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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.

The internal probe was meant to find out who leaked information related to a planned podcast episode about that article. But its intensity and scope suggests the Times’s leadership, after years of fights with its workforce over a variety of issues involving journalistic integrity, is sending a signal: Enough.

“The idea that someone dips into that process in the middle, and finds something that they considered might be interesting or damaging to the story under way, and then provides that to people outside, felt to me and my colleagues like a breakdown in the sort of trust and collaboration that’s necessary in the editorial process,” Executive Editor Joe Kahn said in an interview. “I haven’t seen that happen before.”

while its business hums along, the Times’s culture has been under strain.

In a January 30 interview newly installed Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya told New York Times reporter Liz Harris that after the deal to acquire Simon & Schuster fell through, he envisions a new strategy for increasing market share. “Much of its growth will have to come organically—by selling more books. Mr. Malaviya said that, hopefully, A.I. will help, making it easier to publish more titles without hiring ever more employees.”

It’s about the very American and capitalist idea that more is always better: that constantly churning out new products will help companies achieve year over year growth which, of course, is the paramount goal

heir authors increasingly wonder if they should reach inside their own wallets and hire outside help, not because the people working on their books are too lazy to do their jobs, but because freelance publicists and marketers are more likely to have the bandwidth to be thorough.

the only subset of Right-wing thought in the West today that doesn’t feel moribund is actively anti-conservative. The liveliest corner of the Anglophone Right is scornful of cultural conservatism and nostalgia, instead combining an optimistic view of technology with a qualified embrace of global migration and an uncompromising approach to public order.

in much the same way as the Western Left seized on Venezuela under Chávez as a totemic worked example of this vision, so too the radical Right today has its template for the future: El Salvador under Nayib Bukele

These moves have drastically reduced the murder rate in a previously notoriously dangerous country

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.

, he told a crowd of ambassadors that “global governance is needed, otherwise the risk is social collapse.” He also talked up the Rome Call, a Vatican, Italian government, Silicon Valley and U.N. effort he helped organize.

The author of many books (“Homo Faber: The Techno-Human Condition”) and a fixture on international A.I. panels, Father Benanti, 50, is a professor at the Gregorian, the Harvard of Rome’s pontifical universities, where he teaches moral theology, ethics and a course called “The Fall of Babel: The Challenges of Digital, Social Networks and Artificial Intelligence.”

his job is to provide advice from an ethical and spiritual perspective

As the leaders of the West gathered in Munich over the past three days, President Vladimir V. Putin had a message for them: Nothing they’ve done so far — sanctions, condemnation, attempted containment — would alter his intentions to disrupt the current world order.

In Munich, the mood was both anxious and unmoored, as leaders faced confrontations they had not anticipated. Warnings about Mr. Putin’s possible next moves were mixed with Europe’s growing worries that it could soon be abandoned by the United States, the one power that has been at the core of its defense strategy for 75 years.

Barely an hour went by at the Munich Security Conference in which the conversation did not turn to the question of whether Congress would fail to find a way to fund new arms for Ukraine, and if so, how long the Ukrainians could hold out. And while Donald Trump’s name was rarely mentioned, the prospect of whether he would make good on his threats to pull out of NATO and let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” with allies he judged insufficient hung over much of the dialogue.

the Democratic/Republican ratio varies across fields from around 5.5 and 6.3 to 1 in professional schools and the hard sciences to 31.9 to 1 in humanities and 108 to 1 in communications departments and what are called interdisciplinary studies (such as gender studies, American studies, etc.).

An effective reform movement could make the case to the public that these interventionist DEI policies generate bad results, such as insidious new forms of discrimination, the abrupt decline in patriotism among the young, a lack of trust in our main institutions, and the weakening of U.S. competitiveness in the sciences

While Rufo clearly states that “the challenge must be met not solely in the realm of policy debate but on the deepest political and philosophical grounds,” he is less specific in how this might be done. Yet nothing seems more urgent.

Sullivan first had to dismantle establishment orthodoxies within himself — the same orthodoxies he now sought to undo at Brookings: That globalization and free trade were an unalloyed good, growing economies and improving people’s lives in the process. What was good for the stock market, in effect, was great for everybody. Given enough time, swelling wallets would produce a steady middle class, one that demands its political and human rights from its government. Even the most repressive regimes, the thinking went, would eventually crumble under the weight of inflowing capital. Consistent pressure via greenbacks did the most good for the most people.

“Those were the heady days when the mainstream foreign policy consensus was that globalization was a force for good,” Sullivan recalled in a 2017 interview. There was, of course, reason to think this. Capitalism helped keep the Soviet Union at bay, China still wasn’t a major power and building the economies of enemies turned them into friends. Globalization, per its champions, had the benefit of making many people rich while making the world safer in general and U.S. foreign policy less costly.

“After the Second World War, the United States led a fragmented world to build a new international economic order. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It sustained thrilling technological revolutions. And it helped the United States and many other nations around the world achieve new levels of prosperity. But the last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations,”

I remember when supporters of Operation Iraqi Freedom constantly hyped good news from the battlefield and minimized bad news — right until the bad news became so overwhelming

Before Bush changed tactics and reinforced American troops during the surge in 2007 and 2008, it sometimes felt disloyal in Republican circles to criticize the course of the war.

Could we have changed our military tactics sooner if we had been able to see the battlefield more clearly? Did paradigm blindness — the unwillingness or inability to accept challenges to our core ways of making sense of the world — inhibit our ability to see obvious truths?

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is an elected prosecutor who ran as a Democrat in a heavily Democratic city. Trump also received more scrutiny from prosecutors after he became a political figure than he’d ever experienced before. But none of this has any bearing on whether Trump actually committed the crimes with which he was charged.

The bar for convicting any defendant in the American justice system is extremely high: It requires a unanimous decision by 12 citizens who deem a crime to have occurred beyond a reasonable doubt

The more important question is not what motivated the charges, but whether they were justified and proved to a jury’s satisfaction.

simply tossing your résumé and cover letter into a company’s job portal has a low probability of success, especially now. It’s so easy to submit applications that companies are being bombarded with thousands of them. Human beings can’t possibly review all of them, so they’re reviewed by computers, which simply search for keywords. They don’t understand in any deep way either the applicant’s qualities or the employer’s needs.

“The better writer you are, the greater your chance of getting rejected, because you won’t use keywords” the way the evaluation algorithm wants,

Personal contact is crucial, he said. Rather than spraying applications far and wide, he recommends focusing on a handful of companies, researching them in depth and contacting a wide range of people connected with them, even their suppliers and customers.

Tech companies like to make two grand pronouncements about the future of artificial intelligence. First, the technology is going to usher in a revolution akin to the advent of fire, nuclear weapons, and the internet.

And second, it is going to cost almost unfathomable sums of money.

Silicon Valley has already triggered tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on AI, and companies only want to spend more.

A friend of mine recently ran a climate education session with a local university. The workshop guided the students through the science of the changing climate and the findings of the IPCC reports and, apparently, empowered them to take action.

Empowerment was not the reaction the students responded with.

Instead, they rebuffed with arguments blaming corporations for causing climate change, asking why they had to give up stuff when big businesses are allowed to freely fuck it all up; declaring their lives are hard enough already!

Without any laws in place that would tax Ms. Engelhorn’s inherited fortune, she decided to redistribute it herself, and she turned to the public to decide how her money should be spent. She is part of the group Millionaires for Humanity, which advocates wealth taxes, and she co-founded a group called Tax Me Now.

Before the project was announced in January, Ms. Engelhorn had publicly committed to giving away at least 90 percent of her inheritance. She is part of a small movement of superrich individuals who want to not only redistribute their money, but also to challenge the structures that allowed them to inherit their riches.

Ms. Engelhorn said she would continue to fight for a more equal and fair distribution of wealth in her country. She said she hoped that she would make other people talk about the issue, too.

Most of the measurable and qualitative improvements in today’s large language model AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—including their talents for writing and analysis—come down to shoving ever more data into them. 

models work by digesting huge volumes of text, and it’s undeniable that up to now, simply adding more has led to better capabilities. But a major barrier to continuing down this path is that companies have already trained their AIs on more or less the entire internet, and are running out of additional data to hoover up. There aren’t 10 more internets’ worth of human-generated content for today’s AIs to inhale.

To train next generation AIs, engineers are turning to “synthetic data,” which is data generated by other AIs. That approach didn’t work to create better self-driving technology for vehicles, and there is plenty of evidence it will be no better for large language models,

Elon Musk is racing to a sci-fi future while the AI chief at Meta Platforms is arguing for one rooted in the traditional scientific approach.

Meta’s top AI scientist, Yann LeCun, criticized the rival company and Musk himself. 

Musk turned to a favorite rebuttal—a veiled suggestion that the executive, who is also a high-profile professor, wasn’t accomplishing much: “What ‘science’ have you done in the past 5 years?”

You and I, sitting on the side that would like to preserve liberal democracy, are exhausted. The people lined up across the way, the ones who want to transition to illiberalism? They are energized.

Damon is right that we are on the cusp of something new. But where he sees it as the dawning of a new epoch, I believe we are on the cusp of a revolution.2

views on policy are merely the ornaments on a wholesale reimagining of government as a tool for minority rule and a rejection of the rule of law.3

By the time he left Discord a year or so later, he’d had about 200 calls with different people, both men and women, who spoke of contemplating suicide.

But it was the boys who seemed the most desperately lonely and isolated. On the site, he said, he found “a lot more unhealthy men than unhealthy women.” He added: “With men, there is a huge thing about mental health and shame because you’re not supposed to be weak. You’re not supposed to be broken.” A male mental-health crisis was flying under the radar.

I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness

Too many on the left wing of American politics have become inured to the effect of their overheated rhetoric and histrionic displays of fealty to in-group norms

Bowman’s supporters sought easy explanations for his defeat, including that redistricting had shifted his district northward out of much of the Bronx and into Westchester. But Bowman in fact had fared well in the predominantly Democratic suburban county in his 2020 and 2022 campaigns.

claims that the massive spending of pro-Israel groups was responsible for Bowman’s defeat warrant skepticism