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These claims of criminalizing politics are themselves nothing but spin. They imply that Trump and his associates took no action beyond typical political maneuvering.

there’s something telling about this phrasing. Politics, it suggests, is a dirty game, where the players jockey viciously for advantage—and if the game becomes rough, well, nothing can be done about that.

actually is not the case: Attempting to overturn an election and hold on to power despite the will of the voters is far from typical politics.

The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher

It is almost impossible to categorise Enchantments of Mammon. This monumental labour of love took two decades to write.

this is an extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic and a work of Christian prophecy

A full half of the city’s households did not have enough money to comfortably hold down an apartment, access sufficient food and basic health care, and get around, the report said

Public officials have been particularly alarmed by a significant drop in public school enrollment, which accelerated during the worst of the pandemic and is driven in part by Black families leaving the city over concerns about the cost of living

The study found that New Yorkers are even worse off than after the nadir of the pandemic. The groups’ 2021 report found that just over a third of city households could not keep up with the cost of living at the time, a figure that has since risen

What is a conservative? It’s a hard question to answer, and it gets harder each day.

Since the second half of the 20th century, conservatism as an ideology has been largely synonymous with something called “fusionism,” an alliance between social conservatives and economic libertarians. In the Cold War era, the additional commitment to a strong national defense resulted in what was often called the “th

Under this formulation, the G.O.P. perceived itself as a party united more by ideology than by identity

“AI will steadily be delegated, and could — as it becomes more autonomous — usurp decision making and thinking from current humans and human-run institutions,” said Anthony Aguirre, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a founder of the Future of Life Institute, the organization behind one of two open letters.

“At some point, it would become clear that the big machine that is running society and the economy is not really under human control, nor can it be turned off, any more than the S&P 500 could be shut down,” he said.

Are there signs A.I. could do this?Not quite. But researchers are transforming chatbots like ChatGPT into systems that can take actions based on the text they generate. A project called AutoGPT is the prime example.

The only reason we do not currently have a financial crisis, with a crash and with bailouts, is because regulators have withstood enormous pressure to allow interconnection and linkages between the crypto activities and the core of the financial and banking system,” he said. Because of their regulators’ stance, American banks are not collateralizing loans with cryptocurrencies, for instance. They are not freely trading crypto derivatives.

Meanwhile, an aversion to U.S. regulation has kept crypto businesses, many of which are based offshore, from getting more deeply involved in American finance. “If you are registered with the SEC and regulated by the SEC, you are required to have segregation of customer accounts,” Kelleher explained. “You’re required to have books and records. You’re required to have codes of conduct that include prohibitions on or identification of conflicts of interest. You’re prohibited from commingling funds. You’re required to have margin capital, and you have liquidity requirements.” Crypto companies “did not want that,”

It’s a Ponzi scheme. When there was tulip mania, at least when you lost all your money, you still had a tulip.”

Knocking the stool out is extraordinarily hard, and the current high value of bitcoin and ether makes it even harder. To attack a blockchain and shut it down requires gaining 51% control of the computational power or value of tokens staked to verify transactions. The more valuable the tokens, the more energy it takes to attack a proof-of-work chain, like Bitcoin, and the more money to attack a proof-of-stake chain, like Ethereum. The security of these chains—as measured by the amount someone would have to spend to attack them—is now in the region of $10bn to $15bn.

It would require either a government or an extraordinarily rich individual to mount such an attack

Unravelling is therefore the more conceivable path. The events of this year have revealed just how prone to this sort of thing crypto is.

Charlie mentioned this interesting back-and-forth between Bret Stephens and my old friend David Brooks about how they became politically homeless

I was struck by how much of their analysis of what happened to conservatism / the Republican party is based on the movement of the elites. They talk about misunderstanding what people like Laura Ingraham wanted and the evolution of Fox News and the discrediting of the establishment.

hat changed isn’t the ideological preferences of the elites, but the power of the elites. The power of party structures started waning in the 1970s and has only accelerated. The power of media elites and intellectual elites has similarly collapsed.Republican powerbrokers and media figures like Bill Buckley could once wield influence to shape what the party (and conservatism) would be. Today those decisions emanate largely from the demos.

Kilimnik shared a secret plan whose significance would only become clear six years later, as Vladimir V. Putin’s invading Russian Army pushed into Ukraine.

Known loosely as the Mariupol plan, after the strategically vital port city, it called for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded and -directed “separatists” were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead. The new republic’s leader would be none other than Yanukovych. The trade-off: “peace” for a broken and subservient Ukraine.

Trump was already suggesting that he would upend the diplomatic status quo; if elected, Kilimnik believed, Trump could help make the Mariupol plan a reality. First, though, he would have to win, an unlikely proposition at best. Which brought the men to the second prong of their agenda that evening — internal campaign polling data tracing a path through battleground states to victory. Manafort’s sharing of that information — the “eyes only” code guiding Trump’s strategy — would have been unremarkable if not for one important piece of Kilimnik’s biography: He was not simply a colleague; he was, U.S. officials would later assert, a Russian agent.

Confusing entertainment with substance, we turned celebrities into senators, and reality tv stars into presidents; millions of Americans think that an over-leveraged performative asshole has somehow cracked the code of... well, pretty much everything.

Our starf**king culture simply can’t get enough of starf**king someone who is not just famous, but rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And has 114 million followers on Twitter.

In a long-vanished century, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the rich “are different from you and me,” but the new class of FU rich are something else altogether. They live in self-created bubbles of reinforcement that let them live lives of self-fondling solipsism

Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha lived, and some humans began to touch enlightenment, he says—to move beyond narrative, to break free from ignorance.

Three hundred years ago, the scientific and industrial revolutions ushered in the beginning of the “utter decimation of life on this planet.”

“I’ve been running my research lab for almost 30 years,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “And I can say that throughout that period of time, I’ve just never experienced what we’re seeing over just the last five years.”

“You cannot imagine what you’re going to see over the next 30 years. The pace of advancement is in an exponential phase right now.”

surveying the recent landscape of scientific breakthroughs, she says the last half-decade has been more remarkable still: “I think we’re at an extraordinary time of accelerating discoveries.”

John Kenneth Galbraith assessed the trajectory of America’s increasingly “affluent society.” His outlook was not a happy one. The nation’s increasingly evident material prosperity was not making its citizens any more satisfied. Nor, at least in its existing form, was it likely to do so

One reason, Galbraith argued, was the glaring imbalance between the opulence in consumption of private goods and the poverty, often squalor, of public services like schools and parks

nother was that even the bountifully supplied private goods often satisfied no genuine need, or even desire; a vast advertising apparatus generated artificial demand for them, and satisfying this demand failed to provide meaningful or lasting satisfaction.

perhaps we could consider what this means about the larger moment. That is indeed what liberatory politics amount to, now: a joke. It’s a LARP, cosplay, kayfabe. Self-parody. The theater of the absurd. A pastime, a shared bit of gallows humor. Nobody believes in the capacity for actual liberation, in any meaningful sense. It resides entirely in the world of wistful humor. People are defensive about the orcas because they have no actual movement to be defensive about.

Though we still live in the same world of rabidly emotional politics, the notion that the unrest of 2020 might lead to lasting material change is now so quaint as to be actively embarrassing.

BlackLivesMatter has proven to be a font of petty corruption and chronic mismanagement of funds, while the organic energy it cultivated three years ago has been dispersed into a series of nonprofit jobs and elite college scholarships, into diversity statements and language codes, which obviously don’t threaten the edifice of racial inequality

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.

we think that rich people are not acting normal. Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think ‘Be average.’ That’s good enough.”

“When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’”

The streak of austerity in Dutch culture can be traced to Calvinism, say residents, the most popular religious branch of Protestantism here for hundreds of years. It emphasizes virtues like self-discipline, frugality and conscientiousness. Polls suggest that most people in the Netherlands today are not churchgoers, but the norms are embedded, as evidenced by Dutch attitudes toward wealth.

One reason that the idea of free trade has fallen out of fashion in recent years is the perception that trade agreements reflect the wishes of big American corporations, at everybody else’s expense.

U.S. officials fought for trade agreements that protect intellectual property — and drug companies got the chance to extend the life of patents, raising the price of medicine around the world. U.S. officials fought for investor protections — and mining companies got the right to sue for billions in “lost profit” if a country moved to protect its drinking water or the Amazon ecosystem. And for years, U.S. officials have fought for digital trade rules that allow data to move freely across national borders — prompting fears that the world’s most powerful tech companies would use those rules to stay ahead of competitors and shield themselves from regulations aimed at protecting consumers and privacy.

That’s why the Biden administration, which came into office promising to fight for trade agreements that better reflect the interests of ordinary people, has dropped its advocacy for tech-friendly digital trade rules that American officials have championed for more than a decade.

Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to human beings, setting us on a path of glory and disaster and incurring the jealous wrath of Zeus. In the modern world, especially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, he has served as a symbol of progress and peril, an avatar of both the liberating power of knowledge and the dangers of technological overreach.

The consequences are real enough, of course. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed at least 100,000 people. Their successor weapons, which Oppenheimer opposed, threatened to kill everybody els

Annie Dorsen’s theater piece “Prometheus Firebringer,” which was performed at Theater for a New Audience in September, updates the Greek myth for the age of artificial intelligence, using A.I. to weave a cautionary tale that my colleague Laura Collins-Hughes called “forcefully beneficial as an examination of our obeisance to technology.”

Perplexity AI “unlocks the power of knowledge with information discovery and sharing.” This, it turns out, means “does research.” Type something into it, and it spits out a comprehensive answer, always sourced and sometimes bulleted. You might say this is just Google on steroids — but really, it is Google with a bibliography.

Caleb Jackson, a 22-year-old junior at Ole Miss studying part time, is a fan. This way, he doesn’t have to spend hours between night shifts and online classes trawling the internet for sources. Perplexity can find them, and he can get to writing that much sooner.

What’s most important to Ole Miss faculty members is that students use these tools with integrity. If the university doesn’t have a campuswide AI honor code, and so far it doesn’t, individual classes should. And no matter whether professors permit all applications of AI, as some teachers have tried, or only the narrowest, students should have to disclose just how much help they had from robots.

A task force at the Atlantic modeled what could happen if Google integrated AI into search. It found that 75% of the time, the AI-powered search would likely provide a full answer to a user’s query and the Atlantic’s site would miss out on traffic it otherwise would have gotten. 

What was once a hypothetical threat is now a very real one. Since May, Google has been testing an AI product dubbed “Search Generative Experience” on a group of roughly 10 million users, and has been vocal about its intention to bring it into the heart of its core search engine. 

Google’s embrace of AI in search threatens to throw off that delicate equilibrium, publishing executives say, by dramatically increasing the risk that users’ searches won’t result in them clicking on links that take them to publishers’ sites