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The federal bail system’s presumption of release makes it better and more humane than most state systems

But you can still see the impact of wealth. First, because Sam Bankman-Fried broke the law by (allegedly) stealing billions of dollars instead of by being paid a hundred bucks to transport half a key of black tar heroin, there was no presumption he should be detained. That reflects society’s values. Moreover, rich people are more easily able to satisfy elaborate bail conditions. They have stable families in whose homes they can live, their families can post substantial home equity, they can afford the cost of home monitoring, they can afford to travel back and forth from home to court, they have rich friends who will sign bonds pledging money. Poor people don’t have those things, and so the magistrate judge finds that no combination of conditions — that is, no combination of conditions that this defendant can meet — will assure they won’t be a flight risk or a danger.

I’ve begun to think of Exhibit H as a skeleton key for the final, halcyon days of the tech boom—unlocking an understanding of the cultural brain worms and low-interest-rate hubris that defined the industry in 2022. What we see in Exhibit H is only a tiny snapshot of a very important inbox, but it’s enough to make this one of the most revealing documents in a year that’s been absolutely overflowing with tech disclosures

the Musk texts demonstrate a decadence, an unearned confidence, and a boy’s-club mentality that coincide with the cultural disillusionment regarding the genius-innovator narrative.

I snarkily coined the Elon Musk School of Management to describe the petulant way that some tech founders, such as Musk and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, seemed to use confrontational, culture-warring, Twitter-addled thought leadership as a business tactic. The Musk School revolves around two principles: running a company in an authoritarian manner, and ensuring that every management decision is optimized to make news and hijack the attention of those following along on social media

Jon Kelly, a co-founder of Puck, said subscription newsletters were part of a new model for publishing, comparing them to magazines in their heyday.

“If you take a look back to the history of the magazine industry, it was a business that had a total addressable market that ranged in the tens of billions of dollars focused on affinity-based creative products that people subscribed to because they absolutely loved them,” he said.

Mr. Kelly said Puck’s paid subscriptions had grown an average of 20 percent each mont

When Mr. Carlson first began to look for sealed VHS cassettes, they were considered so much plastic trash. “Back to the Future,” “The Goonies,” “Blade Runner,” were about $20 each on eBay. He put them on a shelf, little windows into his past, and started an Instagram account called Rare and Sealed.

The current cultural tumult, with its boom in fake images, endless arguments over everything and now the debut of imperious A.I. chatbots, increases the appeal of things that can’t be plugged in.

One thing people are eagerly seeking with the new technology is old technology. Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, which he used to write a shelf of important novels, went for a quarter-million dollars. An Apple 1 computer fetched nearly twice that. A first-generation iPhone, still sealed in its box, sold for $21,000 in December and triple that in February.

Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically. That wasn’t true a decade ago, and prosperity within the generation today is not evenly shared. But since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breathtaking financial comeback.

he belief that Millennials have been excluded from the implicit promises that America makes to its people—a house for most, middle-class security, a better life than your parents had—remains predominant in society and, to go by surveys and the tenor of social media, among Millennials themselves.

That prompts a question with implications for the cultural and political future of the United States, a country premised, to a large extent, on the idea of material progress: What if the American dream is still alive, but no one believes it to be?

As those contrasts have faded, so have these distinct regional, rural identities. Everywhere it’s the same cloying pop country, the same aggressively oversized Ford F-150s, the same tumbledown Wal-Marts and Dollar Generals, the same eagle-heavy fashion, the same confused, aggrieved air of relentless material decline. Even the accents are more and more the same, trending toward a generalized Larry the Cable Guy twang.

America’s increasingly placeless, homogenous white rural culture isn’t a blend of all our various regional cultures. Rural Iowans and Minnesotans sound more like rural Missourians than the reverse.

Many large metropolitan areas grew faster over the past decade than the Bureau had previously projected, with eight of the nation's ten largest cities showing an increased growth rate compared to the 2000 to 2010 period. At the same time, most of rural America shrank in absolute as well as relative terms. A majority—52 percent—of the nation's counties actually reported a smaller raw population in 2020 than they had in 2010.

June 2024 Issue

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it is impossible to know, in the first few years of any novel intervention, whether its success will last.

while we tend to focus on stories about everything that has gone wrong, in the long run, the bigger news always ends up being the impact of growth and innovation. But because we’re so pre-occupied with everything else, it tends to sneak up on us.

In the left’s view, market crashes and recessions reveal the real essence of the capitalist system. In reality, they are just temporary glitches and setbacks in a larger story of persistent innovation and growth.

new figures showing the widening gap in wealth between the US and Europe. Jim Pethokoukis describes it as a Doom Loop of Decline and attributes it partly to the impact of heavy European regulation.

the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history.

How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?

The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.

That’s not to say that Silicon Valley’s wealthy aren’t donating their money to charity. Many, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Larry Page, have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to dedicating the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. But much of that money is not making its way out into the community.

The San Francisco Bay Area has rapidly become the richest region in the country—the Census Bureau said last year that median household income was $96,777. It’s a place where $100,000 Teslas are commonplace, “raw water” goes for $37 a jug, and injecting clients with the plasma of youth —a gag on the television show Silicon Valley—is being tried by real companies for just $8,000 a pop.

There are many reasons for this, but one of them is likely the increasing popularity of a certain type of charitable account called a donor-advised fund. These funds allow donors to receive big tax breaks for giving money or stock, but have little transparency and no requirement that money put into them is actually spent.

In recent days, giants of the financial world including JPMorgan, State Street and Pimco all pulled out of a group called Climate Action 100+, an international coalition of money managers that was pushing big companies to address climate issues.

Wall Street’s retreat from earlier environmental pledges has been on a slow, steady glide path for months, particularly as Republicans began withering political attacks, saying the investment firms were engaging in “woke capitalism.”

But in the past few weeks, things accelerated significantly. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, scaled back its involvement in the group. Bank of America reneged on a commitment to stop financing new coal mines, coal-burning power plants and Arctic drilling projects

There isn’t much data on how many of the new immigrants in recent years were documented versus undocumented. But estimates from the Pew Research Center last fall showed that undocumented immigrants made up 22 percent of the total foreign-born U.S. population in 2021. That’s down compared to previous decades: Between 2007 and 2021, the undocumented population fell by 14 percent, Pew found. Meanwhile, the legal immigrant population grew by 29 percent.

immigrant workers are supporting tremendously — and likely will keep powering for years to come.

The economy is projected to grow by $7 trillion more over the next decade than it would have without new influxes of immigrants, according to the CBO.

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

a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.

If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.

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. 

AI could become a commodity

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,

A group of OpenAI insiders is blowing the whistle on what they say is a culture of recklessness and secrecy at the San Francisco artificial intelligence company, which is racing to build the most powerful A.I. systems ever created.

The group, which includes nine current and former OpenAI employees, has rallied in recent days around shared concerns that the company has not done enough to prevent its A.I. systems from becoming dangerous.

The members say OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit research lab and burst into public view with the 2022 release of ChatGPT, is putting a priority on profits and growth as it tries to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., the industry term for a computer program capable of doing anything a human can.