Group items tagged

The notion behind the commercial is fairly obvious. Apple wants to show you that the bulk of human ingenuity and history can be compressed into an iPad, and thereby wants you to believe that the device is a desirable entry point to both the consumption of culture and the creation of it.

Most important, it wants you to know that the iPad is powerful and quite thin.

But good Lord, Apple, read the room. In its swing for spectacle, the ad lacks so much self-awareness, it’s cringey, even depressing.

. I have studied and written about authoritarianism for years, and I think it’s important to pay attention to the views and motivations of voters who support authoritarian politicians, even when these politicians are seen by many as threats to the democratic order.

My curiosity isn’t merely intellectual. Around the world, these politicians are not just getting elected democratically; they are often retaining enough popular support after a term — or two or three — to get re-elected. Polls strongly suggest that Trump has a reasonable chance of winning another term in November.

Why Trump? Even if these voters were unhappy with President Biden, why not a less polarizing Republican, one without indictments and all that dictator talk? Why does Trump have so much enduring appeal?

out of the depths of the inflation-riddled ’70s came the democratization of computing and finance. It feels to me as if we’re at a similar point. What’s going to be democratized next?

Start with quantum computing, autonomous vehicles and delivery drones. Even the once-in-a-generation innovation of machine learning and artificial intelligence is generating fear and doubt. Like homebrew computers, we’re at the rudimentary stage.

Especially in medicine. Healthcare pricing, billing and reimbursements are completely nonsensical. ObamaCare made it worse, but change is beginning. Pandemic-enabled telemedicine is a crack in the old way’s armor. Self-directed healthcare will grow. Ozempic and magic pills are changing lives. Crispr gene editing is also rudimentary but could extend healthy life expectancies. Add precision oncology, computational biology, focused ultrasound and more. The upside is endless.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN IF WE CAN’T even trust the institutions in our imagined utopias?

Starfleet’s exact role was left intentionally vague in the original series (1966–69); the writer’s guide for the original Star Trek explicitly encourages writers to “stay away from it as much as possible,” partly to avoid getting into the details of Earth’s future politics. But by the time of Star Trek’s heyday in the mid-1990s, Starfleet was established as an elite institution composed of brilliant and dedicated people (human and otherwise) who served in an organization resembling NASA, the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Department of State all bundled together, with all of the opportunities for incoherence and mission creep that jumble implies.

One of the greatest episodes of Deep Space Nine (1992–99), “In the Pale Moonlight,” is entirely about how, in times of crisis, moral compromise may be necessary, even for Starfleet. But such cases are treated as exceptional, unusual circumstances far beyond the norm; as a rule, Starfleet is good, and the best way to be a good servant of the true and just in the world of Star Trek is by being a good Starfleet officer. How does one be a good Starfleet officer? By doing one’s job, by being a professional, by following one’s duty.

These are book reviews and diary essays written for The London Review of Books between 1983 and 2002. None has previously been anthologized. The pieces are split almost evenly between political topics (Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, the Oklahoma bombing, Nixon and Kennedy, Kim Philby, the radicalism of 1968) and literary, academic and social ones (Tom Wolfe, the Academy Awards, Salman Rushdie, P.G. Wodehouse, spanking, Gore Vidal, Diana Mosley, Isaiah Berlin).

this miscellany ends in 2002. That was the year Hitchens, previously a self-described “extreme leftist,” came out in favor of the invasion of Iraq. He broke with The Nation, The London Review of Books and many of his old friends.

Why care about a pile of old book reviews? Hitchens’s didn’t sound like other people’s. He had none of the form’s mannerisms. He rarely praised or blamed; instead, he made distinctions, and he piled up evidence

He got a phone call about the imminent sale of a tech company and allegedly traded on the confidential information, according to charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The profit for a few minutes of work: $415,726.

rarely has anyone traded his reputation for seemingly so little reward. For Mr. Bechtolsheim, $415,726 was equivalent to a quarter rolling behind the couch. He was ranked No. 124 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index last week, with an estimated fortune of $16 billion.

Last month, Mr. Bechtolsheim, 68, settled the insider trading charges without admitting wrongdoing. He agreed to pay a fine of more than $900,000 and will not serve as an officer or director of a public company for five years.

Ukrainian civil society, she said, has “this approach, which is called ‘we are a drop in the ocean,’ which means that we all, all the efforts, are modest because we are not gods, we are human beings,” Matviichuk said. “But together … we can change the reality for better.”

As part of a nationwide campaign, they also aired television and radio spots and bought billboard ads highlighting that Russian forces have destroyed hundreds of churches and tortured and killed Christian pastors.

One such billboard popped up across the street from the church Johnson attends in his district. “We pushed on every lever,” said Mykola Murskyj, director of advocacy at Razom

There are many explanations for complicity, Applebaum argued. A potent one is fear. Many Republican elected officials, she wrote, “don’t know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships.”

None of the 43 senators who allowed Donald Trump to escape conviction made fear their argument, of course. Not publicly anyway. The excuses ranged widely

On February 13, 2021, Romney was joined by six other Republicans—North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey—in voting to convict. If the United States and its Constitution survive the coming challenge from Trump and Trumpism, statues will one day be raised to these seven.

Stern said that, in fact, delaying action to cut greenhouse gas emissions was leading to disaster, given the rapid acceleration of the climate crisis, which he said was happening faster than predicted when the Paris agreement was signed. “Look out your window – look at what’s happening,look at the preposterous heat. It’s ridiculous.”

But he warned that if Donald Trump were to be elected this November, the US would exit the Paris agreement and frustrate climate action globally.

“All hard questions of this magnitude should be considered by way of a ‘compared to what’ analysis. The monumental dangers [the climate crisis] poses warrant the same kind of ‘compared to what’ argument when leaders in the political and corporate worlds balk at what needs to be done.”

Each year, it’s no surprise that Finland tops the annual World Happiness Report. And this year was no different, marking the country’s seventh consecutive year doing so

Americans — particularly those under 30 — have become drastically less happy in recent years

the latest data point in what some researchers have described as a crisis among America’s youth.

Since the first AVN “expo” in 1998, adult entertainment has been overtaken by two business models: Pornhub, a free site supported by ads, and OnlyFans, a subscription platform where individual actors control their businesses and their fate.

Now, a new shift is on the horizon: Artificial intelligence models that spin up photorealistic images and videos that put viewers in the director’s chair, letting them create whatever porn they like.

Some site owners think it’s a privilege people will pay for, and they are racing to build custom AI models that — unlike the sanitized content on OpenAI’s video engine Sora — draw on a vast repository of porn images and videos.

Ramsey, the well-known and intensely followed 63-year-old conservative Christian radio host, has 4.4 million Instagram followers, 1.9 million TikTok followers and legions more who listen to his radio shows and podcasts.

His message is brutal and direct: Avoid debt at all costs. Pay for everything in cash. Embrace frugality.

Plenty of 20- and 30-year-olds are pushing back, largely on TikTok. The hashtag #daveramseywouldntapprove, for instance, has 66.8 million views. Many say they don’t want to eat rice and beans every night—a popular Ramsey trope—or hold down multiple jobs to pay off loans. They also say Ramsey is out of touch with their reality.

If you’re looking to understand the philosophy that underpins Silicon Valley’s latest gold rush, look no further than OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson debacle.

the situation is also a tidy microcosm of the raw deal at the center of generative AI, a technology that is built off data scraped from the internet, generally without the consent of creators or copyright owners. Multiple artists and publishers, including The New York Times, have sued AI companies for this reason, but the tech firms remain unchastened, prevaricating when asked point-blank about the provenance of their training data.

At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not.

Applying the same pre-pandemic model to consumer sentiment during and after the pandemic, however, simply does not work. The indicators that correlated with people's feelings about the economy before 2020 no longer seem to matter in the same way

As with so many areas of American life, the pandemic has changed virtually everything about how people think about the economy and the issues that concern them

Prior to the pandemic, our model shows consumers felt better about the economy when the personal savings rate, a measure of how much money households are able to save rather than spend each month, was higher. This makes sense: People feel better when they have money in the bank and are able to save for important purchases like cars and houses.

To my mind, one of the saddest things that has happened to America in my lifetime is how much we’ve lost so many of our mangroves. They are endangered everywhere today — but not just in nature.

Our society itself has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves as well — all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.

You see, shame used to be a mangrove