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David Pecker Expected to Discuss Hush-Money Deal in Trump Trial
David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, will be back on the stand and is likely to discuss the publication’s contact with Stormy Daniels.
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nytimes.com
U.S. Economy Grew at 1.6% Rate in First Quarter
Consumers ensured that growth continued, but the latest data showed signs of vulnerability elsewhere.
8 m
nytimes.com
Greg Abbott Under Fire Over Police Response to Protesters
Abbott said that anyone participating in the protest "belongs in jail."
newsweek.com
Prince William and Kate's Major New Dilemma
Prince William and Princess Kate must decide whether their children do a big royal event at which they usually steal the show.
newsweek.com
3 things to do if interest rate cuts are delayed, according to experts
Delayed rate cuts translate to continued favorable yields on deposit accounts and Treasury bills.
cbsnews.com
Chris Hayes deletes 'glib' post about National Guard shooting Columbia students amid anti-Israel protests
As anti-Israel demonstrators continue to protest at Columbia, MSNBC host Chris Hayes mocked calls for the National Guard to restore order at schools on social media.
foxnews.com
America's 'big glass' dominance hangs on the fate of two powerful new telescopes
Washington acknowledged the need for an 'all-sky' view of deep space but may stint on the funding. Does this make sense?
latimes.com
NATO Members 'Chasing Shadows' With Spying Cases, China Says
Germany and the United Kingdom each made high-profile arrests this week related to suspected espionage for China.
newsweek.com
Election 2024 latest news: Biden to highlight chips investments during New York trip
Live updates from the 2024 campaign trail with the latest news on presidential candidates, polls, primaries and more.
washingtonpost.com
California Home Burns Down After Landlord Tries to Remove Squatter
Police intervened to stop a fight that broke out in Antelope, California, after a fire engulfed a home occupied by squatters.
newsweek.com
Biden’s election-year play to further expand Obamacare
The administration says states can add dental coverage to Affordable Care Act health plans. The move reveals the president’s ACA aspirations.
washingtonpost.com
Cubs pitcher forced to change glove due to white in American flag patch: 'Just representing my country'
Chicago Cubs relief pitcher Luke Little was forced to change his glove Wednesday night due to the white in his American Flag patch on his glove.
foxnews.com
Gaza-Israeli peace will come only by putting people before states
People around the world see the tremendous damage that Benjamin Netanyahu’s war is doing to Israel as well as Gaza.
washingtonpost.com
TikTok to crack down on content that promotes disordered eating and dangerous weight-loss habits
Amid huge demand for Ozempic and other drugs that trigger weight loss, the social media giant announces new community guidelines in an effort to promote positive body image.
latimes.com
F1 News: Christian Horner Investigation Completion Expected Imminently
The F1 community awaits the impending conclusion of the Christian Horner investigation.
newsweek.com
Lawmakers are overreacting to crime
Members of the US Army National Guard patrolling Penn Station in New York City. | Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images Crime rates are falling. Why are lawmakers passing tough-on-crime bills? When it comes to public safety, lawmakers have two primary jobs: enacting policies that curb crime and making their constituents feel safe. It might seem like those two things go hand-in-hand; after all, if lawmakers successfully reduce crime rates, then people have less to worry about. But as has been especially evident recently, there can be a big disconnect between actual crime trends and how people feel about them. According to a Gallup poll, for example, the share of Americans who believe that crime is an “extremely” or “very serious” problem afflicting the country recently hit an all-time high — 63 percent in 2023, up from 48 percent just five years earlier. But the crime data paints a very different picture: According to the FBI, after an uptick in crime in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, crime rates have actually been falling across the country, with murders declining by 13 percent between 2022 and 2023. In New York City, one of the cities Republicans often point to as a supposed example of lawlessness, shootings are down 25 percent, and homicides are down 11 percent. “We keep getting a lot of really great information suggesting that violent crime is declining — in some cases extremely sharply,” said Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. “At the same time, there’s a real lag between what the data show and how people perceive the data.” That gap between reality and public perception is proving to have serious consequences. “Elected officials don’t govern based on necessarily what the data say,” Grawert said. “They govern on what the data say and how the public perceives it.” So as long as people continue to feel that crime is a problem — a reality prompted by an early pandemic crime spike and subsequently fueled by media reports that often overstated the rise in crime — lawmakers feel pressured to respond to a problem that, by and large, appears to be subsiding. That’s why a slew of cities and states have started adopting laws that hark back to the tough-on-crime approach of the 1980s and ’90s, a trend that has crossed party lines. Some jurisdictions, for example, have dramatically increased police presence, cracked down on homeless encampments, and imposed harsher penalties for petty crimes. These policies, in both Republican and Democratic jurisdictions, threaten the meaningful progress that criminal justice reform advocates achieved in the past decade, including a reduction in the prison population. This kind of legislation is both shortsighted and irresponsible: Many of these bills are getting enacted after crime began falling, which not only means they’re likely unnecessary, but they could also potentially pave the way for a reinvigorated era of mass incarceration. New crime bills are not responding to actual crime trends Louisiana was once known as the prison capital of the world, with more prisoners per capita than any other US state, or country for that matter. In 2012, according to the Times-Picayune, one in 86 adults in the state was serving time in prison, which at the time was almost twice the national average. The racial disparities were staggering, too: In New Orleans, one in seven Black men was either in prison, on parole, or on probation. But following a wave of criminal justice reforms across the country, some of which had bipartisan support, Louisiana lawmakers sought to change the state’s reputation. They succeeded, overhauling crime laws and ultimately reducing the prison population. The number of people held in prison for nonviolent offenses, for example, declined by 50 percent between 2016 and 2023. Legislators in the state recently passed changes to its criminal justice system that will likely reverse that pattern. The new laws will impose harsher penalties and longer sentences for a range of offenses, including carjackings and drug dealing, make it significantly harder to qualify for parole or overturn a wrongful conviction, and treat 17-year-olds who are charged with a crime as adults. But deep-red Louisiana isn’t the only place this sort of change of heart is happening. In San Francisco, voters approved ballot measures in March that would expand police surveillance and impose drug tests on welfare recipients — showing a public appetite, even among liberal voters, to do away with a more forgiving law enforcement approach. And in New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, recently deployed hundreds of National Guard troops to patrol the city subway system, despite the fact that crime on the subway was relatively rare and already on the decline. One area getting a lot of lawmakers’ attention is drug enforcement, especially against the backdrop of rising overdose deaths across the country. Oregon’s Democratic governor, for example, recently signed a bill that recriminalized possession of drugs in the state, reversing a decriminalization ballot measure that voters passed in 2020. But criminalization of drugs in particular is an easy way for lawmakers to say they’re responding to a problem without actually committing the necessary resources to address it, like making treatment centers more accessible. “The laws that are being proposed to counteract this by punishing people are not being proposed with public safety in mind,” Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative, told me. If they were, she said, they would be accompanied by an expansion of programs, including treatment centers and safe injection sites. Part of the tough-on-crime trend can be explained by the fact that an election is coming up, and politicians are concerned that the public’s sentiment about crime might sway voters. Fear-mongering about crime — and law-and-order campaigns in particular — is especially popular among Republicans every election cycle. This time around, Democrats seem to be responding not by pointing to declining crime trends, but by trying to appear even tougher on crime than their Republican counterparts. Given people’s attitudes toward crime — and the wrong public perception that crime is on the rise — Democrats might be justifiably worried about appearing out of touch if they deny their constituents’ distorted reality. But that just leads to bad policymaking as a result. “It’s a punitive turn in American policymaking that reflects a political establishment that doesn’t have any good ideas,” Bertram said. “Republicans love to make penalties harsher and sentences longer. To see Democrats bandwagoning on it is sinister and new and reflects a fear that they don’t have enough in their platform.” A renewed era of mass incarceration After the number of prisoners in the United States peaked at around 2.3 million people in 2008, a range of criminal justice reform bills succeeded in bringing that number down by reducing sentences, decriminalizing drugs, and by prosecutors being more selective about which laws to enforce and against whom. And in 2020, after the Covid pandemic prompted lawmakers to release low-risk prisoners, the prison population dipped to around 1.7 million. In recent years, the number of people in prison has been starting to creep back up, increasing by 2 percent nationally between 2021 and 2022. In some states, the rise has been much more pronounced, like in Mississippi, where the prison population grew by 14.3 percent in the same period. That’s in part because crime did indeed rise during the pandemic, but it’s also likely the result of a stricter law enforcement approach to low-level crimes. The overblown shoplifting panic, for example, prompted many states and local prosecutors to impose harsher penalties on offenders, despite the fact that shoplifting, like other crimes, was trending downward. It’s too early to know just how much the new tough-on-crime laws will affect the overall prison population, but they could potentially erase years of progress and further entrench America’s era of mass incarceration as a permanent reality. It’s easy for lawmakers to forget that when the public seems desperately afraid of a crime wave that seems to no longer exist. “There’s a sort of sense of ‘We have to do something, this is something, let’s do it,’ rather than a sober-minded, careful response to the data and the history, and what we know works and what doesn’t,” Grawert said. Indeed, it’s important for lawmakers to take a long-term approach to crime instead of trying to find a quick fix to a short-term problem. One way lawmakers can remind themselves of that is this tidbit in public polling: The same poll that showed that 63 percent of Americans think crime is a very serious problem nationally also showed that only 17 percent believed crime was an extremely or very serious problem in the area they lived in. That could be because while they might read about a supposed crime wave across the country, they’re not actually seeing any evidence of it in their own neighborhoods. Even if new tough-on-crime laws are intended to assuage the public’s fears about crime, they’re seemingly unnecessary and end up hurting everyone in the long term. After all, policy responses like New York sending the National Guard to the subway, which only visibly reinforce the idea that there’s an active threat, won’t only make people feel less safe; they’ll likely lead to more arrests for low-level offenses, too. Lawmakers should ask themselves: What would that actually achieve?
vox.com
Jets first-round pick prediction for 2024 NFL Draft revealed 
The Post's Brian Costello predicts who the Jets will pick with the No. 10 pick in Thursday's 2024 NFL Draft:
nypost.com
How the Campus Left Broke Higher Education
Fifty-six years ago this week, at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university: stop funding military research, and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby Black neighborhood. After a week of futile negotiations, Columbia called in New York City police to clear the occupation.The physical details of that crisis were much rougher than anything happening today. The students barricaded doors and ransacked President Grayson Kirk’s office. “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up,” Mark Rudd, the student leader and future member of the terrorist Weather Underground, wrote in an open letter to Kirk, who resigned a few months later. The cops arrested more than 700 students and injured at least 100, while one of their own was permanently disabled by a student.In other ways, the current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s. Why can’t students imagine doing it some other way?Perhaps because the structure of protest reflects the nature of universities. They make good targets because of their abiding vulnerability: They can’t deal with coercion, including nonviolent disobedience. Either they overreact, giving the protesters a new cause and more allies (this happened in 1968, and again last week at Columbia), or they yield, giving the protesters a victory and inviting the next round of disruption. This is why Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, no matter what she does, finds herself hammered from the right by Republican politicians and from the left by her own faculty and students, unable to move without losing more ground. Her detractors know that they have her trapped by their willingness to make coercive demands: Do what we say or else we’ll destroy you and your university. They aren’t interested in a debate.[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]A university isn’t a state—it can’t simply impose its rules with force. It’s a special kind of community whose legitimacy depends on mutual recognition in a spirit of reason, openness, and tolerance. At the heart of this spirit is free speech, which means more than just chanting, but free speech can’t thrive in an atmosphere of constant harassment. When one faction or another violates this spirit, the whole university is weakened as if stricken with an illness. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who tried and failed to mediate a peaceful end to the Columbia occupation, wrote afterward: In a community one cannot regain authority simply by asserting it, or by using force to suppress dissidents. Authority in this case is like respect. One can only earn the authority—the loyalty of one’s students—by going in and arguing with them, by engaging in full debate and, when the merits of proposed change are recognized, taking the necessary steps quickly enough to be convincing. The crackdown at Columbia in 1968 was so harsh that a backlash on the part of faculty and the public obliged the university to accept the students’ demands: a loss, then a win. The war in Vietnam ground on for years before it ended and history vindicated the protesters: another loss, another win. But the really important consequence of the 1968 revolt took decades to emerge. We’re seeing it now on Columbia’s quad and the campuses of elite universities around the country. The most lasting victory of the ’68ers was an intellectual one. The idea underlying their protests wasn’t just to stop the war or end injustice in America. Its aim was the university itself—the liberal university of the postwar years, which no longer exists.That university claimed a special role in democratic society. A few weeks after the 1968 takeover, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter gave the commencement address to a wounded institution. “A university is a community, but it is a community of a special kind,” Hofstadter said—“a community devoted to inquiry. It exists so that its members may inquire into truths of all sorts. Its presence marks our commitment to the idea that somewhere in society there must be an organization in which anything can be studied or questioned—not merely safe and established things but difficult and inflammatory things, the most troublesome questions of politics and war, of sex and morals, of property and national loyalty.” This mission rendered the community fragile, dependent on the self-restraint of its members.The lofty claims of the liberal university exposed it to charges of all kinds of hypocrisy, not least its entanglement with the American war machine. The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who became a guru to the New Left, coined the phrase repressive tolerance for the veil that hid liberal society’s mechanisms of violence and injustice. In this scheme, no institution, including the university, remained neutral, and radical students embraced their status as an oppressed group.[Charles Sykes: The new rules of political journalism]At Stanford (where my father was an administrator in the late ’60s, and where students took over a campus building the week after the Columbia revolt), white students compared themselves to Black American slaves. To them, the university was not a community dedicated to independent inquiry but a nexus of competing interest groups where power, not ideas, ruled. They rejected the very possibility of a disinterested pursuit of truth. In an imaginary dialogue between a student and a professor, a member of the Stanford chapter of Students for a Democratic Society wrote: “Rights and privacy and these kinds of freedom are irrelevant—you old guys got to get it through your heads that to fight the whole corrupt System POWER is the only answer.”A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors–the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés. Last week an editorial in the Daily Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, highlighted the irony of a university frantically trying to extricate itself from the implications of its own dogmas: “Why is the same university that capitalizes on the legacy of Edward Said and enshrines The Wretched of the Earth into its Core Curriculum so scared to speak about decolonization in practice?”A Columbia student, writing to one of his professors in a letter that the student shared with me, explained the dynamic so sharply that it’s worth quoting him at length: I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept in to every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen. The muscle of independent thinking and open debate, the ability to earn authority that Daniel Bell described as essential to a university’s survival, has long since atrophied. So when, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at any other minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments, they fell back on the obvious defense available under the new orthodoxy. They said that they felt “unsafe.” They accused pro-Palestinian students of anti-Semitism—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. They asked for protections that other groups already enjoyed. Who could blame them? They were doing what their leaders and teachers had instructed them was the right, the only, way to respond to a hurt.[Adam Serwer: The Republicans who want American carnage]And when the shrewd and unscrupulous Representative Elise Stefanik demanded of the presidents of Harvard and Penn whether calls for genocide violated their universities’ code of conduct, they had no good way to answer. If they said yes, they would have faced the obvious comeback: “Why has no one been punished?” So they said that it depended on the “context,” which was technically correct but sounded so hopelessly legalistic that it led to the loss of their jobs. The response also made nonsense of their careers as censors of unpopular speech. Shafik, of Columbia, having watched her colleagues’ debacle, told the congresswoman what she wanted to hear, then backed it up by calling the cops onto campus—only to find herself denounced on all sides, including by Senator Tom Cotton, who demanded that President Joe Biden deploy the United States military to Columbia, and by her own faculty senate, which threatened a vote of censure.The right always knows how to exploit the excesses of the left. It happened in 1968, when the campus takeovers and the street battles between anti-war activists and cops at the Democratic convention in Chicago helped elect Richard Nixon. Republican politicians are already exploiting the chaos on campuses. This summer, the Democrats will gather again in Chicago, and the activists are promising a big show. Donald Trump will be watching.Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.
theatlantic.com
Writing Is a Blood-and-Guts Business
The scrolls lay inside glass cases. On one, the writing was jagged; on others, swirling or steady. I was at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, admiring centuries-old Chinese calligraphy that, the wall text told me, was meant to contain the life force—qi—of the calligrapher expressed through each brushstroke. Though I couldn’t read the language, I was moved to see the work of writers who lived hundreds of years ago, whose marks still seemed to say something about the creators long after they’d passed.I’m using my fingers to type this now, but every letter is perfectly legible and well spaced. Today, the human body behind the written word is less apparent. When I’m composing an email, Gmail makes suggestions I can deploy in one click: “Awesome!” “Sounds great!” “Yes, I can do that.” Artificial intelligence can produce instantaneous sentences. That a person is responsible for text is no longer a given.Last year, Alex Reisner reported in The Atlantic that more than 191,000 books had been absorbed into a data set called Books3, which was then used to train generative-AI large language models that may someday threaten to take the place of human writers. Among the books in question was my debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, which took me five years to complete. My new novel, Real Americans, took even longer: I began working on it in December 2016, and it’s being released at the end of April, seven years and four months later. Those numbers don’t even account for the years of reading, practice, and education (both formal and self-directed) that preceded the writing itself. Now ChatGPT and other LLMs, trained on a wide store of human-generated literature, stand on the cusp of writing novels in no time at all.[Read: What ChatGPT can’t teach my writing students]This seems, initially, discouraging. Here is an entity that can seemingly do what I do, but faster. At present, it “hallucinates” and gets basic facts wrong, but it may soon be able to generate text that can seamlessly imitate people. Unlike me, it won’t need sleep, or bathroom breaks, or patience, or life experience; it won’t get the flu. In fact, AI embodies hypotheticals I can just imagine for myself: If only I could write all day and night. If only I were smarter and more talented. If only I had endless knowledge. If only I could read whole libraries. What could I create if I had no needs? What might this development mean for writing?Considering limitlessness has led me to believe that the impediments of human writers are what lead us to create meaningful art. And they are various: limits of our body, limits of our perspectives, limits of our skills. But the constraints of an artist’s process are, in the language of software, a feature, not a bug.Writing is a blood-and-guts business, literally as well as figuratively. As I type with my hands, my lungs oxygenate the blood that my heart pumps; my brain sends and receives signals. Each of these functions results in the words on this page. In the Middle Ages, monks in the scriptoria wrote: “Two fingers hold the pen, but the whole body toils.” Typing this now, my upper back hurts. I am governed by pesky physical needs: I have to drink water and eat; my mind can’t focus indefinitely. My hands are too cold, and because I haven’t moved it, one foot is going numb. On other occasions, illnesses or injuries have affected my ability to write.The sensitivities of our fragile human bodies require that our labor takes time. Nothing is more discouraging when I am trying to complete a draft. But this exchange—my finite hours for this creative endeavor—imports meaning: It benefits the work, and makes it richer. Over weeks, months, and years, characters emerge and plots take surprising turns. A thought can be considered day after day and deepened.While revising my forthcoming book, one of my thighs erupted into a mysterious rash. Sparing gruesome details, let’s just say it disturbed and distracted me. But it also led me to a realization: I’d been approaching the creation of my novel as though it could be perfectible. In reducing my entire self to my cognition alone, akin to a computer, I’d forgotten the truth that I am inseparable from my imperfect body, with its afflictions and ailments. My books emerge from this body.In his book How to Write One Song, the musician Jeff Tweedy writes: “I aspire to make trees instead of tables.” He was talking about songs, but the concept was revelatory to me as a novelist. Unlike a table, the point of a novel isn’t to be useful or stable or uniform. Instead, it is as singular and particular as its creator, shaped by numerous forces and conditions. In spite of its limits and because of them, a tree is an exuberant organic expression. Though costumed in typeset words, a novel is an exuberant organic expression too.[Read: My books were used to train meta’s generative AI. Good.]AI is creating tables out of our trees. Its infinite iterations are pure veneer: bloodless and gutless, serviceable furniture made of the deforested expanse of human experience. A large language model doesn’t require experience, because it has consumed ours. It appears limitless in its perspective because it writes from an extensive data set of our own. Though writing comes out of these experiences and perspectives, it does not follow that unlimited quantities of each beget maximally substantial work. I believe that the opposite is true.Compared with AI, we might seem like pitiful creatures. Our lives will end; our memory is faulty; we can’t absorb 191,000 books; our frames of reference are circumscribed. One day, I will die. I foreclose on certain opportunities by pursuing others. Typing this now means I cannot fold my laundry or have lunch with a friend. Yet I believe writing is worth doing, and this sacrifice of time makes it consequential. When we write, we are picking and choosing—consciously or otherwise—what is most substantial to us. Behind human writing is a human being calling for attention and saying, Here is what is important to me. I’m able to move through only my one life, from my narrow point of view; this outlook creates and yet constrains my work. Good writing is born of mortality: the limits of our body and perspectives—the limits of our very lives.I can imagine a future in which ChatGPT works more convincingly than it does now. Would I exchange the hours that I spent working on each of my two books for finished documents spat out by ChatGPT? That would have saved me years of attempts and failures. But all of that frustration, difficult as it was in the moment, changed me. It wasn’t a job I clocked in and out of, contained within a tidy sum of hours. I carried the story with me while I showered, drove—even dreamed. My mind was changed by the writing, and the writing changed by my mind.[Read: Prepare for the textpocalypse]Working on a novel, I strain against my limits as a bounded, single body by imagining characters outside of myself. I test the limits of my skill when I wonder, Can I pull this off? And though it feels grandiose to say, writing is an attempt to use my short supply of hours to create a work that outlasts me. These exertions in the face of my constraints strike me as moving, and worthy, and beautiful.Writing itself is a technology, and it will shift with the introduction of new tools, as it always has. I’m not worried that AI novelists will replace human novelists. But I am afraid that we’ll lose sight of what makes human writing worthwhile: its efforts, its inquiries, its bids for connection—all bounded and shaped by its imperfections—and its attempts to say, This is what it’s like for me. Is it like this for you? If we forget what makes our human work valuable, we might forget what makes our human lives valuable too. Novels are one of the best means we have for really seeing one another, because behind each effort is a mortal person, expressing and transmuting their realities to the best of their ability. Reading and writing are vital means by which we bridge our separate consciousnesses. In understanding these limits, we can understand one another’s lives. At least, we can try.
theatlantic.com
Commanders decline linebacker Jamin Davis’s fifth-year option
Exercising the option would have made the 2021 first-round pick one of the highest paid linebackers in the NFL.
washingtonpost.com
‘9-1-1’s Oliver Stark Previews Season 7, Episode 6: “One Of My Favorite Ever Episodes To Shoot”
Stark talked Buck and Eddie's karaoke scene, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, and more.
nypost.com
Letitia James Responds to Supreme Court Abortion Case: 'Isn't Complicated'
James said that "no one should be denied" emergency medical treatment as Idaho's near-total abortion ban is considered.
newsweek.com
Russian Losses Fast Approaching Four Grim Milestones: Kyiv
Moscow's forces continue to suffer high losses of four kinds of equipment, according to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.
newsweek.com
Donald Trump meets with construction workers who erupted into chants of ‘USA!’ before ‘hush money’ trial
Former President Donald Trump made an early-morning visit to a Manhattan construction site Thursday where he was seen shaking hands with workers before returning to court for his “hush-money” trial, which is entering its third day. Video shared on social media showed Trump mingling with construction workers at 48th St. and Park Ave, near the...
nypost.com
Woman Moves in With Boyfriend—Discovers He Packed an Unexpected 'Essential'
An old McDonald's toy is not the only bizarre item the boyfriend packed, according to his girlfriend.
newsweek.com
Stock Market Today: U.S. Futures Slip Ahead of More Big Tech Earnings
Facebook parent Meta saw shares slide in pre-market trading a day after it spooked investors with low sales and revenue forecasts.
newsweek.com
Kendra Wilkinson shares rare photo of son Hank Jr., 14, to celebrate prep school admission
"I love you so much and watched you work hard to get to where you are," the reality star, who also shares daughter Alijah with ex Hank Baskett, gushed.
nypost.com
How Micah Parsons envisions ‘all-in’ plan for Cowboys with NFL Draft here
Cowboys linebacker Micah Parsons heard the talk surrounding Dallas' noticeably quiet free agency.
nypost.com
Billie Eilish on the joys of self-pleasure: ‘I should have a Ph.D. in masturbation’
In a new cover-story interview with Rolling Stone, Billie Eilish reveals that masturbation is one of her secret obsessions: “People should be jerking it, man."
nypost.com
Work Advice: Can you be a nice person but a bad manager?
Being a caring, likable manager isn’t a bad thing -- unless it prevents you from addressing problems
washingtonpost.com
Army reservist who warned Maine killer would 'snap' before shooting to testify
Before Robert Card carried out Maine's deadliest mass shooting, his best friend had warned their superiors that Card might "snap and do as mass shooting."
foxnews.com
Venice begins charging entry fee for day-trippers to address tourism crisis
Venice has launched a pilot program to charge day-trippers an entry fee that authorities hope will discourage visitors from arriving on peak days, officials say.
foxnews.com
Meghan Markle set to make seven figures in less than a year with American Riviera Orchard brand: report
Is the Duchess of Sussex onto a winner?
nypost.com
Washington 13-year-old steals woman’s purse, punches her outside Seattle pharmacy, police say
Seattle police arrested a 13-year-old boy on suspicion of robbery after video allegedly captured him stealing a woman's purse and punching her.
foxnews.com
Money Won't Solve Ukraine or Israel's Problems | Opinion
As the old saying goes, money doesn't buy happiness. It doesn't necessarily buy security either.
newsweek.com
It’s about time to hold Trump in contempt
Merchan must refuse to let the former president undermine the rule of law.
washingtonpost.com
Bible full of 'historical evidence' for how effective prayer is, stresses faith leader
A pastor in the Seattle area is highlighting the importance and power of prayer amid today's antisemitism and attacks on Jewish people both in America and all over the world.
foxnews.com
Ryan Seacrest’s ex Aubrey Paige claps back at haters after breakup: ‘I don’t give a f–k’
The bikini-clad Sippin on Somethin' co-creator appeared unfazed while soaking up the sun in a pool with a glass of wine.
nypost.com
Chinese Warships Permanently Deployed at New Overseas Naval Base
An expert believes the five-month-long presence of the Chinese naval vessels at Cambodia's Ream Naval Base is the beginning of the permanent deployment.
newsweek.com
Mom Returns Home With Crying Baby, Finds Unexpected Note From Neighbor
"It had been written and posted pretty much straight after she saw me leave the house with a crying baby," the mom told Newsweek. "I felt less alone."
newsweek.com
The dramatic NFL Draft decisions awaiting the Giants, Jets and their rivals
It’s a big night for New York football fans, who'll wait with fingers crossed that their steams can make impact moves.
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nypost.com
Iconic windmill sails fall from Paris cabaret club Moulin Rouge: ‘Lost his soul’
A spokesperson for the Moulin Rouge said the theatre would investigate the cause of the incident with experts and insurers. Clerico said whatever the cause it was not intentional.
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nypost.com
Fauci to testify publicly before Congress for 1st time since retirement
Dr. Anthony Fauci has agreed to testify before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in June, a House panel investigating the origins of COVID-19 and the government's response.
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foxnews.com
2 military horses in serious condition after breaking free, running loose across London
Two military horses that bolted miles through the streets of London after being spooked by construction noise are in a serious condition, according to the British Army.
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foxnews.com
King Charles’ Funeral Plans Dusted Off, as His Health Remains a Mystery
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesIt’s the question everyone in British society and in the corridors of power is thinking, but nobody will publicly ask, let alone answer: Just how sick is King Charles III? The chatter that King Charles is significantly more unwell than his aides are letting on is proliferating in British society.Speaking to friends of the king in recent weeks about his health, the most common response is a lowering of the voice by half an octave or so, followed by the sombre, drawn-out pronouncement: “It’s not good.”His officials didn’t respond to formal requests for comment on the matter from The Daily Beast. To be clear, his team have made it very clear, since the king disclosed his cancer diagnosis earlier this year—in an unprecedented act of royal transparency—that they wouldn’t be providing a “running commentary” on his health.Read more at The Daily Beast.
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thedailybeast.com
Columbia students who rushed to join NYU rally admit they have no idea what it’s about: ‘Why are we protesting?’
"Why are we protesting, here at NYU specifically?" one of the Columbia students asks her friend, who replies: "I wish I was more educated."
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nypost.com
The Sports Report: Kings win Game 2 in exciting fashion
Anze Kopitar scores in overtime as the Kings win Game 2 to even the first-round series with Edmonton.
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latimes.com
Why campus protests against Israel probably won’t be effective
Students protesting against Israel at Columbia and elsewhere probably aren’t persuading the average American voter.
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washingtonpost.com