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Google and OpenAI Are Battling for AI Supremacy This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.This week has felt like the early days of the generative-AI boom, filled with dazzling events concerning the future of the technology.On Monday, OpenAI held a last-minute “Spring Update” event in which the company announced its newest AI model, GPT-4o, in an impressive live demo. Running on the iPhone’s ChatGPT app, the model appeared able to understand live camera footage, help solve a math problem, and translate a live conversation between English and Italian speakers. Every previous smartphone assistant, including Apple’s Siri, now appears obsolete—and the smartphone itself might be reimagined as the device most “perfectly positioned to run generative-AI programs,” as I wrote on Monday.Not to be outdone, Google followed suit yesterday during its annual developer conference, which focused almost exclusively on generative AI. Alongside various technological advances, the company laid out its vision for search in the AI era: “Google will do the Googling for you,” Liz Reid, the company’s head of search, declared. In other words, chatbots will take the work out of finding information online. Lurking beneath the announcements was an acknowledgment that AI is better suited at synthesizing existing information and formatting it into an accessible format than providing clear, definitive answers. “That’s not omniscience; it’s the ability to tap into Google’s preexisting index of the web,” I noted yesterday.OpenAI’s and Google’s announcements are a duel over not just which product is best, but which kind of generative AI will be most useful to people. The ChatGPT app promises to do everything, all in one place; AI-powered Google search promises to be more of an open-ended guide. Whether users will embrace either vision of a remade web remains to be seen.— Matteo Wong, associate editorWhat to Read Next The live translation exhibited in OpenAI’s demo gestures toward a world in which people no longer feel compelled to learn foreign languages. Louise Matsakis explored this potential AI-induced death of bilingualism in March, writing, “We may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.” Another, perhaps even more alarming future for the world’s languages: Generative AI, which is most proficient in the handful of languages with plentiful training data, may push thousands of other tongues into extinction. “If generative AI indeed becomes the portal through which the internet is accessed,” I wrote in March, “then billions of people may in fact be worse off than they are today.” P.S.The buzz over AI image generators and deepfakes was preceded, decades ago, by similar excitement and hand-wringing over Adobe’s Photoshop, then “the primary battlefield for debates around fake imagery,” my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote last week. In the age of AI, Photoshop is struggling to adjust to being just one player in a crowded field.— Matteotheatlantic.com
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The 8 Dynamics That Will Shape the Election And that will decide the outcome in Novembertheatlantic.com
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The Baby Reindeer Mess Was Inevitable This story contains spoilers for the Netflix limited series Baby Reindeer.In the finale of Baby Reindeer, the comedian Donny Dunn (played by the show’s creator, Richard Gadd) achieves the kind of success he’d always wanted: He lands podcast interviews, performs before appreciative crowds inside big clubs, and scrolls through scores of online comments praising him for his bravery. He has transformed, as he puts it, “from a walking ghost to the center of a media storm”—all because a random audience member filmed and uploaded to YouTube a set during which Donny fell apart and delivered confessions instead of jokes. He’d told the room that he’d been groomed and abused years earlier by a man he’d considered his mentor, and that the resulting mix of self-hatred, humiliation, and guilt led him to indulge a stalker named Martha (Jessica Gunning).Donny is based on Gadd himself, and the British series—an expanded, episodic version of Gadd’s one-man show of the same name—opens with a card that reads “This is a true story.” Gadd has said that he was indeed stalked and harassed by a middle-aged woman who claimed to be a lawyer, and that he had been sexually abused by someone in the industry he’d greatly admired. The names of these people and certain details about the events were changed, but, as Gadd said in an interview, the show was “all emotionally 100 percent true.”[Read: We’ve lost the plot]The response to Baby Reindeer has been a lot more complicated than Donny’s brush with acclaim. Though the show has received glowing reviews since its April debut and became a hit on Netflix, topping the streamer’s English-language charts three weeks in a row, the fallout has been, to put it mildly, a mess. Some viewers tried to uncover the identity of Gadd’s entertainment-industry abuser and ended up targeting an innocent former co-worker of Gadd’s. As for Martha, internet sleuths found a woman who matched her description, leading tabloids such as the Daily Mail to track her down. The woman has said she believes that the character of Martha was based on her, and admitted to sending Gadd emails and tweets, but denied stalking him or committing criminal behavior during their interactions. She has since accused Gadd of stalking her, and, last week, she was interviewed by Piers Morgan, which led to a fresh wave of online commentary. Maybe that’s the last of it; Gadd himself has refused to “confirm or deny anything relating to the real life people who the characters are based on in the show.” Or maybe such a high-profile appearance will beget more headlines, which will beget even more discussion.None of this is really a surprise when you consider the show’s structure. Baby Reindeer spends most of its time dissecting Donny—and, by extension, Gadd himself—but the stalker story is its most seductive hook. The show’s thrillerlike twists offer a kind of voyeuristic accessibility into Donny’s staggering turmoil. But by branding itself as a true story, the series implicitly invites viewers to ponder what’s real and what’s been embellished—this intrigue is what helped turn the show into a word-of-mouth hit. As such, it’s become nearly impossible to see the story of Baby Reindeer on its own terms, separate from the conversation about Gadd’s ethics and whether he did enough to prevent the real people involved from being publicly identifiable. The show itself actually makes trenchant observations about obsession, shame, and abuse—all of which have been overshadowed by the frenzy it helped create.This apparently wasn’t Gadd’s intention. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be,” he wrote in an Instagram Story. “That’s not the point of our show.” The point, it seemed, had been catharsis—for Gadd, and for anyone who might resonate with his journey. The original stage show, he told The Guardian, became “a lifeline … The way people received the show, and received me, and accepted what happened to me: it saved my life.” In making the show, he sought to make sense of how his earlier abuse informed his behavior around his stalker: why he remained in contact with her for so long and why he failed to draw clear boundaries.The show succeeds in many ways at capturing Gadd’s cathartic self-reflection. Donny’s narration anchors the series in his queasy point of view, his voice-over repeatedly veering into critical takedowns of his own behavior. He tends to state how much he loathes himself, his need for relevancy, and his similarities to Martha. Baby Reindeer’s fourth and strongest episode, told in a visceral series of flashbacks, is especially uncomfortable: The disorienting camerawork places us inside Donny’s confused, blurry mind as he returns to his groomer’s apartment over and over, knowing each time that he’ll be drugged and raped. Even the title credits emphasize how trapped Donny is in his head: The words “created & written by Richard Gadd” are typed on-screen and then backspaced away, as if Gadd can’t fully say what he wants to express. The effect is overwhelming—Donny is so raw and honest about how he feels about himself that you immediately empathize with him. [Read: A grim new low for internet sleuthing]But Baby Reindeer also quietly, perhaps inadvertently, encourages prying into the people being depicted on-screen—to participate, in other words, in the very form of “toxic empathy” Gadd said he struggled with during the time he engaged with Martha. Netflix has maintained that it took “every reasonable precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the people involved,” yet the show seems to have kept plenty of other details intact: Netflix U.K.’s Instagram account declares that the misspelled emails depicted in the show were pulled from Gadd’s inbox. An in-joke about curtains is reproduced in the drama; the alleged real-life Martha referred to it in a public social-media post, which viewers easily found online. Donny’s emphasis on how much he couldn’t quit Martha often overshadows the richer parts of his story. The show spends several episodes exploring Donny’s budding romance with a trans woman, Teri (Nava Mau), and his evolving understanding of his parents, who have more in common with him than he thought. But Donny’s relationship with Martha bookends the series, affirming its importance over everything else. Viewers are left with Martha’s voice ringing in their ears. It’s no wonder that so many began hunting for her once they finished the show.I want to give Gadd the benefit of the doubt. Reliving his real-life trauma to play Donny can’t have been easy, and he said on a panel discussion recently that he had expected Baby Reindeer to “sit as maybe a little cult, artistic gem on the Netflix platform.” “If I wanted the real life people to be found, I would’ve made it a documentary,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in a conversation conducted before the Piers Morgan interview. “I’ve spoken publicly about how I don’t want people to do it and if I start playing a game of whack-a-mole, then I’m almost adding to it. I don’t think I’ll ever comment on it ever again.” (It’s unclear whether the woman who claims to be the real-life Martha was ever formally charged or investigated for alleged stalking.)For better or worse, the selling of the show as a true story positioned it to become the subject of internet sleuthing, and buried what’s really potent about it beyond the stalker storyline. Baby Reindeer examines the destructive nature of abuse, the way that a survivor can do seemingly irrational things—returning to the site of the abuse, obsessing over actions and inactions—just to be sure the whole ordeal wasn’t imagined. Donny found solace in the easy validation Martha provided and saw in her the same self-loathing and loneliness he had within him.During Donny’s unplanned confession onstage, he explains why he couldn’t let go of the possibility that his abusive mentor could actually make him famous. “When you’re famous, people see you as that,” he said. “They think, It’s the guy from that thing!” In reality, of course, fame can simply be the start of a cycle of exploitative empathy. At its core, Baby Reindeer understood this. But inevitably, too many of its viewers did not.theatlantic.com
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The Death of the Corner Office If you walked into an office building during the second half of the 20th century, you could probably figure out who had power with a single glance: Just look for the person in the corner office. The corner offices of yore were big, with large windows offering city views and constant streams of light, plus unbeatable levels of privacy. Everyone wanted them, but only those at the top got them. Land in one, and you’d know you’d made it. Fast-forward to today, and that emblem of corporate success is dying off. The number of private offices along the side of a building, a category that includes those in the corner, has shrunk by about half since 2021, according to the real-estate company CBRE. But today’s workplace transformation goes beyond the corner. All assigned desks and offices are on the decline, comprising only 45 percent of the average office, compared with 56 percent in 2021. Employers of many kinds—law firms, oil companies, biotech businesses, railway operators—are doing without them. They’re being replaced with coffee areas, conference rooms, and other collaborative spaces, Janet Pogue, the global director of workplace research at Gensler, a design firm, told me. In 2023, communal areas constituted 20 percent of the average office floor, up from 14 percent in 2021, CBRE found. [Read: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults]Some take this shift as evidence of a revolution in egalitarianism. But tearing down the walls of the corner office hasn’t exactly made the workplace more democratic. Executives still claim many of the new shared spaces as their own, take the lead during team meetings, and enjoy other subtle privileges. They may no longer occupy a seat of such visible power, but they still exert sway over the rest of the office, using spaces as they please and influencing what others can do in them.The relationship between office geography and power has always been in flux. The earliest workplaces displayed a “total inversion of our image of the traditional office-space hierarchy,” Dale Bradley, a professor at Brock University who has researched the history of the office, told me. Take the Larkin Building, which was designed in 1904 for a soap company. There, executives sat in the center of the first floor. “These guys are on display all the time,” Bradley said. Lower-level employees, meanwhile, were pushed to the edges of the building.But as the years passed, bosses decided they’d rather not be so visible. Shortly before World War II, they started moving into the corners, where they could easily block themselves off, and the symbol of corporate power that we know today took root. By mid-century, developers were bragging about how many corner offices they could cram onto each floor. In 1966, The New York Times wrote about a Philadelphia office building that had eight corners—“twice the normal supply.” Toronto’s Scotia Plaza did even better, with as many as 22 on some floors. This influence seeped into literature too. Books with titles such as Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office and Winners Dream: A Journey From Corner Store to Corner Office made clear that attaining the corner office was the apex of capitalist triumph. Then, about two decades ago, office designers began phasing them out. Google’s open-plan office redesign in 2005 was one of the earlier and most high-profile signs of changing attitudes: Modern workplaces were emphasizing collaboration, and corner offices were seen as too siloed. In 2020, the office came under attack again. Especially during the early pandemic, fewer executives were showing up to work in person, and their palatial corner offices were going to waste. “Nobody else really feels comfortable going into somebody else’s space and sitting there,” Kay Sargent, a director at the design firm HOK, told me. Now new office leases are about 20 percent smaller than they were before COVID, and companies are reconfiguring their floor plans to include more communal areas so that more employees fit into less space.Without the corner office, status is conveyed in new ways. No matter the setup, “human beings will still find a way of creating hierarchy,” Lenny Beaudoin, CBRE’s global head of workplace design, explained. Bosses might have more computer monitors, bigger desks, or even just a permanent spot rather than a rotating one, Matthew Davis, a business professor at Leeds University Business School, told me. Power also manifests intangibly—for instance, only a select few might be able to not check Slack or come and go from the office without explanation. It’s the same benefit of having a far-flung corner office, re-created digitally: You know you’re important if you can escape surveillance.[Read: ‘Resimercial:’ the terrible word for today’s trendy office aesthetic]And even if they’re not in the corner, a lot of executives do still have offices. Those have largely slimmed down, but many are connected to conference rooms or other collaborative spaces, such as broadcast rooms in finance firms, recording studios at media companies, and labs in the life sciences. Many higher-ups essentially seize these for themselves whenever they come in, Pogue, at Gensler, told me. From there, they can shape any collaboration that takes place, ensuring it plays out in their space and under their supervision. Many modern companies “have as many conference rooms as there are executives,” Sargent said, and it’s become a “dirty little secret” that conference rooms are the new corner offices.A collaborative space doesn’t need to be directly attached to a boss’s office for this dynamic to play out. When a high-ranking executive parks themselves in a big conference room or spreads their stuff across the long table in the office coffee shop, no one is going to tell them to leave. The communal spaces are free to use only if the boss isn’t there. Across all iterations of the workplace, higher-ups have always found ways to get what they want. We may one day return to an older layout of explicit hierarchy: Beaudoin, the CBRE designer, told me that he recently worked with a bank that decided to reinstall corner offices for a group of senior leaders, hoping it would bring them back to the office. But even if recent changes prove lasting, with space designed to be up for grabs, there won’t be any illusions about who has the power to grab it.theatlantic.com
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A Gaza Protester Who’s Willing to Suffer The protesters on university campuses have an image problem: They look like they are having way too much fun. In tone, the demonstrations do not match the subject matter, which they allege is genocide, the least fun of all human activities. For 20-year-olds, some activities that would be miserable to a normal person—screaming hysterically, being arrested, living in ragged encampments—are in fact an exhilarating way to spend one’s time, and certainly preferable to studying for exams. Young people like to rough it, within reason. Earlier this month, the protesters at the University of Chicago begged to be resupplied with dwindling essentials such as Chapstick and dental dams.Most universities have delayed threats of serious punishment. Even students who are eventually arrested are likely to suffer only minor blemishes to their records. And many of these blemishes are desirable: What better way to prove you were young and alive in 2024 than to have a framed mug shot from the day you were zip-tied and booked? Such mementos will have an honored place on the desks of protesters who someday follow a square occupation, like corporate law or podiatry.Fun does not discredit a cause, but a protester who enjoys himself has a harder time demonstrating his commitment than one willing to suffer. This weekend I spoke with one of the latter. David Chmielewski, a Princeton English major from Torrington, Connecticut, along with 11 other Princeton community members, spent 10 days on a hunger strike to call for the university to divest from Israel. “We wanted to commit ourselves to making clear how dire the situation is, with the forced famine that’s happening in the Gaza Strip,” Chmielewski said. He and the others consumed nothing but water, electrolytes, and necessary medicine. “There’s something very powerful about being able to use your body to show that commitment.” He said the group stopped on Saturday after talks with Princeton administrators yielded promising results.[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]Many have ridiculed the hunger strikers for the short duration of their fast, and for not emerging from the ordeal sallow and hollow-cheeked. (“PROTESTER WHINES OVER SELF-IMPOSED HUNGER STRIKE,” read the chyron on a Fox News broadcast.) Ten days isn’t long, but it is nine days longer than I’ve ever gone without food, so I am not inclined to downplay the unpleasantness of the experience. In fact, I respect Chmielewski. And just as it is important to ridicule protesters who have no idea what they are protesting, or who infringe on the rights of others, or who hate Jews, one should acknowledge when others press their cause, whatever its merit, in a morally faultless way.Chmielewski said his group was inspired by hunger strikers earlier this year at Brown (where the strike lasted eight days), at Dartmouth (where it lasted 12 days), and at Harvard (half a day). “We’re also drawing on a longer tradition of the hunger strike as a nonviolent-resistance tactic,” he told me, citing the Irish-republican hunger strikes of the 1920s and those of Gandhi and others in the movement for Indian independence. The Princeton protesters, he said, have had weeks to evolve in their tactics, without having been wiped out by clashes with police. “Other student groups may not have been afforded that luxury of time,” Chmielewski said. “We’ve had a lot of time to sit and reflect on what we can do to pressure the university but also to center Palestinians.”The language of “centering”—borrowed from the feminist theory of bell hooks and others—refers to the practice of giving credence and priority to the views of those historically ignored or victimized. It is in my opinion misguided, insofar as history’s victims are like history’s oppressors: human, and therefore flawed to the core and wrong about most things. And in the case of the Palestinians, the practice of “centering” seems to introduce a contradiction. Was it not odd, I asked Chmielewski, that centering the Palestinian perspective would lead him to adopt tactics that have never attracted a significant following among Palestinians?Chmielewski countered that Palestinian political prisoners have gone on hunger strikes by the thousands at various points in the past few decades. That’s true, but many of those striking were doing so only because they were in prison for violent crimes, and nonviolence had become the only option available. Nonviolent resistance as a preferred tactic remains rare—and rejected completely by Hamas—even though a growing literature in political science (particularly the work of Erica Chenoweth and the late Gene Sharp) has demonstrated that it is often very effective. It is less effective when allied with organized armed resistance. Chmielewski’s peers seem content with such an alliance. “Glory to the martyrs,” his Princeton group declared in a recent social-media post. “The empire will burn.”The question of why Palestinians have shown conspicuously little interest in the tactic that he himself has adopted is, Chmielewski told me, “better asked of a Palestinian.” “I don’t necessarily feel qualified to speak to the exact reasons for the dynamics of what tactics Palestinians have adopted historically,” he said. He was, I should add, smart and articulate, and one reason I liked him was his willingness to admit ignorance. Another was that unlike many other protesters, he did not hide behind a mask and committed himself to his cause by name.His conclusion from the experience was not narrowly about hunger in Gaza at all. “I’m not sure I know the right word” for what he experienced by not eating, he told me. “Spiritual? Poetic? Imaginative?” He said the hunger strike, although nominally about his university’s divestment, gave him a sense that “another world is possible, because you’re refraining from material needs. Everyone tells you you need these material things. But then stepping away from them gives you this permission to imagine other possibilities for existing in the world. It gives you permission to imagine a better world, because it’s taking you a step back from this world of … raw materiality.”I sensed that he was getting what one should get from one’s time at university: an education. Maybe it was the ketosis talking. (Several days of not eating can leave one giddy, even energetic.) I came away persuaded less by his cause than by his dedication and the worthiness of nonviolence as a tactic of first resort. I hope there will be more who practice it—in Princeton, Gaza, and Israel.theatlantic.com
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New Google Has a Lot in Common With Old Google The company is rebuilding its search engine with new generative-AI features.theatlantic.com
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Biden’s Weakness With Young Voters Isn’t About Gaza America’s young voters are fired up about the war in Gaza—aren’t they? Campus protests and the controversies around them have dominated media attention for weeks. So has the possibility that youth anger about the war will cost President Joe Biden the election. “Joe Biden Is Losing Young Voters Over Israel,” a USA Today headline declared last month. The New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall recently argued that nothing would help Biden more with young voters than negotiating a cease-fire in Gaza.The available evidence, however, overwhelmingly suggests otherwise. For all the attention they’ve drawn, the campus protesters are outliers. Biden has a problem with young voters, but it does not appear to be because of Gaza.This may feel counterintuitive. More than 80 percent of young people disapprove of the way Biden is handling the war, according to a recent CNN survey—the most of any cohort. And poll after poll shows Biden losing support among 20-somethings, the group that helped propel him to victory four years ago. In 2020, Biden won the 18-to-29-year-old vote by 24 percentage points. This time around, some polls suggest that the demographic is a toss-up between him and Donald Trump. If Biden is losing support from young people, and young people overwhelmingly object to his handling of the war in Gaza, a natural conclusion would be that the war is the reason for the lack of support.[Jill Filipovic: Say plainly wha]t the protesters wantBut that’s a mistake, because there’s a big difference between opinions and priorities. People have all kinds of views, sometimes strong ones, on various topics, but only a few issues will determine how they vote. And very few Americans—even young ones—rank the Israel-Hamas war as one of their top political priorities.“Obviously for some people it is the most important issue, and we need to respect that,” John Della Volpe, who directs polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, told me. “But what we’re seeing on college campuses, based upon this data, is not reflective of what the youth voter in general is thinking about.”In the April 2024 edition of the Harvard Youth Poll, which Della Volpe runs, 18-to-29-year-olds rated the Israel-Palestine conflict 15th out of 16 possible priorities. (Student debt came last.) Among self-identified Democrats, it was tied for third from the bottom. In another survey of registered voters in swing states, just 4 percent of 18-to-27-year-olds said the war was the most important issue affecting their vote. Even on college campuses, the epicenter of the protest movement, an Axios/Generation Lab poll found that only 13 percent of students considered “the conflict in the Middle East” to be one of their top-three issues. An April CBS poll found that the young voters who wanted Biden to pressure Israel to stop attacking Gaza would vote for him at about the same rate as those who didn’t.In fact, most young people don’t seem to be paying much attention to what’s going on beyond America’s borders. The 18-to-29-year-old age group is the least likely to say they’re following the war, according to a March survey from the Pew Research Center: 14 percent said they were closely tracking updates, while 58 percent said they weren’t following news of the conflict at all. “If you take a broader view, people who are in their teens and 20s are the least likely group of Americans to pay attention to politics, period,” David Barker, a professor of government at American University, told me. Many seem to be unsure how to feel about the war. “I think that the natural response for anybody, let alone young people, is just to be like, ‘Okay, what’s the price of milk?’” Barker said.Granted, if 2016 and 2020 are any guide, the election will likely be so close that any Democratic defections could be said to have determined the results, particularly in the swing states that Biden needs to win. In 2020, young people voted for Biden by a bigger margin than any other age group. “This is going to come down to small numbers of votes in six or seven key states,” Robert Lieberman, a political-science professor at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Any change, no matter the size, “could tip the election one way or the other.” A New York Times/Siena College swing-state poll out this week found that 13 percent of people who said they voted for Biden in 2020, but don’t plan to in 2024, are basing their decision on the war in the Middle East or on foreign policy. That’s a sliver of a sliver of the population, far fewer than those who cited the economy or inflation—but any sliver could be the decisive one.[David Frum: The plot to wreck the Democratic convention]Even if people don’t vote based on the conflict itself, they might vote based on what it represents. The chaos of an international conflict, and the domestic protests it inspires, could contribute to the impression that Biden is not in control.Still, with the election six months away, some experts predict that young voters will shift back toward Biden as they start paying closer attention to politics. If that doesn’t happen, it will likely be for the same reasons that are depressing his standing with other age groups—above all, the economy. “I ultimately expect that Biden’s fate will be determined less by something like this conflict in Gaza and more, frankly, by which direction inflation and unemployment go over the course of the next few months,” Barker said.There’s no denying that the Israel-Palestine conflict, along with the related controversies emanating from it, has affected and will continue to affect domestic U.S. politics—and the moral questions posed by the war extend far beyond electoral calculations. But the issue is unlikely to trigger any demographic realignment. When it comes to the issues they care about most, young Americans appear closer to the overall electorate than to the activist groups that claim to represent them.theatlantic.com
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The Real ID Deadline Will Never Arrive If you fly regularly, you’ve probably seen signs saying that the Real ID Act will soon go into full effect. When that happens, all domestic travelers using a driver’s license at TSA checkpoints will have to show a federally compliant one—or be turned away. On May 7, exactly a year ahead of the latest purported enforcement date, a USA Today story bore the headline “The 2025 Real ID Deadline for New Licenses Is Really Real This Time, DHS Says.” Maybe the Department of Homeland Security needs to pinkie-swear to make the 2025 date really, really real, because those airport signs and travel stories have been telling us about a final deadline for more than 15 years. And yet, that deadline has never arrived. If past extensions are any indication, it probably never will.The 2005 Real ID law created a national system for sharing driver information, set more onerous documentation standards for driver’s licenses than states had previously used, and added security rules that pushed states to mail licenses to applicants rather than issuing them on the spot. During the years of collective panic that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, lawmakers and executive-branch agencies pushed through a raft of measures—common-sense ones, such as fortified cockpit doors, but also more controversial ones, such as expanded data surveillance and airport body-scanning machines. To this day, recorded airport announcements still warn passengers about “heightened security measures” that have been in place for more than a decade and might well remain heightened in perpetuity. Originally meant to take full effect in 2008, Real ID now looks like a particularly misguided bit of post-9/11 security theater. The measure survives in public policy despite, or perhaps precisely because of, its lack of urgency.The deadline has been delayed again and again. The initial holdup was that many states bristled at federal encroachment on their turf and at the cost of revamping their license systems to meet the new standards. More recently, Homeland Security has cited the slow uptake of Real ID cards—the department estimated last year that 44 percent of the population did not have a compliant license—and administrative backlogs related to the coronavirus pandemic.[Derek Thompson: Air travel is a disaster right now. Here’s why ]If requiring a Real ID license for every airline passenger were essential to preventing another 9/11-style attack, this would have become clear years ago. As my 2006 book, Identity Crisis, pointed out, supporters of Real ID could not plausibly claim that the policy would thwart foreign terrorists, who can travel within the United States using passports. Perhaps that’s why supporters pivoted after the Real ID Act’s passage to touting the policy as protection against identity fraud and illegal immigration. These assertions don’t hold up either. Identity fraud typically involves hacking into victims’ financial accounts, or starting new ones, under circumstances in which banks and merchants don’t check ID. Controlling illegal immigration through an identification system would require something much further-reaching than Real ID: registering all Americans from birth and all lawful newcomers from the moment of entry, using a strong biometric identifier. Then, checking people against a centrally managed database when they applied for a job, sought health care, or made a credit-card payment would trip up the people who aren’t in it. Many people, including me, intuitively oppose such a system because it would be intrusive on its own terms and because of how it might be used to track and control people’s activities. Whether you are worried about access to ammunition or access to reproductive services, you can reasonably harbor doubts about the potential uses and abuses of any national ID system.Real ID is a peculiar hybrid—the closest thing to a national ID that was politically viable at the time of the act’s passage. But the marginal security gains are not worth even the short-term costs: burdensome document demands, longer lines at motor-vehicle departments, slower license issuance.Applying cost-benefit analysis and other rigorous tools to policy making was difficult in the post-9/11 era and remains so today. Remote risks, such as novel attacks on transportation, must be weighed against inconveniences to hundreds of millions of travelers. Even today, the invocation of terrorism activates many people’s “lizard brain,” in which the fight-or-flight instinct overwhelms rational thinking about security. Knowing this, politicians and security-agency administrators fear being blamed for any future attack with at least notional connections to fraudulent state identification cards. Now that most states are at least partially compliant with federal standards, the percentage of Americans with a Real ID license is likely to tick upward over time. And with the help of technology, the U.S. government is steadily expanding its role in identity verification. The TSA is rolling out its ostensibly voluntary facial-scanning system at more and more airports. In December 2020, Congress passed legislation allowing for digital driver’s licenses, carried on smartphones and smartwatches, that would comply with Real ID requirements. This nominal upgrade to the licensing regime may make identity checking far more common and data gathering easier; it also expands Homeland Security’s influence over the configuration of licenses. A digital driver’s license is not like a paper one without the bulk. As the ACLU’s Jay Stanley warned in a 2021 report, its functions could include “phoning home” to central databases, revealing when and where you present it, and allowing tracking by businesses and government institutions that check it. Because of these and other dangers, the American public should think carefully before adopting digital licenses in the name of convenience in coming years.[Russell Berman: The obvious voting-rights solution that no Democrat will propose]In the meantime, Americans who travel frequently will be barraged with exhortations to adopt 2005’s state-of-the-art license technology, Real ID. Fortunately, the threat of being denied boarding without a compliant license is hollow. If every Real ID holdout decided to get a compliant license between now and May 2025, states probably wouldn’t be able to handle the administrative burden. Under any likely scenario, the political costs of turning Americans away at airports in May 2025 will be too high.Here’s my prediction: Well before next May, the Real ID compliance deadline will be rolled back again. The only uncertainty is the reason the federal government will give us.theatlantic.com
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Introducing: Good on Paper Have you ever heard a commonly held belief or a fast-developing worldview and asked: Is that idea right? Or just good on paper? Each week, host Jerusalem Demsas and a guest take a closer look at the facts and research that challenge the popular narratives of the day, to better understand why we believe what we believe. Good on Paper launches Tuesday, June 4.Listen to the conversation here:The following is a transcript of the episode:Jerusalem Demsas: What’s an idea that you’ve felt was good on paper but didn’t pan out in real life?Alice Evans: Oh my God. So much of my life, so much of my life.Demsas: [Laughs]Demsas: What if the conventional wisdom driving our public discourse isn’t quite right?Natalia Emanuel: This is the question in many ways.Demsas: What if new evidence on housing or immigration or relationships flies in the face of what we believe?Evans: Wow, okay. Big question.Demsas: What if the policies we support give us results we don’t like?Nick Papageorge: We were playing with data, and we found a pattern that didn’t make sense.Emanuel: One of the first people we presented to said, Are we sure this isn’t mansplaining?Evans: Okay, great. So I maybe sound a little bit Marxian now.Demsas: My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic. And I’m hosting a new podcast called Good on Paper. It’s a policy show that will question what we really know about the world and challenge the popular narratives of the day. Like, were the 2020 protests—both the Black Lives Matter and anti-lockdown ones—actually full of radicals?Papageorge: That was one part of the caricaturization, right? That there are these gun-toting vigilantes and then there are these privileged leftist extremists going to these BLM protests. But then, you start to look.Demsas: Or—is remote work actually good for workers?Emanuel: If you have even one colleague who is remote, that yields about 30 percent of the loss from having everyone be remote.Demsas: Wait, so if one person on your team goes remote, that you just lose all of that?Emanuel: Well, a third of it, yeah.Demsas: A third of it, that’s huge!Emanuel: Right, it’s huge—from just one person.Demsas: From The Atlantic comes Good on Paper. First episode drops June 4 wherever you get your podcasts. Come be surprised.Evans: I do a Lara Croft roly-poly, spinning off to the side. At this point, I hand over the phone, and I sprint, and I’m bleeding, and I’m covered in blood.Demsas: Well, I just think it’s—Evans: So, yeah, that is something that had not gone to plan. Getting punched in the face was not on the agenda.Demsas: Not good on paper.theatlantic.com
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Summer Reading 2024 Warm weather brings with it freedom and leisure—and it can also call to mind the particular pleasure of losing yourself in a book. The relatively idle quality of summer opens up the chance to read something just for fun, or it provides a needed stretch of time for finally picking up the paperback that’s been patiently waiting on your bedside table. This year, The Atlantic’s writers and editors have chosen fiction and nonfiction to match all sorts of moods. Perhaps you want to transport yourself to another place, or you’re determined to learn something completely new. It’s also the right time to start the book you’ll read all summer or immerse yourself in a cult classic. You might hope to feel wonder about the universe or dive into someone else’s mind—or maybe you just need to indulge in a breezy beach read. Here are 25 books to pick up as your summer unfurls.Transport Yourself to Another PlaceI Capture the Castleby Dodie SmithCassandra Mortmain, 17, lives in a crumbling medieval castle in 1930s England. Her father purchased it with the royalties from his one successful novel, the income from which has long since run dry. As an escape—and as practice for her own novel, which she hopes might spring her family from its now-less-than-genteel poverty—Cassandra has dedicated herself to “capturing” the characters around her in a diaristic, curious first person: irascible, blocked-writer father; bohemian stepmother; beautiful, dissatisfied older sister; lovelorn farmhand. Cassandra’s circumstances are at odds with her romantic temperament, but they animate her narration; charm, humor, and frustration spark off of every page. I Capture the Castle has the enjoyably familiar trappings of the Jane Austen marriage plot—there are wealthy bachelor neighbors and sisterly schemes in the damp yet charming English countryside. But in this book, the tropes collapse in on one another in comic and quietly poignant ways as the reader is welcomed into the nostalgic mood of interwar Britain, with its tea cozies and tweeds and trousseaus bought in London. It’s a novel that you sink into like a chintz armchair, only to emerge warm but wistful as the light fails and the evening mist appears. — Christine EmbaWandering Starsby Tommy OrangeOrange’s previous novel, There There, conjured an interconnected cast of characters who were a part of a widespread Native community in Oakland, California. Wandering Stars, a sequel of sorts, is in part an exploration of what happens after the earlier book’s dramatic and painful ending—but it is also Orange’s attempt to provide a deeper, historical backstory to the contemporary, urban reality he described so well. The novel rewinds more than 100 years, beginning in the 19th century with a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and following his bloodline through the decades, with characters wandering to and around California until they end up back in the present day, in Oakland. You can’t understand these people unless you delve into the years of brutality and assimilation that brought them here, Orange implicitly argues—and he brilliantly captures the confusion of the youngest generation, which feels disconnected from its roots even as its inheritance weighs heavily. — Emma SarappoSomeone Like Usby Dinaw MengestuAt one point in Mengestu’s new novel, the main character, Mamush, having missed a flight from his home in Paris to Washington, D.C., decides on a whim to buy a ticket to Chicago instead. He’s not dressed for the freezing cold, which provokes a stranger’s concern, but Mamush remains nonplussed: “What she saw was a shadow version of me,” he thinks. “My real self was hundreds of miles away in the suburbs of northern Virginia.” The soul of this short, disorienting book, which drifts between continents and cities, does indeed lie in the anonymous, dense suburbs north and south of Washington, D.C. These communities are where Mamush, a failed journalist, grew up in a milieu of Ethiopian immigrants. Mamush’s French wife, Hannah, struggles to wrap her mind around these American nonplaces—and even Mamush fails to describe them with anything but the blandest words. “We lived in apartment buildings, surrounded by other apartment buildings, behind which were four-lane highways that led to similar apartments,” he remembers. His trip home, meant to be a family reunion, becomes a sobering and eerie voyage after a sudden tragedy. But as his visit unlocks long-buried memories and secrets, these places that began as ciphers end up specific enough to make the hairs on one’s neck stand up in recognition. — E.S.Learn Something Completely NewThe Secret Life of Groceriesby Benjamin LorrGreat nonfiction books take you into worlds you could never otherwise know: deepest space, Earth’s extremities, the past. The best nonfiction books explore places you know intimately but haven’t thought nearly enough about. The Secret Life of Groceries begins elbow-deep in trout guts and melting ice, a smell “thick in the air like you are exhuming something dangerous, which perhaps you are,” as the low-wage laborers who make a Manhattan Whole Foods fit for the daily rush do their best to clean the fish case. Lorr starts there because it’s a near-perfect metaphor for the American grocery store and its global machinery: It is gross, it is miraculous, it is where plants and animals become products, and where desire becomes consumption. After following him from specialty-food shows to shrimping boats to new-employee orientation, you’ll never think of groceries the same way again. — Ellen CushingBecoming Earthby Ferris JabrIn his new book, Jabr invites the reader to consider the true definition of life. Earth doesn’t just play host to living beings, in his telling; it’s alive itself because it is fundamentally made up of the plants and creatures that transform its land, air, and water. “Life, then, is more spectral than categorical, more verb than noun,” he explains. It is “not a distinct class of matter, nor a property of matter, but rather a process—a performance.” Plankton release gases that can alter the climate; microbes below the planet’s surface sculpt rock into caverns and, Jabr suggests, might have even helped form the continents. Jabr is a science journalist who has written searching articles on inter-tree communication, the possibilities of botanical medicine, and the beauty of certain animals; here, he travels from the kelp forests near California’s Santa Catalina Island to an observatory high above the Amazon rainforest in Brazil to his own backyard in Portland. Along the way, he makes a convincing, mind-opening case that “the history of life on Earth is the history of life remaking Earth,” which means that humans are just one part of a changing, multifarious whole—and that we must work urgently to mitigate our disproportionate effects on the planet. — Maya ChungDaybookby Anne TruittTruitt’s sculptures—tall wooden columns of pure color—are almost mystically smooth. But her writing, especially in her first published journal, Daybook, flies in the face of those unbroken surfaces: She chronicles her complex experiences as a mother and a working artist, giving readers an intimate look into how her biography and her process cannot be separated. Daybook, which covers Truitt’s life in the late 1970s, emerges directly from her maxim that “artists have no choice but to express their lives.” In her case, that means capturing serene meditations on the creative spark, recounting the labor of applying 40 coats of paint to her forms, and groaning over the financial discomfort of raising three kids. Most spectacular are her ruminations on how life is what we feed to art in order to make it grow. Watching her daughter take a bath is a source of inspiration. “I had been absorbing her brown body against the white tub, the yellow top of the nail brush, the dark green shampoo bottle, Sam’s blue towel, her orange towel, and could make a sculpture called Mary in the Tub if I ever chose to,” she muses. Daybook is full of all the luminous colors Truitt, who died in 2004, evoked—the soothing lilacs, blaring yellows, revolutionary reds. It’s a powerful lesson that an artist is not only a person who planes towering poplar sculptures but also someone who removes a splinter from a child’s finger. — Hillary KellyDelmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poetby James AtlasYou might not ever have heard of Schwartz, and it doesn’t really matter. Atlas’s biography of him is such a psychologically acute, stylishly executed portrait of a doomed genius and his milieu of New York intellectuals that it effortlessly propels the reader through its pages. Schwartz was supposed to become the American W. H. Auden; he had the potential to be the greatest poet of his generation, and his work provoked the awe of peers such as Saul Bellow (who loosely based the novel Humboldt’s Gift on Schwartz’s troubled life). Atlas depicts a legendary conversationalist, a brilliant wit (Schwartz coined the aphorism “Even paranoids have real enemies”), and a life brutally overtaken by mental illness. — Franklin FoerStart the Book You’ll Read All SummerAt the Edge of Empireby Edward WongFor years, the only uniform that Wong, The New York Times’ former Beijing bureau chief, could imagine his father wearing was the red blazer he put on to go work at a Chinese restaurant every day. Then he saw a photo of young Yook Kearn Wong dressed as a soldier, and two stories opened up. His nonagenarian father had once been in Mao’s army and witnessed firsthand the Communist attempt to resurrect a Chinese empire; he dramatically left China in 1962 for Hong Kong and then Washington, D.C., disillusioned with what he had seen. This mix of memoir and efficiently recounted history covers 80 turbulent years. Wong is especially detailed about the decades his father spent in the People’s Liberation Army; he was sent to Manchuria, where he trained with the Chinese air force, and Xinjiang, where he met the Muslim populations of Uyghurs and Kazakhs that the state has struggled to subdue. Along with his father’s history, Wong unpacks his own years reporting on Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power and quashing of dissent—a mirror of what his father saw. This book’s power comes from Wong’s broad sense of the patterns of Chinese history, reflected in the lives of a father and son, and from his ability to toggle effortlessly between the epic and the intimate. — Gal BeckermanKristin Lavransdatterby Sigrid Undset, translated by Tiina NunnallyKristin, the pivotal character in Undset’s historical 1,000-page trilogy, is introduced as a young girl in 14th-century Norway. She is the adored daughter of Lavrans, a widely respected nobleman who runs their family’s estate with wisdom and faith, and a member of a well-drawn social world of relatives, friends, and neighbors with defined feudal roles. As she grows up, she becomes beautiful, bighearted, and religious, though she is also willful and disobedient in ways that will bring her deep sorrow for the rest of her life. Kristin’s saga, rich with detail, has shades of Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ tragedy and Brideshead Revisited’s piety, but more than anything, the story is deeply human. Readers follow an imperfect, striving, warm, petty, utterly understandable woman from her childhood during the peak of medieval Norwegian strength to her death during the Black Plague, a time when Catholicism ordered social and political life but pagan traditions and beliefs were not yet forgotten. Her journey from maid to sinner to pilgrim to matriarch, first published in the 1920s, is gorgeous, fresh, and propulsive in Nunnally’s translation. A century later, spending weeks or months tracking the years of Kristin’s life remains wildly rewarding. — E.S.The Bee Stingby Paul MurrayThe setup for the Irish author Murray’s fourth novel is a classic one: Take one family and explore its dynamics in intimate detail, turning it over to reveal all of its flawed facets, and expose it as a microcosm of larger social and cultural forces roiling us all. Jonathan Franzen is the current American master of this particular novelistic gambit, but Murray brings new energy to the enterprise with his portrait of the Barneses, Dickie and Imelda, and their two children, Cass and PJ. They’re a once-prosperous family living in a small Irish town; they’ve been suddenly struck down by the 2008 financial crash, which sends Dickie’s chain of car dealerships and garages into freefall. You could read this book in a week, and you’ll want to, but give yourself the whole summer to appreciate how fully Murray inhabits the perspectives of each family member chapter after chapter. Their psychologies—scarred in so many ways, both subtle and dramatic—become impossible to turn away from. After 600 pages, the elements Murray has been putting in place build to a wrenching climax, one that, like in all great tragedies, was foretold from the first page of this beautifully crafted book. — G.B.Immerse Yourself in a Cult ClassicIn the Actby Rachel IngallsIf nothing else, read In the Act for the fights. Helen and Edgar, who are unhappily married, have developed a caustic fluency in the art of spiteful exchange. “You’re being unreasonable,” he says at one point. “Of course I am. I’m a woman,” she replies. “You’ve already explained that to me.” But also, read Ingalls’s sneakily brilliant 1987 novella for the absurd plot, which begins at a grouchy, oddball simmer—Edgar is adamant that Helen give him privacy to work on a mysterious project in the attic; Helen, suspicious of the sounds she hears up there, is determined to learn more—and ultimately reaches an exhilarating, tragicomic boil. In between, we discover the particular, creative way in which Edgar is two-timing Helen, the equally creative way in which she takes revenge, and just how delightful a story can be when each lean, mean sentence carries its weight. — Jane Yong KimLet’s Talk About Loveby Carl WilsonWhat might a music critic with a knee-jerk distaste for Celine Dion stand to gain from careful, open-minded consideration of her work? This is the premise of Wilson’s 2007 touchstone of cultural criticism, which proved so popular that an expanded edition, released in 2014, includes response essays by luminaries such as Mary Gaitskill and James Franco. Let’s Talk About Love focuses on the singer of “My Heart Will Go On,” yes, but at its core it’s an investigation of taste: why we like the things we like, how our identities and social status get mixed up in our aesthetic preferences, and how one should wrestle with other people’s wildly different reactions to works of art. The book will have you scrutinizing your own preferences, but its true pleasure is unlocked simply by following along as a critic listens to music and thinks deeply about it—particularly one as intelligent, rigorous, and undogmatic as Wilson. — Chelsea LeuRipley’s Gameby Patricia HighsmithThe suave serial murderer Tom Ripley’s actions can be notoriously hard for readers to predict—but in Highsmith’s third novel about the con man, Ripley surprises himself. No longer the youthful compulsive killer of The Talented Mr. Ripley, the character is aging and getting bored. So when a poor man named Jonathan responds coolly to him at a party, Ripley fashions an elaborate drama for his own amusement: He cons the mild-mannered and entirely inexperienced Jonathan into taking a job as a freelance assassin targeting Mafia members, but the more Ripley watches Jonathan struggle with the task and his morals, the more Ripley itches to get his own hands dirty again. When I revisited Highsmith’s books ahead of their (rather dour) Netflix adaptation, I found myself unexpectedly drawn most to Ripley’s Game and its absurd humor. The novel explores a classic Highsmith preoccupation: how reducing strangers to archetypes can feel irresistible. Ripley is as much a petty meddler as he is a cold-blooded murderer—and that makes him endlessly fun to follow. — Shirley LiSirena Selenaby Mayra Santos-FebresIn 1990s San Juan, Puerto Rico, the drag queen Martha Divine hears a young boy singing boleros while picking up cans. She helps transform him into Sirena Selena—a beguiling drag performer who is soon invited to sing at a luxury hotel in the Dominican Republic and inspires an erotic obsession in one of its rich investors. Santos-Febres has pointed out that the Caribbean has long “been a desire factory for the rest of the world,” and her story looks squarely at the power dynamics inherent in these fantasies, especially those between tourists and locals. When it was published in 2000, Selena’s story was immediately heralded as crucial Puerto Rican literature, and it remains beloved partially for the force of its central allegory: Tourism, it argues, forces Caribbean people into a performance of exoticism—yet another type of drag. Santos-Febres will make you reconsider gender and the travel industry while luring you in with prose so sumptuous that reading it feels like putting on a pair of delicate satin gloves. — Valerie TrappFeel Wonder About the UniverseYou Are Here: Poetry in the Natural Worldedited by Ada LimónThis collection of verse defines the natural world loosely: Here, yes, we have lovely descriptions of ancient redwoods and the “buttery platters of fungus” ascending their trunks; sparrows and spiderwebs and “geckos in their mysterious work.” But the book is largely about human nature, and our place in a world that contains so many other living things. An address to a saguaro becomes a meditation on immigration; a walk with a baby is tinged with sadness for the climate disasters surely to come; bearded irises give someone the strength to keep living; lilacs and skunk cabbage are envisioned through the haze of distant memory—it’s an ephemeral act, “like wrapping a scoop of snow in tissue paper.” Who are we, the poets ask, as individuals and as a species? How have our surroundings shaped our pasts and our presents, and what can they tell us about how to exist in the future? The Earth here is rather like a supporting character—a foil—who can surprise us, devastate us, and bring us back to ourselves. As Limón writes in a gorgeous introduction, she started repeating “You are here” to herself after seeing the phrase on a trail map. When I feel like a disembodied mind this summer, I’ll take myself to the ocean, this book in hand, and try doing the same. — Faith HillLives Other Than My Ownby Emmanuel CarrèreCarrère’s books demand some surrender on their reader’s part. You have to be okay not knowing exactly where the story—to the extent that there is anything resembling a traditional story—is going. You are there to spend time with his mind. Lives Other Than My Own, my favorite of his works, is no exception. It begins in Sri Lanka in 2004, where Carrère was witness to the tsunami that pulverized the island. Amid the immense death and destruction, Carrère befriends a French family whose little girl drowned in the waves. But just as Carrère pulls us into this grieving family’s emotional upheaval, his mind drifts. He returns from Sri Lanka to Paris and shifts his attention to his girlfriend’s sister, Juliette, a judge who has just died of cancer; he then carries out an investigation of sorts about the life she lived and the loved ones she left behind. The two strands don’t obviously connect—but they also make perfect sense next to each other. Each one fundamentally shakes Carrère, forcing him to ponder death, love, and how a meaningful existence comes together. — G.B.Tentacleby Rita Indiana, translated by Achy ObejasTentacle may be a bit of a spooky read for this summer: In its world, initially set a few years into the future, the island of Hispaniola was devastated by a tidal wave in 2024 that wiped away coral reefs and food stands. But as you read on, the story asks you to let go of your attachments to chronology, flitting among three time periods: a post-storm island that is livable only for the ultrarich; an early-2000s milieu of beach-town artists; and a colonial-era past centered on a band of buccaneers. The book was originally written in Dominican Spanish and sprinkled with Yoruba and French, and the English translation retains a fiery love for the dynamic Earth. In one of the timelines, “an enormous school of surgeonfish” shoots out of a coral reef like “an electric-blue stream.” In another, the same sea is described as “a dark and putrid stew.” Holding voltaic awe in one hand and profound grief in the other, Indiana helps us see how the years behind us have led to our present climate crisis, and ignites a desire to fight for all we can still save. — V.T.Dive Into Someone Else’s MindAmong the Thugsby Bill BufordEvery time I come across footage of January 6, I think of this book, the greatest study of mob violence ever written. Since its publication in 1990, English police have largely eliminated what was once euphemistically called “hooliganism” from the soccer stadium, but Buford’s first-person account of embedding with the Inter-City Jibbers, a group of pugilistic Manchester United fans, remains as readable and relevant as ever. He unforgettably recounts the experience of being pummeled by Italian police in Sardinia—and he describes the human capacity for brutality with terrible candor and compelling empathy. The violence he experiences is addictive, adrenaline-induced euphoria, as is his technicolor, emotionally vibrant account of it. — F.F.Broughtupsyby Christina CookeBy the time that 20-year-old Akúa travels back to Jamaica to see her estranged sister, she’s spent half her life in the United States and Canada. Before Akúa even arrives at her sister’s house, she begins to realize how difficult the transition to her birthplace will be. In the cramped taxi ride from the Kingston airport, other passengers joke with one another in patois, “their words flying hot and quick.” Akúa’s inability to join their banter leaves her feeling like she’s “listening through water,” one of many such indignities detailed by her evocative, searching narration. But language isn’t the only thing that weighs heavily on her relationship with the island; she also has to confront the grief and familial resentment that have unmoored her in the years since her mother’s death. Cooke’s vibrant debut novel is a queer coming-of-age story and a chronicle of diasporic rediscovery: Akúa makes new memories with her sister—and with rebellious strangers whose lives challenge the religious conservatism around them all. Along the way, Akúa’s loneliness starts to lift, and the island’s misfits help make Jamaica feel like home again. — Hannah GiorgisMina’s Matchboxby Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen B. SnyderIn 1972, a young Japanese girl named Tomoko is sent by her mother to live with her aunt’s family in the seaside town of Ashiya. Things are a bit odd in their house: Her wealthy, half-German uncle disappears for long stretches; her sickly cousin, Mina, spends much of her time hidden away indoors, but rides a pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko to school; her aunt searches for typos in books and pamphlets, obsessively identifying these “jewels glittering in a sea of sand.” Most enchanting are Mina’s many matchboxes, hidden underneath her bed, each of them featuring an intricate, beautiful picture. Mina collects them like talismans and writes devastating stories about the characters that appear on their illustrated labels. Everything, from the eerie events that happen at home to the bigger, global events such as the terror attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics, is filtered through a child’s perspective—curious but lacking adult judgment. Tomoko’s narration is subtle, almost detached, but the reader is immersed in her ardent love for her fragile cousin, and comes to appreciate how history seeps into every life, even the most sheltered ones. — M.C.This Is Salvagedby Vauhini VaraThe physical experience of being a human is pretty weird, with our little flappy arms and occasional runny noses. To read Vara’s short stories is to briefly inhabit a mind attuned to the fumbling and freedom of having a body. One character draws our attention to “a crust clinging in the tiny bulbed corner” of an eye. Another pronounces that we don’t “talk enough about labial sweat.” Even flowers are not immune to the indecency of physicality: “Blooming seemed too formal for what the flowers were doing on their stems. They were doing something obscene: spurting; spilling.” Vara injects that same irreverence into all of her characters’ situations: Two girls work as phone-sex operators after the death of one of their siblings. One woman transforms into a buffalo. “I felt wet, porous, as if the world were washing in and out of me, a nudity of the soul,” says another character. These stories, similarly, reveal the leaky boundaries between our bodies and the universe, and bare what’s vulnerable, and beautiful, underneath. — V.T.Indulge in a Breezy Beach ReadGlossyby Marisa MeltzerThere was a brief moment in 2017 when The Atlantic’s London bureau shared a WeWork floor with the U.K. marketing team for Glossier, and this was when I first became fascinated with the cult beauty brand, its playful tubes of color, and its virtuoso Instagram presence. Meltzer’s 2023 book, Glossy, is a rich, gossipy history of the company’s rise. But it’s also a fairly succinct examination of womanhood in the 2010s: the cursed girlboss ethos, the growth of social media, the aesthetic nature of aspiration in a moment when feminism was a trend more than a movement. Meltzer thoroughly examines how Glossier’s founder, Emily Weiss, ascended seamlessly from her supporting role on The Hills to blogging to founding a billion-dollar brand; the book delivers thrilling details and structural analysis along the way. (Beauty is a business with extremely high profit margins, which explains a lot about its ubiquity in our culture when you think about it.) Mostly, the book left me marveling at how selling a business in this environment was as much about selling yourself as any particular product. — Sophie GilbertThe Coinby Yasmin Zaher“Woman unravels in New York City” is hardly an innovative storyline for a novel. Yet The Coin, the Palestinian journalist Zaher’s debut—which is, yes, about a woman unraveling in New York City—feels arrestingly new. Its unnamed protagonist, a Palestinian multimillionaire who teaches at a middle school for gifted, underprivileged boys, is a neat freak, a misanthrope, a dirty-minded isolate who dislikes the United States profoundly but lives there because “I wanted a certain life for myself … Wearing heels was important to me.” Her narration is spiky and honest, her choices gleefully, consciously bad. The pleasure she takes in making those decisions and then recounting them is what makes The Coin both unusual and compelling. Our protagonist denies herself nothing she wants, and she denies her audience no detail. The combination renders the book tough to put down. — Lily MeyerThe English Understand Woolby Helen DeWittMy copy of The English Understand Wool came with a little silver sticker on the front proclaiming it actually funny. Perspicacious sticker: This book is funny in the sense that it will make you laugh—for real, out loud, more than once—but also in the sense that it’s a little off-kilter and unlike anything else. Its narrator is Marguerite, a 17-year-old who has been taught by her elegant, commanding maman to play piano and bridge, spot fine tailoring from a distance, and live a life unmarred by mauvais ton: “bad taste.” On a trip to London from their home in Marrakech, Marguerite learns something that elevates the novella from a charming comedy of manners to a truly divine combination of psychological thriller, caper, tender coming-of-age story, and barbed publishing-industry satire. It also does all of this in just over 60 pages, making this a book you can actually finish over a single drink from your beach cooler—though once you do, you may well return to the beginning to try to figure out how DeWitt pulled it off. — E.C.The Birthday Partyby Laurent MauvignierDespite its title, The Birthday Party isn’t … fun, per se. It’s violent and exceedingly dark; when it was longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, the judges said, “It is a very scary book.” And it’s not a quick read—following a couple, their young daughter, and that family’s lone neighbor as they’re visited by three menacing men, the plot is unspooled detail by minute detail over the course of roughly 500 pages. Single sentences stretch on so long that by the end of one, you might have forgotten its beginning. But the novel, in its own way, is breezy: Mauvignier drifts gently as a leaf in the wind among characters’ perspectives, swirling acrobatically through their interior worlds and sketching their psyches finely before he plunges them into terror. The first explicitly frightening event happens about 100 pages in; by that point, I’d come to care about these people a great deal, and my jaw hurt from anxious clenching, knowing something bad was on the way. The action is made more suspenseful because it explodes in slow motion—gripping enough to make you forget about the sand in your teeth and the seagull circling your sandwich. That’s my kind of beach read. — F.H.theatlantic.com
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The Cicadas Are Here 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.For the first time in 221 years, two different groups of cicadas are emerging simultaneously and screaming from the treetops. More after these three stories from The Atlantic: This is the next smartphone evolution. Russell Berman: Attack a Democrat charged with corruption? Republicans wouldn’t dare. The fad diet to end all fad diets Spring AwakeningThe first thing to know about cicadas is that, not unlike flowers, the insects come in annual and periodical varieties. Among the annual cicadas are the dog-day cicada, that emerald-green bug you might associate with steamy summer evenings on the porch—the type you can always hear but almost never see. Periodical cicadas, on the other hand, are the bugs of legend. They make a synchronized mass appearance either every 13 or every 17 years in various parts of the country. And they are so plentiful and so loud when they come that they cannot be ignored.Across the country, billions of these periodical cicadas, categorized by region and year as “broods,” are crawling up out of the ground to see the light of day. The first to begin emerging this spring were the members of the Great Southern Brood—the largest of all periodical-cicada groups—which came out in many states across the southeastern United States. Another big group, the Northern Illinois Brood, is now tunneling up not only in Illinois but also in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Although the two broods won’t overlap much geographically, such a simultaneous emergence is rare: The previous double brood occurred during Thomas Jefferson’s first term as president.The cicadas we’re starting to see waited years for this moment. Now they’re here, ready to do what they do best: sing a little, mate, and die. But for humans, their extraordinary showing can provoke deep thoughts about the cycle of life and, well, the meaning of it all. At least, it does for Matt Kasson, an associate professor at West Virginia University who is studying a fungus that infects cicadas.“So often, there’s these amazing things happening kind of hidden in plain sight, and we take it for granted,” he told me. “When you see the cicadas emerge, you not only are faced with them, but you have to think about all the time that they spent underground and what was happening in your own life. They give you a new perspective.”The lifestyle of a cicada is a wonder. After a clutch of cicada eggs hatch, inside a small slit in a tree branch, the babies will bravely drop to the ground and delve deep into the earth. A cicada will spend most of its life underground, as a secretive burrow-dweller, sucking sap from maple and oak trees and generally minding its own business. The little nymph knows when to come aboveground only because, according to scientific speculation, she can track the changing sap cycles of a tree.“A maple tree in the fall loses its leaves and goes dormant, and that changes the sap flow in a tree,” Kasson said. The cicada nymphs clock this. “So they keep a kind of chalkboard in their head where they are able to tally how many years they’ve been down there.” Occasionally, a cicada will make a mistake in that mental arithmetic (relatable!), coming up four years too early or too late. Unfortunately, it’s a fatal error. “They don’t have anybody to mate with,” Kasson said, “so it’s kind of a dead end for them.”The emergence we’re seeing now goes like this: Billions of nymphs climb out of their holes, attach themselves to a tree or some other structure, and undergo an incomplete metamorphosis process that transforms them into flying adults. The process involves shedding their exuvia, the name of those ghostly brown shells you’ll find stuck to tree bark every spring. Over the next few weeks, adult males will “sing” to attract females, in a sometimes deafening cacophony. After mating, females will lay their eggs in tree branches and then die, and the whole process will start over.This spring is a very good time to be a bird—or basically any other predator in these cicada hot spots. It’ll be a feeding frenzy out there, which means that the bird population will probably spike, thanks to the increased food source. And animals aren’t the only ones that will benefit. “When all these cicadas die, they are turned back into soil as a huge influx of nitrogen, so they act as a fertilizer for the plants as well,” Kasson said.Although this year’s double broods mostly aren’t expected to appear in the same place, residents of one particular state should gird themselves for a Big Bug Explosion. Researchers predict that, somewhere in central Illinois, cicadas from both the Great Southern Brood and the Northern Illinois Brood will both be coming up together. It’ll be loud in Springfield this summer.Even if you’re not lucky enough to experience a Midwestern cicada-geddon, chances are you live somewhere near one of the emerging broods. If you can’t hear them now, you should be able to soon. Go out and listen. Appreciate that new perspective.Related: Cicadas could make outdoor dining a nightmare. (From 2021) Unfortunately, some cicadas taste like nature’s Gushers. (From 2021) Today’s News Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, finished his first day of testimony in Trump’s New York criminal trial. Cohen alleged that Trump was concerned about his presidential-election prospects in 2016 and ordered Cohen to pay hush money to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels. Jury selection began in Senator Bob Menendez’s federal criminal trial. The former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is charged with accepting bribes from businessmen in exchange for political favors aiding the governments of Egypt and Qatar. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced yesterday that he is replacing his minister of defense with Andrei R. Belousov, an economist and one of Putin’s close advisers. Dispatches The Trump Trials: The hush-money criminal case against Donald Trump cuts to the core of who he is, George T. Conway III writes. The Wonder Reader: One thing you quickly learn when speaking with a child: They’re natural philosophers, Isabel Fattal writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Julian Ward / Gallery Stock Why Do So Many Parents Think Kids Need Their Own Bedroom?By Annie Midori Atherton Whenever I contemplate whether to have a second child, I inevitably start worrying about housing. For me and my husband to grow our family and stay in our two-bedroom rental in Seattle, our kids would have to share a room. He did it growing up, and it would be more affordable than getting a bigger place. But I struggle to wrap my head around the idea. I grew up in a three-bedroom home near where we live now; I had my own room, as did most of my friends. Even though housing prices have skyrocketed, I still want to give my children this privilege. When I ask my husband what it was like to share a room as a kid, he shrugs. He didn’t consider it that big a deal. But many parents I’ve talked with who live in metro areas with high costs of living feel the same as I do. Some are stretching their budgets to afford a house with more bedrooms; others are reluctant to grow their families without having more space. As I mull this over, I wonder: Why do so many of us prioritize giving kids their own room? Read the full article.More From The Atlantic America’s worst time zone Our once-abundant Earth Should the hawthorn be saved? A family story about colonialism and its aftereffects Culture Break Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. Listen. Are the relationships we establish through our screens authentic? In the first episode of How to Know What’s Real, Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez explore the surprising ways a connection can be both real and imaginary—at the same time.Have a laugh. Conan O’Brien’s true gift lies in his combination of an entertainer’s desperate desire to be liked and an antagonistic streak, Vikram Murthi writes.Play our daily crossword.P.S.So many readers wrote in with friendship wisdom after I asked for tips on making—and keeping—friends as an adult. I wanted to share two of my favorite pieces of advice here.From Maxwell, a reminder that less is more: “I don’t consider anyone a true friend unless we can go years without contact and at any time pick up right back where we left off,” he wrote. “By that guideline, I’ve been lucky to keep one or two timeless friends with beautiful souls from each school and workplace, and that has honestly been plenty.”From Bonnie, a practical tip: “I send real notes and cards with postage stamps to all my friends throughout the year. Trader Joe’s 99 cents brings a flood of happiness,” she said. “I keep a log of everyone’s birthday. A week before, there is a note on my calendar to mail—NOT EMAIL OR TEXT—a real birthday card with a note.”Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.theatlantic.com
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OpenAI Just Killed Siri Earlier today, OpenAI announced its newest product: GPT-4o, a faster, cheaper, more powerful version of its most advanced large language model, and one that the company has deliberately positioned as the next step in “natural human-computer interaction.” Running on an iPhone in what was purportedly a live demo, the program appeared able to tell a bedtime story with dramatic intonation, understand what it was “seeing” through the device’s camera, and interpret a conversation between Italian and English speakers. The model—which was powering an updated version of the ChatGPT app—even exhibited something like emotion: Shown the sentence I ♥️ ChatGPT handwritten on a page, it responded, “That’s so sweet of you!”Although such features are not exactly new to generative AI, seeing them bundled into a single app on an iPhone was striking. Watching the presentation, I felt that I was witnessing the murder of Siri, along with that entire generation of smartphone voice assistants, at the hands of a company most people had not heard of just two years ago.Apple markets its maligned iPhone voice assistant as a way to “do it all even when your hands are full.” But Siri functions, at its best, like a directory for the rest of your phone: It doesn’t respond to questions so much as offer to search the web for answers; it doesn’t translate so much as offer to open the Translate app. And much of the time, Siri can’t even pick up what you’re saying properly, let alone watch someone solve a math problem through the phone camera and provide real-time assistance, as ChatGPT did earlier today.Just as chatbots have promised to condense the internet into a single program, generative AI now promises to condense all of a smartphone’s functions into a single app, and to add a whole host of new ones: Text friends, draft emails, learn what the name of that beautiful flower is, call an Uber and talk to the driver in their native language, without touching a screen. Whether that future comes to pass is far from certain. Demos happen in controlled environments and are not immediately verifiable. OpenAI’s was certainly not without its stumbles, including choppy audio and small miscues. We don’t know yet to what extent familiar generative-AI problems, such as the confident presentation of false information and difficulty in understanding accented speech, may emerge once the app is rolled out to the public over the coming weeks. But at the very least, to call Siri or Google Assistant “assistants” is, by comparison, insulting.The major smartphone makers seem to recognize this. Apple, notoriously late to the AI rush, is reportedly deep in talks with OpenAI to incorporate ChatGPT features into an upcoming iPhone software update. The company has also reportedly held talks with Google to consider licensing Gemini, the search giant’s flagship AI product, to the iPhone. Samsung has already brought Gemini to its newest devices, and Google tailored its latest smartphone, the Pixel 8 Pro, specifically to run Gemini. Chinese smartphone makers, meanwhile, are racing their American counterparts to put generative AI on their devices.Today’s demo was a likely death blow not only to Siri but also to a wave of AI start-ups promising a less phone-centric vision of the future. A company named Humane produces an AI pin that is worn on a user’s clothing and responds to spoken questions; it has been pummeled by reviewers for offering an inconsistent and glitchy experience. Rabbit’s R1 is a small handheld box that my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce likened to a broken toy.[Read: I witnessed the future of AI, and it’s a broken toy]These gadgets, and others that may be on the horizon, face inevitable hurdles: compressing a decent camera, a good microphone, and a powerful microprocessor into a tiny box, making sure that box is light and stylish, and persuading people to carry yet another device on their body. Apple and Android devices, by comparison, are efficient and beautiful pieces of hardware already ubiquitous in contemporary life. I can’t think of anybody who, forced to choose between their iPhone and a new AI pin, wouldn’t jettison the pin—especially when smartphones are already perfectly positioned to run generative-AI programs.Each year, Apple, Samsung, Google, and others roll out a handful of new phones offering better cameras and more powerful computer chips in thinner bodies. This cycle isn’t ending anytime soon—even if it’s gotten boring—but now the most exciting upgrades clearly aren’t happening in physical space. What really matters is software.The iPhone was revolutionary not just because it combined a screen, a microphone, and a camera. Allowing people to take photos, listen to music, browse the web, text family members, play games—and now edit videos, write essays, make digital art, translate signs in foreign languages, and more—was the result of a software package that puts its screen, microphone, and camera to the best use. And the American tech industry is in the midst of a centi-billion-dollar bet that generative AI will soon be the only software worth having.theatlantic.com