When Senator Katie Britt of Alabama gave the Republican response to the State of the Union address last Thursday, she introduced herself to America with a bizarre, dramatic speech. Set in a stark kitchen, and veering between folksy and distressed, it was ripe for parody. Naturally, Saturday Night Live would tackle it. But unexpectedly, it did so with the actor Scarlett Johansson—a much more familiar face to many Americans—who handled Britt’s odd performance brilliantly.

Former President Donald Trump, perhaps threatened by President Joe Biden’s well-received State of the Union address, mocked his opponent’s lifelong stutter at a rally in Georgia yesterday. “Wasn’t it—didn’t it bring us together?” Trump asked sarcastically. He kept the bit going, slipping into a Biden caricature. “‘I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-together,’” Trump said, straining and narrowing his mouth for comedic effect.
Trump has made a new habit of this.

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Between the Super Tuesday results and the president’s State of the Union address, a Joe Biden–Donald Trump face-off—the first presidential rematch since the 1950s—has become all but certain.
The end of political centrism continues to be a prevailing theme.

What is the correct distance from which to film a dictator? You could give him a close-up, revealing his psychic wounds, in a biopic or drama. You could turn on a spotlight, make him sing and dance onstage. Perhaps it’s best not to put him on-screen at all, and to focus instead on those who suffered at his hands.
Pablo Larraín, the director of the Oscar-nominated black comedy El Conde, wrestled with this question carefully.

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A Columbia historian said he’d discovered evidence of a lost sacred text with scandalous implications about the life of Jesus. Was it a fake? In a new Atlantic feature, the writer Ariel Sabar reports on the bitter ongoing debate—and the largely unexamined early life of the man who found it.

The millions of people who crowd into New York City’s busiest subway stations every day have recently encountered a sight reminiscent of a frightening, bygone era: National Guard troops with long guns patrolling platforms and checking bags.
After 9/11 and at moments of high alert in the years since, New York deployed soldiers in the subway to deter would-be terrorists and reassure the public that the transit system was safe from attack. The National Guard is now there for a different reason.

Everyone knows AIs are dangerous. Everyone knows they can rattle off breakthroughs in wildlife tracking and protein folding before lunch, put half the workforce out of a job by supper, and fake enough reality to kill whatever’s left of democracy itself before lights out.
Fewer people admit that AIs are intelligent—not yet, anyway—and even fewer, that they might be conscious.