residents across 1,500 acres, comes with an estimated cost of $25 billion. The whole project would be expected to exceed $400 billion, with the city reaching its target population of 5 million within 40 years.

The movement has three distinctive strains. First, the people over 50 who have been hanging around conservative circles for decades but who have recently been radicalized by the current left.

The second strain is made up of mid-career politicians and operatives who are learning to adapt to the age of populist rage:

people like Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), J. D. Vance (Yale Law), and Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale).

Although the story will be much more heroic if this bill or something like it passes into law, the achievement is already heroic, by bringing such legislation, in this country, even this close.

In less than five years, a new generation of activists and aligned technocrats has taken climate action from the don’t-go-there zone of American politics and helped place it at the very center of the Democratic agenda, persuading an old-guard centrist septuagenarian, Biden, to make a New Deal-scale green investment the focus of his presidential campaign platform and his top policy priority once in office

This, despite a generation of conventional wisdom that the issue was electorally fraught and legislatively doomed. Now they find themselves pushing a recognizable iteration of that agenda — retooled and whittled down, yes, but still unthinkably large by the standards of previous administrations — plausibly forward into law.

The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages.

Some of the greatest thinkers, authors, statesmen, scientists and artists in human history thrived during this era, while global exploration opened up new lands and cultures to European commerce. T

Galieo (1564-1642): Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer whose pioneering work with telescopes enabled him to describes the moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn. Placed under house arrest for his views of a heliocentric universe.

The brilliance of the Bubble idea, as designed by the New York-based architecture firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is that it would cost less than one-tenth of the projected cost of the Gehry wing at the Corcoran, yet would have an outsized impact on architectural thinking in Washington. Koshalek and his architects have finessed one of this city’s hardest design challenges: How to make something new, in the center of the city, but in such a way that no permanent violence is done to the historic character of the Mall and its environs.

The Bubble would also bring innovative temporary architecture — one of the most intellectually exciting currents in contemporary architectural thinking — to the District. It would enliven the generally moribund civic space of the Mall, and demonstrate something that is now seriously in question: that Washington has developed progressive instincts when it comes to architecture, design and culture.

Since he arrived in 2009, Koshalek has rigorously addressed the most obvious and fundamental question of any art museum today: How to break out of the institutional bunker, and into a larger dialogue with the city and the country at large?

Beyond appointing eight cardinals as outside advisers, Francis has not yet begun making concrete changes or set forth an ambitious policy agenda

He has chosen to live not in the papal apartments but rather in the Casa Santa Marta residence inside the Vatican, where he eats dinner in the company of lower-ranking priests and visitors.

n his speeches, “his style is simple and direct. It’s not elaborately constructed and complex,

It was a playing field on which we were expected to pay the North Koreans not to do dangerous things, and that is not a sound basis for a policy.

When Bush won the presidency, talks [with North Korea] ceased immediately. The criticism that comes from the Clinton camp is that there was no continuity in policy.

I honestly don't see how, looking back, the architects of that agreement can hold the Bush administration culpable for behavior that, in retrospect, should make us reconsider whether the original Framework Agreement was a sensible idea.

crimped construct leaves no room for the very different perspective of someone like architect Charles Kelley in Portland, Oregon

“Portland,” Kelley said, “has become responsible for setting the frame for how China will look at urbanism for the next 50 years.”

consult with cities around the world to develop sustainable communities through everything from promoting renewable energy to opening bike lanes.

“This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary,” Mr. Post said. “You can criticize the judicial system, you can criticize individual cases, you can criticize individual judges. But the president has to be clear that the law is the law and that he enforces the law. That is his constitutional obligation.”

Even as much of the Republican political establishment lines up behind its presumptive nominee, many conservative and libertarian legal scholars warn that electing Mr. Trump is a recipe for a constitutional crisis.

“Who knows what Donald Trump with a pen and phone would do?” asked Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the libertarian Cato Institute.

Europe's populist movements are on the cusp of sweeping far-right, nationalist and euroskeptic parties into power across the continent in a series of upcoming elections

he revolving door swung against current Prime Minister Matteo Renzi Sunday, when voters rejected his proposed changes to the country's constitution

Experts say that if Grillo comes to power, he'll likely follow through on promises to call a referendum to scrap the euro, reintroduce the Italian lira, and perhaps even follow Britain out of the European Union

Founding father Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706 in Boston. Along with serving as one of the architects of American independence, he was also a scientist, inventor, printer, writer, newspaper owner and philosopher who became a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic.

Every time we allowed ourselves to be even remotely optimistic, some new reminder arrived that we, an immature electorate, had elected a child.

In eight years in the White House there had been an uninterrupted stretch of calm and decency. In eight years there has been no scandal, not even a whiff of scandal, coming from the White House. That is a profoundly difficult thing to do, especially with the two houses of Congress in Republican hands and the president’s every move or hope met with biblical opposition.

For eight years we have been able to look to the White House and see a president who thinks and acts with cool deliberation, whose every sentence is well-considered. Anyone can disagree with President Obama’s policies but it cannot be denied that the first family acted with unerring decorum and amenity.

The Democrats are a class party; it’s just that the class in question is not the one we think it is. It’s not working people, you know, middle class. It’s the professional class. It’s people with advanced degrees. They use that phrase themselves, all the time: the professional class.

What is the professional class?The advanced degrees is an important part of it. Having a college education is obviously essential to it. These are careers based on educational achievement. There’s the sort of core professions going back to the 19th century like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, but nowadays there’s many, many, many more and it’s a part of the population that’s expanded. It’s a much larger group of people now than it was 50 or 60 years ago thanks to the post-industrial economy. You know math Ph.Ds that would write calculations on Wall Street for derivative securities or like biochemists who work in pharmaceutical companies. There’s hundreds of these occupations now, thousands of them. It’s a much larger part of the population now than it used to be. But it still tends to be very prosperous people

there’s basically two hierarchies in America. One is the hierarchy of money and big business and that’s really where the Republicans are at: the one percent, the Koch brothers, that sort of thing.