The apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump in Pennsylvania tonight brings home that democratic failures and security failures are intertwined.
Based on initial reporting, a sniper on a rooftop outside the venue—which people had to pass through a magnetometer to enter—shot at Trump, possibly grazing his ear with a bullet, before being killed by the Secret Service. At least one person at the rally was killed and two more were in serious condition.

Updated at 9:35 p.m. ET on July 13, 2024.
Former President Donald Trump was rushed offstage at a rally in Pennsylvania tonight after a shooting.
Trump posted on his Truth Social site that he was struck in the ear by a bullet, and the Secret Service said in a statement that a shooter had fired several times from an elevated position toward Trump. The former president raised a fist to the crowd as he was ushered away.

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On the eve of the Republican National Convention, President Joe Biden appears more determined than ever to continue his bid for reelection.

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A few years ago, my colleague Olga Khazan conducted an experiment—“sample size: 1”—to see whether she could change her personality. “I’ve never really liked my personality, and other people don’t like it either,” she wrote.

It’s time for some game theory.
The Democratic Party is now in the third week of a nightmare, and the reason it can’t seem to wake up is explained by the classic concept of the prisoner’s dilemma: The most influential figures in the party can’t know what their best course of action is, because they don’t know what everyone else will do.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the entrepreneur Arianna Huffington spoke with my colleague Charlie Warzel earlier this week about their ambitions to remake the American health-care system with generative AI.

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Summer is in full swing, and everywhere I go, I hear Sabrina Carpenter’s catchy, somewhat nonsensical “Espresso.

For the 2.2 million people in Houston who lost power Monday after Hurricane Beryl swept through the city, the first question they had was When will the electricity be back on? The city’s utility, CenterPoint Energy, didn’t yet have an online outage map to monitor. There was, however, a work-around. “The Whataburger app works as a power outage tracker,” tweeted a user who goes by the name BBQ Bryan, alongside a screenshot of the beloved local fast-food chain’s location map on its app.

An important thing to realize about the grandest conversations surrounding AI is that, most of the time, everyone is making things up. This isn’t to say that people have no idea what they’re talking about or that leaders are lying. But the bulk of the conversation about AI’s greatest capabilities is premised on a vision of a theoretical future.

Near the end of The Truman Show, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) flees his home in the middle of the night. He’s come to believe that his surroundings are fake, that the people around him are actors, and that everything he does is being broadcast as “authentic” entertainment to an audience. He’s right, of course: Watching over him is the godlike Christof (Ed Harris), the program’s mastermind. “Cue the sun,” orders Christof.