Multiverses are, at this point, familiar ground for Hollywood. Films about extra-dimensional travel and parallel versions of ourselves aren’t restricted to the realm of comic-book nerdery; the reigning Best Picture winner at the hoary Oscars is all about “verse-jumping,” after all.
On Tuesday morning, the merchants of artificial intelligence warned once again about the existential might of their products. Hundreds of AI executives, researchers, and other tech and business figures, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Bill Gates, signed a one-sentence statement written by the Center for AI Safety declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
This article contains spoilers through the series finales of Succession and Ted Lasso.Succession ended on Sunday with a series finale whose title, like the three season finales before it, was taken from a John Berryman poem, “Dream Song 29.” Before the episode aired, there was widespread speculation about whether the poem alluded to any particular revelation.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.When the French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize last fall, it was for her highly personal books—autobiographical narratives in which she places herself on an operating table and also acts as the surgeon, splaying out her thoughts and anxieties and desires in meticulous, vulnerable detail.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that members of the Sackler family can receive immunity from all current and future civil litigation related to their role in creating and fueling the opioid epidemic. The billionaire Sacklers own Purdue Pharma, maker of the highly addictive opioid OxyContin. The legal shield could lead to a settlement in the range of $6 billion for thousands of plaintiffs, including states, local governments and tribes.
We get an update on the armed police SWAT team raid and arrest of three organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has been raising money to bail out protesters opposed to the construction of a massive police training facility known as Cop City in the Weelaunee Forest, one of the city’s largest green spaces and the former site of a prison farm. Marlon Kautz, Adele Maclean and Savannah Patterson were charged with money laundering and fraud.
Dianne Feinstein returned to the Senate last month after a prolonged absence due to poor health and as questions continue to grow about her fitness for office. Feinstein said she would resume her duties with a lighter schedule, but the 89-year-old senator is reportedly suffering from mental decline that leaves her heavily reliant on her aides. Congressmember Ro Khanna of California is among a growing number of Democrats who have called on Feinstein to retire.
After a contentious battle with the Republican House majority, President Biden and Congress have agreed on a bipartisan deal suspending the debt ceiling until January 1, 2025.
The battle showed how hard it can be to tackle rising health care costs.
Resneck talks to POLITICO about the group’s challenges — from legal threats to AI — as he prepares to step down.
Debt ceiling talks and court battles risk also cutting off public health funding and PrEP drug access.
Negotiations between Biden and GOP leaders are targeting public health dollars slated for combating record infection rates.
The Fed is paying particular attention to so-called core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy costs and are regarded as a better gauge of longer-term inflation trends.
POLITICO asked a panel of strategists and elected officials what under-the-radar issue they think could play an outsize role in 2024.
The slowdown reflects the impact of the Fed’s aggressive drive to tame inflation.
We look at the impact of the reelection of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Sunday in a tight runoff vote, extending his 20-year rule for a further five years. Erdoğan received just over 52% of the vote, beating challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, an economist and former civil servant who unified a broad coalition but failed to unseat Erdoğan despite growing dissatisfaction with his governance and deep economic pain within the country.
We go to Kampala, Uganda, to discuss the impact of one of the most draconian anti-LGBTQ laws in the world, just signed by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. The new law makes same-sex relationships punishable by life imprisonment. Some LGBTQ people could receive the death sentence.
The famed political trickster apparently forgot his mic was on.
The eldest son of former president Donald Trump invited the “family friend” Fox News host on his podcast and immediately messed up the title of her book.
The former president appeared in Iowa as the Florida governor campaigned in New Hampshire.
Twitter users called out comedian Chrissie Mayr after Chick-fil-A discussion takes a turn.
Fending off a U.S. default, the Senate has given final approval to a debt ceiling and budget cuts package.
Last month, the surgeon general released a lengthy advisory calling attention to social media and its effects on the mental health of teenagers. Historically, a warning from the surgeon general pointed a big neon sign at an issue that we might not be sure how much to worry about: cigarettes, AIDS, drunk driving. But people are already worried about social media—and they’re acting on those concerns.
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.Yesterday, news outlets reported the existence of a recording in which Donald Trump discusses his possession of classified documents. The recording could prove legally damaging, but its existence also reveals something important about how the former president operates.
Cohen’s appointment would come at a transition point for the CDC.
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekIf there were a Hall of Fame for song lyrics and you got to make one nomination, what would it be and why? (The linguist John McWhorter might pick something from Steely Dan.)Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.
If the writer-director Nicole Holofcener could predict the future, she’d guess that no matter what happens to the planet, no matter how much human society evolves and devolves, our descendants will still get emotionally distressed over something small, petty, and entirely irrelevant to anyone else. People hurting each other’s feelings, she told me over Zoom last week, is “going to happen until the end of the world.
Advocates for student debt relief are raising the alarm over a controversial part of the bipartisan deal to raise the U.S. debt ceiling that would end the freeze on student loan repayments by the end of August. The moratorium has been in place since 2020. Meanwhile, the fate of the Biden administration’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student debt for borrowers is going to be decided by the Supreme Court, where it is likely to face skepticism from the conservative majority.
We host a roundtable discussion with three experts in artificial intelligence on growing concerns over the technology’s potential dangers. Yoshua Bengio, known as one of the three “godfathers of AI,” is a professor at the University of Montreal and founder and scientific director at Mila–Quebec AI Institute. Bengio is also a signatory of the Future of Life Institute open letter calling for a pause on large AI experiments.
The battle showed how hard it can be to tackle rising health care costs.