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This puts those Republican politicians saddled with inconvenient Ivy League degrees in an awkward position, like the guy who shows up in a tux for a rodeo wedding. In order to stay in office and on message, they must reject the very thing that propelled their own careers.

Remember, Ron DeSantis once eagerly joined one of Yale’s secret societies and told classmates he’d dreamed of attending Harvard Law. He founded a tutoring firm offering “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.

But once in office, he made a show of distancing himself from his academic credentials.

“Cultural pessimism has a strong appeal in America today,” the historian Fritz Stern wrote. “As political conditions appear stable at home or irremediable abroad, American intellectuals have become concerned with the cultural problems of our society, and have substituted sociological or cultural analyses for political criticism.”

I bring up Stern’s book because it nails the character of “revolutionary” conservatism—just the sort of politics Vance represents. The junior senator from Ohio believes “culture war is class warfare,”

has made it possible for him to claim to be a tribune of the working class in spite of a 0 percent score from the AFL-CIO on “voting with working people.”

For all our divisions, Americans have been united by a singular obsession: How can we have a better life? Economists call this economic mobility—the ability to move up the income ladder and make it to a higher rung than your parents.

Harvard University economist Raj Chetty has spent more than a decade working to understand what makes mobility possible, and why in some places the children of poor parents have been more able to move up than in others.

Using anonymized census and tax data, Chetty and his fellow researchers have been able to follow millions of Americans from childhood into adulthood. The data showed that even in neighborhoods bordering one another, outcomes for poor children can be vastly different.

The new start-up is called Safe Superintelligence. It aims to produce superintelligence — a machine that is more intelligent than humans — in a safe way, according to the company spokeswoman Lulu Cheng Meservey.

Last year, Dr. Sutskever helped create what was called a Superalignment team inside OpenAI that aimed to ensure that future A.I. technologies would not do harm. Like others in the field, he had grown increasingly concerned that A.I. could become dangerous and perhaps even destroy humanity.

Jan Leike, who ran the Superalignment team alongside Dr. Sutskever, has also resigned from OpenAI. He has since been hired by OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic, another company founded by former OpenAI researchers.

A rift between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s military leadership is spilling increasingly into the open after the armed forces’ top spokesman said Netanyahu’s aim of destroying Hamas in Gaza is unachievable.“The idea that we can destroy Hamas or make Hamas disappear is misleading to the public,” military spokesman Daniel Hagari told Israeli television on Wednesday.

The exchange was an illustration of months of tensions between Netanyahu and the country’s military leadership, who argue that Hamas could only be defeated if Israel replaces it with another governing authority in Gaza. During more than eight months of war, the Israeli military has invaded swaths of the Gaza Strip, only to see Hamas reconstitute itself in areas when Israeli forces withdraw.“What we can do is grow something different, something to replace it,” Hagari said Wednesday. “The politicians will decide” who should replace Hamas, he said.

The friction between Netanyahu and the military establishment had burst into public view earlier in the war. In May, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant delivered a speech calling on the government to decide who should replace Hamas in Gaza. The lack of a decision, he said, left Israel with only two choices: Hamas rule or a complete Israeli military takeover of the strip.

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,

Payments to thousands of former and current athletes will approach $2.8 billion, minus the trial lawyers’ cut of the class-action suits. This follows the NCAA’s decision to let college athletes benefit financially from their names, images and likenesses

Most legal analysis of the settlement concludes that the days of the “amateur” college athlete are over. In the future, the men and women on Division I teams and others likely will be regarded as professionals who will be paid to play by universities through revenue-sharing agreements up to $20 million a year per school.

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

Altman told me that his decision to join Huffington stemmed partly from hearing from people who use ChatGPT to self-diagnose medical problems—a notion I found potentially alarming, given the technology’s propensity to return hallucinated information. (If physicians are frustrated by patients who rely on Google or Reddit, consider how they might feel about patients showing up in their offices stuck on made-up advice from a language model.)

I noted that it seemed unlikely to me that anyone besides ChatGPT power users would trust a chatbot in this way, that it was hard to imagine people sharing all their most intimate information with a computer program, potentially to be stored in perpetuity.

“I and many others in the field have been positively surprised about how willing people are to share very personal details with an LLM,” Altman told me. He said he’d recently been on Reddit reading testimonies of people who’d found success by confessing uncomfortable things to LLMs. “They knew it wasn’t a real person,” he said, “and they were willing to have this hard conversation that they couldn’t even talk to a friend about.”

Over the last eight years, think tankers, activists and politicians have developed MAGA into a worldview, a worldview that now transcends Donald Trump.

It has its roots in Andrew Jackson-style populism, but it is updated and more comprehensive. It is the worldview that represents one version of working-class interests and offers working-class voters respect.

J.D. Vance is the embodiment and one of the developers of this worldview — with his suspicion of corporate power, foreign entanglements, free trade, cultural elites and high rates of immigration.

f disempowerment underlies the Republicans’ most potent issues in this campaign: inflation and immigration.

If Ms. Harris continues to repeat economic facts without acknowledging most voters’ feelings, she will fail to address the mood of discontent that has her running just behind Mr. Trump in the polls. Low unemployment, robust job growth, rising wages — by the usual metrics, the economy has been a success during the Biden years. And yet inflation looms so large for voters that most disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy. Why

Because inflation is not merely about the price of eggs. Many voters experience it as an assault on their agency, a daily marker of their powerlessness: No matter how hard I work or how much I make, I can’t get ahead or even keep up.

I think we’re in a really important turning point in American history. What I wrote in “Bowling Alone” is even more relevant now. Because what we’ve seen over the last 25 years is a deepening and intensifying of that trend. We’ve become more socially isolated, and we can see it in every facet in our lives.

Social isolation leads to lots of bad things. It’s bad for your health, but it’s really bad for the country, because people who are isolated, and especially young men who are isolated, are vulnerable to the appeals of some false community. I can cite chapter and verse on this: Eager recruits to the Nazi Party in the 1930s were lonely young German men, and it’s not an accident that the people who are attracted today to white nationalist groups are lonely young white men.

You distinguish between two types of social capital, right? There’s bonding social capital and there’s bridging social capital.