Wendell Berry was not an easy man to reach. When I wanted to interview him for this magazine in the spring of 2015, his publicist warned me that a press request would take some doing. Berry didn’t have a cellphone. He didn’t use email. He didn’t even have a computer. He wrote most of his drafts by hand during the day, without electric light. And he definitely didn’t make himself available to any old reporter who wanted to talk.
I knew this already, of course.

When J. D. Vance was asked at a press conference on Thursday about his relationship with Tucker Carlson, the media personality and ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorist, he displayed a surprising side of himself: human, vulnerable, almost touchingly naive.
“Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things,” the vice president said. “And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them.

Construction is notoriously slow-going work. But in Donald Trump’s Washington, cranes and bulldozers appear like DoorDash deliveries: fast, frictionless, and on demand.
To build the president’s White House ballroom, roughly 250 workers have been pouring concrete and installing steel framework, keeping the site humming for 20 hours a day, seven days a week.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
The crypto industry has always moved in cycles: booms and busts; bull markets and harsh, unforgiving “winters.” We’re in something of a lull right now: Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, is worth about two-thirds of what it was last fall.

When did AI companies become AI labs? That term, and the image of studious, exacting white-coated scientists that it conjures, has become curiously entrenched as a descriptor for the businesses swiftly escorting the world into an existentially unsettling future. AI companies themselves have embraced the label: When Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, addressed the pope earlier this year, he repeatedly referred to his company, one of the most powerful AI enterprises in the world, as a lab.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
When I read Thomas More’s Utopia in college, the main thing I retained was that the inhabitants of More’s imaginary island worked just six hours a day and earned what we might now call a universal basic income.

During the five weeks of her murder trial, Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of murdering her three young children in 2023, spoke barely a word. She has been on display for the entirety of her livestreamed trial, sitting in her wheelchair beside her lawyer at the defense table.

Late last month, OpenAI launched a rather grand mission: nothing less than defending individual political freedom in an age of all-powerful machines. The company’s “Strategic Futures” team has styled itself, in a sense, as inheriting the task of America’s Founding Fathers: “We labor in service of the ideals of free expression and individual liberty that are enshrined in the humble parchment of the U.S. Constitution,” Dean Ball, the team’s leader, wrote in a new OpenAI blog post.