Garth Brooks launches 'high-risk' strategy against accuser in sex assault claim: expert

There is more than one reason for the Lakers preseason road show, but that doesn't make it a great way to prepare.

United Airlines is adding new overseas destinations in what the carrier calls its largest international expansion.

L.A. is facing another budget crisis and city leaders need to be transparent about the costs and tradeoffs of their promises to public employee unions.

Winner of two straight same-game parlays, Michael Arinze's back with another SGP special for Thursday night.

Ben Simmons doesn’t know how long he’ll be playing in Brooklyn. But for as long as he’s with these young Nets, he says he wants to lead them.

You don’t need to blow your budget to achieve a luxe aesthetic. You just need these DIY tips.

TIKTOK/KRICKETFELTMillions of people have been watching a mom who defied evacuation orders to show off a “Milton-proof” concrete mansion her husband built to withstand the hurricane.Posting under the name Kricketfelt on TikTok, the Florida mom kept followers updated through the night until her power was knocked out.The mother-of-three hunkered down in Tampa with her husband and their Rottweiler named Zeus and filmed as the hurricane hit.Read more at The Daily Beast.

A top NYPD commissioner and City Hall liaison quietly pocketed tens of thousands of dollars in overtime thanks to a payroll loophole last year — while all other top-ranking officials were barred from collecting any extra cash, The Post has learned.

A construction crane toppled into an office housing the news outlet, the Tampa Bay Times, leaving a massive hole in the side of the building during violent winds from Hurricane Milton.

Hurricane Milton ripped the roof off Tropicana Field, which is the Tampa Bay Rays ballpark in St. Petersburg. The stadium had been transformed into a camp for thousands of first responders when the roof was destroyed.

Somehow, this Mets run keeps reaching new ethers of crazy, of magical, of unexpected.

Animation by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThe best thing about Kamala Harris sitting down for the traditional grilling by a 60 Minutes correspondent is that she showed up and Donald Trump didn’t.He ducked.In an election where contrast is everything, she took CBS’ Bill Whitaker’s questions while CBS’ Scott Pelley used the time that had been allotted for Trump to describe how the former president canceled at the last minute, demanding an apology for what another correspondent said to him four years ago that she never said. He walked off the set that time.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Hurricane Milton slammed into Florida’s west coast Wednesday night as an extremely dangerous Category 3 storm. More than 3 million people were left without power, and many areas were left flooded.

"Obviously there's emergency situations, people are going to do what they got to do, but if you can try, stay out."

CNN’s Anderson Cooper was hit in the face by flying debris while reporting live on Hurricane Milton. The incident happened about thirty minutes after the storm made landfall on Florida’s west-central coast.

NFL players have hosted "Saturday Night Live" throughout its history, and while the experiences were cherished, transitioning from athlete to actor wasn't easy.

The Dodgers toss a shutout while using a bullpen game as they silence the San Diego crowd early and rout the Padres.

At first, I thought I was allergic to my shampoo. I’d switched to a new brand recently, and while my hair looked amazing, I’d developed an itchy ring around the perimeter of my skull, like someone had put a poison crown on me. When the itch became so distracting I couldn’t work, I reluctantly switched back to my old, frizz-promoting hair care regimen.  Then my older kid started scratching. It turned out that about half his class had head lice. At our house, closer inspection revealed scuttling insects on both our scalps. We began an odyssey of combing and shampooing that lasted weeks, caused at least one meltdown per person, and left our bathroom full of sinister metal nit combs and half-empty bottles of goo.  Our experience is a rite of passage for young children and their families. In addition to being disturbing on a psychological level (I, for one, do not like the phrase “blood meal”), lice can cause intense itching; Logan, 5, another recent sufferer, described his recent case to me as “super, amazing, big, wild itchy.” Lice are often a source of shame and anxiety for families. The insects have “been historically associated with things like poor personal hygiene or houselessness or a certain socioeconomic status,” said Dawn Nolt, a pediatric infectious disease doctor and the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’s 2022 recommendations on lice.  In fact, however, there’s some evidence that they prefer clean hair, Kate King, a school nurse in Ohio and the president of the National Association of School Nurses (NASN), told me. And the insects infest people of all walks of life, all around the world, though kids and caregivers are the most susceptible. Lice are an annoyance, not a danger, Nolt said — they do not spread disease. But some school districts, including New York City, where I live, bar kids from the classroom if they’re found to have lice. For my kid, that meant a day spent getting combed in front of the TV, instead of attending kindergarten. Experts say no-lice policies — and in-school lice checks in which a nurse or other adult combs an entire class for bugs — don’t actually stop the spread of lice, and are especially problematic as school districts battle chronic absenteeism in the wake of Covid-19. “Since the pandemic, we really appreciate the benefits of in-person schooling,” Nolt told me. “Head lice is not a reason for a child to miss school.” The CDC has actually recommended against sending kids home for lice for more than 10 years. But a website redesign led to a resurgence of interest in the policy at the beginning of the 2024–25 school year, alongside what some say is an uptick in lice cases after a pandemic lull.  Instead of panicking, experts say, families and schools alike should approach lice as what they are: annoying bugs that want to eat us, but that can be defeated with the right tools, and the right attitude.  As Logan told me, “Don’t give up.” The truth about head lice Head lice are about the size of a sesame seed and can live on a person’s head for about a month, feeding on blood. During that time, they lay eggs called nits, which they stick to the hair shaft very close to the scalp with an adhesive material. Those eggs incubate for about 10 days, Nolt said, before hatching and maturing into new lice. The itching that is the hallmark of a lice infestation is actually caused by the insect’s saliva, which can cause a mild allergic reaction in humans. This reaction takes four to six weeks to develop, Nolt said, so once you start scratching, you’ve already had lice for a while.  Lice don’t have wings, and they can’t jump, but they spread by crawling from one person’s head to another, usually through head-to-head contact (something that happens a lot among little kids, who like to hug and roughhouse and generally get up in one another’s faces). They can spread through shared hats or clothing, but that’s much less common, Nolt said, because lice simply can’t survive for very long away from their source of warmth and food. For some kids, the worst part of having lice is getting rid of them. Typically, an adult washes a child’s hair, then uses a special lice comb (included with many over-the-counter lice shampoos) to find all the nits and remove them. Depending on the length of a kid’s hair, the process can take hours. “The combing really hurt,” Thomas, 7, told me. His parents let him play video games as a distraction, but “it still really hurt,” he said.  Some kids don’t mind the combing — Byron, Logan’s 2-and-a-half-year-old brother, called it “tingly.” Adding some mythos may help: Logan and Byron informed me that their family had used “nit destroyer warrior” combs “made by lasers.” (A fact-check reveals that some nit combs are purportedly made using “laser technology.”) Complicating matters further is the fact that lice appear to have evolved some resistance to pyrethrin and permethrin, the active ingredients in many over-the-counter lice shampoos. Some research shows that dimethicone, a gooey polymer that basically suffocates lice, remains effective. This is what finally worked in my house, after several rounds of permethrin-based products failed. It is also extremely oily and takes forever to wash out. All of this is stressful enough without adding school disruption to the mix. Once children have symptoms, they’ve usually already had lice for weeks, Nolt said. Sending them home for a day or two does little to limit spread, but deprives the child of key learning time. Along with the CDC, the NASN and the American Academy of Pediatrics also recommend against sending kids home for lice. In-school lice checks — a mainstay of my millennial childhood that’s still a reality in New York and elsewhere — are also ineffective, experts say. “It doesn’t produce any real results,” said King, the NASN president. “It’s also very demeaning and shaming for students.” When a child has lice at her school, King contacts the family with information about treatment, and provides free lice shampoo upon request. “Our main focus is to be a helper, not a punisher.” Ultimately, experts say schools and families should think of lice not as something shameful or frightening, but as a part of childhood — annoying, sure, but normal and not always avoidable. “Head lice are like the common cold,” said King. “Sometimes, it just happens.” What I’m reading Nearsightedness is on the rise among kids around the world, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, possibly as a result of the rise in “near work,” such as reading and writing (the effect of smartphones and other screens is still unclear). The report’s authors recommend two hours of outdoor time per day to counteract the trend, at least one of which should take place during school. Students with disabilities lack access to college readiness programs, another report finds, even though they’re entitled to such support under federal law.  In the wake of Hurricane Helene, tens of thousands of kids are home from school, with no idea when they can return to the classroom. Even remote learning isn’t possible in some areas of North Carolina because of disruptions to internet and electric service. “This isn’t Covid remote learning. This is nothing,” a professor who has studied the impact of Hurricane Katrina told the New York Times. At my house, we are reading Bill Bryson’s A Really Short History of Nearly Everything. Warning: This has required me to spend a lot of time trying to explain the Big Bang and the shape of the universe, topics that are pretty cognitively taxing at bedtime. Get in touch For Halloween, I’m hoping to write about scary stories. As a fan of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Goosebumps, I’m curious what kids are reading (or watching) to freak themselves out nowadays. For adults, I also want to hear about your favorite scary tales from childhood — or the ones that gave you nightmares for weeks. If you have observations about spooky kid content past or present, let me know at anna.north@vox.com. Your eerie recommendations (or warnings) could make it into a newsletter soon!

Sabrina Ionescu believes she is in a better headspace this year entering the Liberty’s return trip to the WNBA Finals against the Minnesota Lynx.

Sean "Diddy" Combs is set to appear in a Manhattan courtroom Thursday in his sex trafficking and racketeering case — as the jailed hip-hop mogul's lawyers push for a trial as soon as April.

Multiple fatalities have been reported after more than a dozen powerful tornadoes associated with Hurricane Milton ripped through parts of Florida Wednesday. Sheriff Keith Pearson, who posted video in front of a destroyed steel storage shed, said “multiple fatalities” were reported at the Spanish Lakes Country Club in Fort Pierce, according to reports.

"We're not evacuating. And please, don't ask me to ... All these animals are our children."

The Patriots owner’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism is launching an ad with the sports leagues that will feature Billie Jean King, Shaq and more.

Videos posted on social media showed the roof ripped to shreds with debris all over the field after Hurricane Milton slammed the area.

A little over 12 years ago, Melania Trump logged on to Twitter, uploaded a picture of a cheery-looking beluga whale, and added the caption, “What is she thinking?” The tweet was classic Melania, which is to say that it was cryptic, minimalist, and only lightly in focus. Unlike her husband, Melania Trump undershares on social media—if she isn’t there to hawk baffling NFT collectibles or patriotic Christmas ornaments, she doesn’t typically have much to say. But over the past few weeks, as she’s soft-launched her new memoir, Melania has been posting a series of short videos, each one its own inscrutable puzzle. Mistily obscured through what seems to be a Vaseline-smeared camera lens, she gives brief statements on subjects including cancel culture, her immediate attraction to “Donald,” and her apparent belief in a woman’s right to choose. Her head is stiffly tilted, her gaze steadfast. As she talks, a string section in the background pulses with momentum, as though these clips are actually trailers for the climactic final season of a show called America!What is she thinking? First ladies, by the cursed nature of the role, are supposed to humanize and soften the jagged, ugly edge of power. The job is to be maternal, quietly decorative, fascinating but not frivolous, busy but not bold. In some ways, Melania Trump—elegant, enigmatic, and apparently unambitious—arrived in Washington better suited to the office than any other presidential spouse in recent memory. In reality, she ended up feeling like a void—a literal absence from the White House for the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency—that left so much room for projection. When she seemed to glower at her husband’s back on Inauguration Day, some decided that she was desperate for an exit, prompting the #FreeMelania hashtag. When she wore a vibrant-pink pussy-bow blouse to a presidential debate mere days after the Access Hollywood tape leaked, the garment was interpreted by some as a statement of solidarity with women, and by others as a defiant middle finger to his critics. Most notoriously, during the months in 2018 when the Trump administration removed more than 5,000 babies and children from their parents at the U.S. border, Melania wore a jacket emblazoned with the words I really don’t care, do u? on the plane to visit some of those children, the discourse over which rivaled the scrutiny of one of the cruelest American policies of the modern era.[Read: On pitying Melania]Would-be Melaniaologists have had mere scraps to work with over the years, which is why the announcement of her memoir in July was a surprise. Like the British Royal Family, the former first lady prefers to never complain, never explain, and instead glide imposingly through crisis, a swan in a swamp. Does she care? Having read the roughly 200 pages of Melania that aren’t given over to photos, I think I can say that she does not. In fact, she appears to have turned not caring into its own superpower, focusing rigidly on who or what pleases her (beauty; her son, Barron; blockchain ventures) and filtering out virtually everything else. The book contains no mention of Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, the Access Hollywood tape, E. Jean Carroll, the felony conviction of her husband for falsifying business records. Trump’s first impeachment gets about one page, compared with about four devoted to Melania’s failed caviar-based skin-care brand from 2013. Her stepchildren merit just one direct mention. If the book contains any insight into Melania, it’s in how meticulously she seems to have curated a reality for herself that’s free from trouble, anxiety, or introspection. She’s untouchable, insulated from care and responsibility by her extremely selective focus and distractingly ornamental prose.So why write a book at all? My guess would be: As someone who seems to so dislike other people profiting from her name that—according to the former CNN journalist Kate Bennett’s book, Free, Melania—souvenirs sold in her hometown are reportedly branded only with M or first lady to deter lawsuits, she wanted her own monetized effort on shelves next to the unauthorized biographies and torrid tell-alls. “As a private person who has often been the subject of public scrutiny and misrepresentation,” she writes in the brief introduction, “I feel a responsibility to set the record straight and to provide the actual account of my experiences.” What follows is—with the exception of her writing on abortion rights—highly predictable, and as airbrushed as a Vogue cover. Her memories of Election Night 2016 are of her husband emerging as “a unifying leader … [who] recognized the need for healing and unity in America.” Her childhood in Slovenia is idyllic, with two loving parents, a private nanny who bakes cakes frosted with “handmade sugar flowers,” and “cherished” family holidays on the Dalmatian coast. The prose is lavish by way of LinkedIn: Melania’s grandfather, a shoemaker and an onion farmer, “wasted no time in pursuing his passion for agriculture”; her mother, a patternmaker in a children’s-clothing factory, “was the artisan behind the scenes … thriving in the world of fashion.”The Trumpian embellishment of Melania’s life prior to her husband’s election can feel deadening to read; if everything is unique and remarkable and thrilling, nothing is. Her time as a model, a fairly uneventful career whose highlight before she met Trump was a single Camel ad, is reinvented as a plucky girl’s triumph, a “testament to my firm determination, courage, and resilience.” In her first meeting with Trump, she’s struck by his “polished business look, witty banter, and obvious determination.” She feels immediately “as if our souls had known each other for a very long time”; pragmatically, she ignores the reality of his messy second divorce, “choosing instead to enjoy his company.” Their early commitment to each other is based on their shared preference for “a healthy life, evident in our abstinence from alcohol and tobacco.” (Big Macs and Coca-Cola would like a word.) When the tabloids label her a “gold digger,” she insists that she’d already “earned my fortune” but decides that “to engage in such matters—to dignify each and every untruth—would be squandering my time and energy.”What is fascinating about the book—if you can bear being beaten over the head with adjectives—is how early on Melania learns that the art of selective attention will set her free. She opts to not concern herself with Trump’s chaotic romantic history, to not trouble herself with what people say about her. “While I may not agree with every decision or choice expressed by Donald’s grown children, nor do I align with all of Donald’s decisions, I acknowledge that differing viewpoints are a natural aspect of human relationships,” she writes. “Rather than imposing my views or critiquing others, I have aimed to be a steady presence—someone they can rely on.” Over time, as the stakes rise, this aversion to conflict starts to feel pathological. When the crisis at the border becomes global news, with shocking reports of hysterical children being snatched from their families, Melania describes being “blindsided” and “completely unaware of the policy.” On January 6, 2021, as protestors storm the Capitol, Melania is busy “taking archival photographs” for a record of White House renovations. She’s perplexed, then, when her press secretary at the time, Stephanie Grisham, asks her by text message if she wants to “denounce the violence.” (As Grisham reminded us at the Democratic National Convention this year, Melania’s reply was just one word: “No.”) When, Melania thinks, “had I ever condoned violence?”The only thing that really seems to aggravate Melania is when her willful ignorance is disrupted in ways she can’t dismiss—which is perhaps why almost all of her enmity here is directed at the media. When it’s revealed that sections of her speech supporting her husband at the 2016 Republican National Convention were near-identical to sections from a speech by Michelle Obama, she’s furious that “my words, which articulated a hopeful vision for the nation, were overshadowed by a barrage of personal attacks.” As her I really don’t care jacket—a dig at the media, she writes—becomes a scandal, she’s enraged at how “the media’s distorted reporting on the jacket overshadowed the importance of the children,” as though the jacket had simply fallen on her shoulders by accident, its message inscribed by invisible fairies.This adamant refusal to engage with anything she doesn’t want to think about does become harder and harder to maintain. When Melania writes of her steadfast, lifelong belief that women should “have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the flashing neon elephant in the room is her own husband, his three Supreme Court appointments, and his successful pitch to evangelicals that he would be America’s most pro-life president. After Melania’s home at Mar-a-Lago is raided during the FBI’s investigation over Trump’s alleged misuse of classified documents, she’s appalled that the FBI goes through her and Barron’s bedrooms, even though, she insists, “I had no confidential documents in my possession, no involvement with the West Wing.” Americans, she emphasizes, “need to understand the dangers posed by a federal government that feels entitled to invade our homes and our lives.” What’s missing is any acknowledgement of the approximately 13,000 documents the government found at Mar-a-Lago, more than 100 of which were classified and some of which related to information about national defense. (It’s much easier to call something a “witch hunt” if you mulishly ignore the cauldron, spellbook, and broomstick in your own basement.)But fact-checking her memoir is, in some ways, beside the point, given how impervious Melania and her husband seem to be to the concept of “truth.” Both understand how crucial attention can be, whether you’re drawing it to yourself or focusing so intently on some things that you can’t be criticized for all the other things you’ve missed. As I read other books about Melania Trump over the past week, I thought it seems likely that she is, in private, a gracious and fun woman who genuinely loves children, finds great pleasure in her own self-presentation, and cares not one single degree about what people think of her. In that sense, she is truly free, liberated from the pains of empathy and anxiety that plague the rest of us. She really doesn’t care, and if we do, that’s our problem.

What is the relationship between creativity and intelligence?  That’s a fundamental, perhaps unanswerable, question. Is it also an obsolete one? The question today seems to be: What is the relationship between creativity and artificial intelligence? We tend to think of artistic creativity as a uniquely human endeavor, but what if it can be much more? Philosophers, artists, and scientists are already debating whether the art and writing generated by Midjourney and ChatGPT are evidence of machines being creative. But should the focus be on the output — the art that’s generated? Or the input — the inspiration? And what about the other, smaller ways in which we use our creativity, like through a prank on a friend or in a note to a loved one? Does the value of those communications change if AI creates them?   Meghan O’Gieblyn is an essayist and the author of God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. She’s been thinking about our relationship with technology for a long time. Her book, originally published in 2022, made a convincing case that we’re going to have to reimagine what it means to be human in the age of artificial intelligence. I invited O’Gieblyn on The Gray Area to explore how AI might force us to also reconsider the meaning — and importance — of creativity. As always, you can hear the full conversation on The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing How did you start studying and writing and thinking about the relationship between humans and computers? Meghan O’Gieblyn I came to my interest in technology in a very idiosyncratic way. I grew up in a very religious family. There was a lot of fear about technology when I was growing up during the Y2K crisis, for example, and just all of this focus on the end times prophecies, which were often filtered through the lens of emerging technologies and fears about emerging technologies. I studied theology for two years at Moody Bible Institute, a very conservative, old Christian institution in Chicago, and ended up having a faith crisis while I was there. I left that belief system behind and just happened to read Ray Kurzweil and some other transhumanists in the years after that deconversion experience. I became kind of obsessed with the relationship between spiritual traditions and the larger philosophy of human nature that I had grown up with, this idea that humans are made in the image of God, that we’ve been given these divine capacities for reason and creativity.  Sean Illing Since you brought it up, I should ask for a thumbnail definition of transhumanism. Meghan O’Gieblyn Transhumanism is a movement that emerged primarily in Silicon Valley in the ’80s and ’90s. Followers believed that humans could use technology to evolve into a higher form of intelligence. At the time, the conversations about those possibilities were very speculative. But I think the things that were being discussed at that time are very much being implemented now into technologies that we’re using every day. Sean Illing You once asked a computer scientist what he thought creativity meant and he told you, “Well that’s easy, it’s just randomness.” What do you make of that view of creativity?  Meghan O’Gieblyn It’s no coincidence that a computer scientist came up with this definition. If you’re thinking about creativity, or what we call creativity, in large language models (LLMs), you can play around with the temperature gauges. You can basically turn up the temperature and turn up the amount of randomness in the output that you get. So if you ask ChatGPT to give you a list of animals at a low temperature, it’ll say something very basic like a dog, a cat, a horse. And if you turn up the temperature, it’ll give you more unusual responses, more statistically unlikely responses like an ant eater. Or if you turn it way up, it’ll make up an animal like a whistledy-woo or some Seussian creature that doesn’t exist. So there is some element of randomness. I’m inclined to think that creativity is not just randomness because we also appreciate order and meaning.  The things that I appreciate in art have a lot to do with vision, with point of view, with the sense that you’re seeing something that’s been filtered through an autobiography, through a life story. And I think it’s really difficult to talk about how that’s happening in AI models.  Sean Illing We have these large language models, things like ChatGPT and Midjourney, and they produce language, but they do it without anything that I’d call consciousness. Consciousness is something that’s notoriously hard to define, but let’s just call it the sensation of being an agent in the world. LLMs don’t have that, but is there any way you could call what they’re doing creative? Meghan O’Gieblyn The difficult thing is that creativity is a concept that is, like all human concepts, intrinsically anthropocentric. We created the term “creativity” to describe what we do as humans. We have this bad habit of changing the definition of words to suit our opinion of ourselves, especially when machines turn out to be able to do tasks that we previously thought were limited to us. Inspiration has this almost metaphysical or divine undertone to it. And now that we see a lot of that work done by automated processes, it becomes more difficult to say what creativity really is. I think there’s already an effort, and I sense it myself too, to cordon off this more special island of human exceptionalism and say, “No, what I’m doing is actually different.” Sean Illing Do you think a machine or an AI could ever really communicate in any meaningful way? Meghan O’Gieblyn There’s things that you can say in an essay or a book that you can’t say just in normal social conversations, just because of the form. I love seeing the way that other people see the world. When people ask, “Do you think an AI could create the next best American novel, the great American novel?” We’re talking a lot in those hypotheticals about technical skill. And to me, I think even if it was — on the sentence level or even on the level of concepts and ideas — something that we would consider, virtuoso, just the fact that it came from a machine changes the way that we experience it. When I’m reading something online and I start to suspect that it was generated by AI, it changes the way I’m reading. I think that there’s always that larger context of how we experience things, and intent and consciousness is a big part of it. Sean Illing There’s something about the intentionality behind artistic creations that really matters to us. It’s not like when I consume a piece of art, I’m asking myself, how long did it take to make this? But I know subconsciously there was a lot of thought and energy put into it, that there was a creator with experiences and feelings that I can relate to who’s communicating something in a way they couldn’t if they weren’t a fellow human being. That matters, right? Meghan O’Gieblyn I think that the effort that we have to put into making things is part of what gives it meaning, both for the audience and the person who’s producing it. The actual sacrifices and the difficulty of making something is what makes it feel really satisfying when you finally get it right. And it’s also true for the person experiencing it.  I think about this a lot even with things that we might not consider works of genius. Everyday people have always been creative — like my grandfather, who would occasionally write poetry or make up funny poems for different occasions. He didn’t have a college education, but he was creative and the poems were personalized for the person or for the occasion. And that’s precisely the kind of thing that an LLM couldn’t do very well, right? It could write a simple poem and you could prompt it to do that. But what would that mean to us if it was just produced by a prompt? I think that really does change how you experience something like that. Sean Illing Do you remember that controversy over the Google Gemini commercial? It’s Google’s competitor with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The commercial has a young girl who wants to write a fan letter to her hero, who’s an Olympic gold medalist or something like that. Her dad says something like “I’m okay with words, but this letter has to be perfect.” And so he’s just going to let the AI write it for them.   It is horrifying to me because it shows that AI isn’t just coming for our art and entertainment, it’s not just going to be writing sitcoms or doing podcasts, it’s going to supplant sincere authentic human-to-human communication. It’s going to automate our emotional lives. And I don’t know what to call that potential world other than a machine world populated by machine-like people and maybe eventually just machine people. And that’s a world I desperately, desperately want to avoid. Meghan O’Gieblyn For a long time I wrote an advice column for Wired magazine where people could write in with questions about technology in their everyday life. And one of the questions I got very shortly after ChatGPT was released was from somebody who is going to be the best man in their friend’s wedding. And he said, “Can I use ChatGPT, ethically, to do a best man’s speech for me?” There’s cases of people doing this. People use it to write their wedding vows. And my first instinct was like, well, you’re robbing yourself of the ability to actually try to put into words what you are feeling for your friend and what that relationship means to you. And it’s not as though those feelings just exist in you already.  I think anyone who’s written something very personal like this realizes that you actually start to feel the emotions as you’re putting it into language and trying to articulate it. I think about the same thing with this hypothetical fan letter that the girl is writing in the commercial, right? It’s like you’re stealing from your child the opportunity to actually try to access her emotions through language. Sean Illing Do you think that AI will make radically new kinds of art possible? Meghan O’Gieblyn Any of us who are daring to speak about this topic right now really are putting ourselves out there and risking looking stupid in two years or five years down the road. But it is true that AI is often called an alien form of intelligence and the fact is that it reasons very differently than we do. It doesn’t intuitively understand what’s relevant in a dataset the way that we do because we’ve evolved together to value the same things as humans. Sean Illing This is a big question, but I’m comfortable asking you because of your theological background. Do you think we have any real sense of the spiritual impact of AI? Meghan O’Gieblyn It’s a paradox in some way, right? Technologies are very anti-spiritual in the sense that they usually represent a very reductive and materialist understanding of human nature. But with every new technological development, there’s also been this tendency to spiritualize it or think of it in superstitious ways.  I think about the emergence of photography during the Civil War and how people believed that you could see dead people in the background. Or the idea that radio could transmit voices from the spiritual world. It’s not as though technology is going to rob us of a spiritual life. I think that technological progress competes with the type of transcendence that spiritual and religious traditions talk about, in the sense that it is a way to push beyond our current existence and get in touch with something that’s bigger than the human. I think a very deep human instinct is to try to get in touch with something that’s bigger than us. And I think that there’s a trace of that in the effort to build AGI. This idea that we’re going to create something that is going to be able to see the world from a higher perspective, right? And that’s going to be able to give our lives meaning in a new way.  If you look at most spiritual traditions and wisdom literature from around the world, it usually involves this paradox where if you want to transcend yourself, you also have to acknowledge your limitations. You have to acknowledge that the ego is an illusion, you have to admit that you’re a sinner, you have to humble yourself in order to access that higher reality. And I think technology is a sort of transcendence without the work and the suffering that that entails for us in a more spiritual sense. Sean Illing What I’m always thinking about in these sorts of conversations is this long-term question of what we are as human beings, what we’re doing to ourselves, and what we’re evolving into. Nietzsche loved this distinction between being versus becoming. Humanity is not some fixed thing. We’re not a static being. Like everything in nature, we’re in this process of becoming. So what are we becoming?  Meghan O’Gieblyn At some point, I think, a threshold is crossed, right? Where is that? If we’re becoming something, we’ve already been becoming something different with the technologies that we’re using right now. And is there some hard line where we’ll become post-human or another species? I don’t know. My instinct is to think that there’s going to be more pushback against that future as we approach it than it might seem right now in the abstract. I think that it’s difficult to articulate exactly what we value about the human experience until we are confronted with technologies that are threatening it in some way.  Some of the really great writing and the conversations that are happening right now are about trying to actually put into words what we value about being human. And I think these technologies might actually help clarify that conversation in a way that we haven’t been forced to articulate it before. They can help us think about what our values are and how can we create technology that is actually going to serve those values, as opposed to making us the subjects of what these machines happen to be good at doing. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

It is likely, but by no means certain, that in May 1938, the writers John Steinbeck and Sanora Babb met in a café near Arvin, California. Both were in town to chronicle the plight of migrants who were flooding the state to escape the decimation of the Dust Bowl. Both were writing fiction about it—Steinbeck had abandoned two novels on the subject earlier that year, while Babb had received an enthusiastic response from Random House for the opening chapters of her novel in progress, Whose Names Are Unknown. And both were connected to Tom Collins, a staffer at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a federal agency providing aid to the migrants. To Steinbeck, Collins was a friend and a passkey to the migrant experience. To Babb, he was a mentor and supervisor; she had volunteered to document living conditions in the camps.What happened next is in some ways clear as day, in others frustratingly fuzzy. The clear part is a tale of profound literary unfairness: Steinbeck received FSA field notes, compiled largely (but not entirely) from Babb’s observations and interviews, after which he began a punishing 100-day writing sprint to produce The Grapes of Wrath, the foundational American novel about the Great Depression. Babb’s book, delivered later, would be scotched. The Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf alerted Babb that she was late to the finish line in August 1939. “What rotten luck for you that ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ should not only have come out before your book was submitted but should have so swept the country!” Cerf wrote. “Obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax!”Here’s the fuzzy part: Over time, an understandably frustrated Babb would insist that she, not Collins, had personally handed over the reports to Steinbeck—an act that would make his appropriation look more brazen and personal. “Tom asked me to give him my notes,” Babb would write 40 years after that alleged café meeting. “I did. Naïve me.” It doesn’t appear that Steinbeck ever wrote about meeting Babb, or even mentioned her by name, though it’s plausible that two diligent reporters on the same beat would want to compare notes.Fuzzier still is the question of how much of Grapes was written on the back of the FSA notes, how much of that research was Babb’s—and how much it matters. Her observations almost certainly helped Steinbeck shape his rendering of the migrants. Babb’s entries were rich and thorough—having grown up on a failing farm in the Oklahoma panhandle, she was particularly trusted by Collins to connect with the migrants. When Babb shared her jottings, directly or indirectly, she was likely motivated by the urge to get their experience across through whatever medium might help them.So what would you call the ensuing fame of one novel and the preemptive burial of another? Appropriation? Theft? Bad timing? Sexism? Perhaps, in the end, it was simply evidence of a cruel flaw of publishing: Sometimes its decision makers conclude—not always for good reasons—that there isn’t room for many stories about one major event. That a short-term judgment about what the market will bear can choke off a literary legacy and, to some extent, impoverish a culture. Sanora Babb (seated in the center) at an FSA migrant camp in 1938. (Courtesy of Sanora Babb Papers / Harry Ransom Center / University of Texas at Austin. © Joanne Dearcopp.) One virtue of Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s new biography, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, is that it keeps Steinbeck off the stage for as long as possible. Despite Babb’s rotten luck, as Cerf put it, the editor’s snub wasn’t the defining element of her life and career. A dedicated leftist, she’d published fiction and reportage in little magazines and journals such as New Masses, befriending working-class writers including William Saroyan and Nelson Algren. She had a long marriage to the Oscar-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe that sometimes bent but didn’t break under the pressure of his work. And though Grapes derailed her career, Babb never stopped mining her childhood for material. In Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas, she’d experienced poverty, crop failures, and an absent dad; her mother struggled to keep a bakery running while her father chased illusory dreams as a gambler and semipro baseball player. Wind highlights Babb’s determination to chronicle such deprivation while writing her way out of it.This personal history, according to Dunkle, goes some way toward explaining why Babb might have made the career-crippling decision to open-source her notes. “You have to understand that Sanora Babb came from a communist, liberal background—she was a community-based writer,” Dunkle told me over Zoom from UC Davis, where she is a lecturer in the English department. “She was part of a writers’ group for 40 years with Ray Bradbury,” and professional collaboration was baked into her ethos. “I don’t think she thought that Steinbeck would appropriate things from her notes and that it would make it impossible for her to publish her book.”[Read: Plagiarism is the next “fake news”]Riding Like the Wind doesn’t argue that Steinbeck plagiarized Babb, but rather asserts that he appropriated her writing without credit; it also suggests that the scope and perspective of The Grapes of Wrath didn’t become clear to Steinbeck until he had those notes in hand. Dunkle quotes Steinbeck himself to show that the field reports commissioned by Collins (one of the people to whom Grapes was dedicated) were essential to an authentic portrayal of his milieu: “Letter from Tom with vital information to be used later. He is good,” the author wrote in his diary while toiling over his novel. “I need this stuff. It is exact and just the thing that will be used against me if I am wrong.”Although Dunkle’s framing is backed by fresh evidence, some fuzziness persists. In his 2020 biography of Steinbeck, Mad at the World, William Souder expresses skepticism about whether Babb actually met Steinbeck—or would have willingly handed over notes she was using for her own novel. Speaking to me on the phone from his home in Minnesota, he deferred to Dunkle’s research (and Babb’s statements) on that point, but said it is difficult to discern what material of Babb’s was used, and how.Souder and other scholars have detected echoes of Babb’s notes in Grapes. Her observations about the migrants’ “mortgage-lost farms, bank-claimed machinery and animals, dust-ruined acres” have the same biblical cadence that Steinbeck mastered in his novel. Their descriptions of stillborn babies are similar; both use creatures like insects and turtles as metaphors for the migrants’ plight.Without direct evidence, however, a definitive link can’t be proved; both authors were, after all, in the same place at the same time. “It’s really hard to disentangle things and say, ‘Well, this idea comes from Steinbeck; this idea comes from Babb,’” Souder said. “I think that’s borderline impossible.”And Steinbeck had at least as much right to the subject. He had been writing about Dust Bowl migrants well before meeting Babb; in 1936, he wrote dispatches on them for the San Francisco News; that same year, he published In Dubious Battle, about a California fruit-worker strike. “He’s a native of California,” Peter Van Coutren, an archivist at the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University, told me. “He is a keen observer of what’s … happening here in California, and he’s looking for a way to promote his ideals of fairness, human rights, and human equality.” Babb in front of a window display featuring her first published book, The Lost Traveler, at Pickwick Books in Los Angeles in 1958. (Courtesy of Sanora Babb Papers / Harry Ransom Center / University of Texas at Austin. © Joanne Dearcopp.) For all the parallels, a reader would be unlikely to mistake one novel for the other. Their plots rhyme, especially in the latter chapters, which concern migrant families trapped and exploited by low-paying conglomerate farms. But where Grapes is relentlessly symphonic and often melodramatic, Unknown—which was finally edited and released 20 years ago—is intimate and restrained, focusing acutely on the slow-motion erosion of the agrarian American dream in a pattern of exploitation that the Dust Bowl only intensified. Its portrait of an Oklahoma-panhandle community undone by dust storms, depicting miscarriage and suicide along with economic devastation, is visceral and honed, more in line with Algren than Steinbeck.Babb had a gift for weaving together individual desperation and systemic failure. In a fine section in the first half of Unknown, a family patriarch, Milt, contemplates the coming weather and practically wills it to save his family: He looked at the edges of the sky, hoping for clouds or the steely haze that might mean early snow. Off to the northwest a bank of clouds lay just darker than the sky, still like a great animal waiting to spring, showing the sleepy fire of its eyes when the faint autumn lightning winked. It was far away and would spend its strength on other land. His wheat and that of every other prairie farm was waiting in the ground for rain. In his “rotten luck” letter, Cerf wrote to Babb that “the last third of your book is so completely like ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ that the families and characters might basically be interchanged in the two.” This is exactly right but also completely misses the point: Collective experiences are, by their nature, shared, but Babb’s characterization of them was wholly her own. And while Grapes chronicles the injustices that migrants faced in California, Unknown shows how farmers struggled with them in Oklahoma, bringing their dread and suspicions of authority westward. Two writers with divergent styles, both capturing a cataclysmic American event: It’s difficult to believe the marketplace didn’t have room for them both. “The excuse given by Cerf that the field was too crowded to hold another novel of the same seems flimsy at best,” Van Coutren, of the Steinbeck Center, told me. “So I imagine there was some other push for him to come up with a reason to dismiss her, and I see that dismissal … as, most likely, because she was a young woman writer who was just getting started.”[Read: The hazards of writing while female]This is Dunkle’s conclusion as well, and it’s a reasonable one. The publishing industry could accommodate contemporaneous World War II novels about the Pacific Theater, including From Here to Eternity and The Caine Mutiny; Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep opened the door for Jewish American immigrant literature, rather than slamming it shut.The closest parallels to Babb’s predicament might be the fate of innovators such as Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the concept of natural selection around the same time as Charles Darwin, or Gottfried Liebniz, who developed a variant of calculus just as Isaac Newton did. But fiction isn’t science. It’s a study in emotion and perspective, and Grapes and Unknown are distinct books. Dunkle said that Grapes of Wrath makes her think of her grandmother, who grew up in Oklahoma. When Dunkle told her that she was reading Grapes in class, her grandmother snapped: Don’t ever talk to me about Steinbeck again. “She hated the book,” Dunkle recalled, “and I couldn’t understand why.” But the more closely she read the influential novel, the more she noticed Steinbeck’s tendency to depict his characters as victims with little agency of their own.Dunkle’s book may help elevate Babb’s status, not simply because it so thoroughly explores the Steinbeck affair but because it succeeds at doing what all good literary biographies do: It makes a case for reading old writing in new ways. Steinbeck thrived in an era when sweep and melodrama and heft—not to mention manliness—signified quality literature. Babb, arguably, speaks more directly to this moment, which rewards clear portraits of marginalization and a grasp of how sociopolitical forces shape everyday relationships. Babb didn’t get the chance she deserved, but she knew as well as anyone how much the world was suffused with unfairness alongside hope and ambition. It’s right there in the final line of Unknown: “They would rise and fall and, in their falling, rise again.”

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Meanwhile, videos of random folks with polar-opposite political views sitting in a dark room arguing over hot-button issues — and often saying wildly offensive or misinformed things — are on the rise.  She fought a good fight, but lost I fear . pic.twitter.com/k7U3lOrvkl— Stace (@StaceDiva) September 21, 2024 At the end of September, a YouTube video titled, “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 25 Trump Supporters” went viral, drawing attention for its absurd, Battle Royale-like premise. In two weeks, it had accumulated 9.6 million views. The video sees 19-year-old liberal TikTok pundit Dean Withers (a.k.a. the “woke teen”) thrown into a lion’s den of young, zealous Trumpers eager to prove him wrong. One by one, he argues with his opponents across a table about reproductive rights and Kamala Harris’s bona fides. One clip where he appears to stump a woman during a discussion about abortion and IUDs garnered millions of views on X.  This is just one of the contentious and extremely clicky scenarios explored by the media company Jubilee in its popular YouTube series “Surrounded.” The series’ setup looks like a satire of what debate has become in the age of Trump: extremely competitive, theatrical, and unbalanced (literally and emotionally) to boot. What should theoretically be an exchange of facts and logic has become the ultimate bloodsport for a certain type of “thought leader” often happy to traffic in opinions and distorted truths. These oral pugilists are more interested in some online-only version of “winning” than having meaningful discourse.  Across the political spectrum, there has proven to be an appetite for watching people shout at each other. These on-air clashes have been the bread and butter of cable news networks like CNN and Fox News. Still, these filmed debates mostly promote the pessimistic notion that the US is too polarized to be saved. They’re frequently a front-row seat to all the misinformation, conspiracy theories, and regressive attitudes polluting the political landscape and affecting people’s daily lives. So why can’t we stop watching them?   In the Trump era, liberal vs. conservative face-offs are everywhere  While this critique has certainly been amplified in the Trump era, the observation that public debate has become a circus is not exactly new. You can go back decades; in the 2000s, Jon Stewart (fairly) disparaged Crossfire; in the ’90s, Saturday Night Live parodied the unproductive and shouty nature of political panel show The McLaughlin Group and, later, The View. However, in the digital age, this kind of content has been mass-produced and even more degraded. You no longer have to watch CNN or programs like Real Time With Bill Maher to see opposing parties talk over each other and manipulate facts. Instead, you can go to the New York Post’s website to watch two random people shout about the legitimacy of the Black Lives Matter movement in a series called “Face Your Hater” or watch a group of strangers argue about traditional and modern masculinity on Vice’s YouTube channel.  Ryan Broderick, a freelance journalist who writes the newsletter Garbage Day, began noticing these viral confrontations ramping up after the Obama era, a period that saw a growing cultural backlash to progressive policies and rhetoric (i.e. the Tea Party movement) and eventually culminated in Trump’s election. This was a time when liberals and moderates were encouraging each other to “reach across the aisle” and talk about politics with their Trump-supporting relatives during holidays. He describes these filmed social experiments as an “impulse from extremely naive digital media companies.”  “That whole style of content got really popular because there was this impulse coming out of the Obama years that we could bypass all the unpleasantness of the last 10 years if we could just talk to each other,” said Broderick.  Some of these videos are at least designed as slightly more benevolent attempts to see if two supposedly opposing identities can find common ground or at least engage in a civil conversation. The YouTube channel Only Human has a series called “Eating With the Enemy” where two people from different backgrounds — like a drag queen and a Catholic priest, for example — share a meal while discussing political issues, like gay marriage.  Others, like Vice’s popular “Debate” series on YouTube, can get a little more dramatic and heated, like watching a daytime panel show or a scene from Real Housewives. Even with a moderator guiding the discussion, they aren’t exactly designed with the goal of finding middle ground or even having one side convince the other of their argument. Rather, they feel like useless surveys meant to convey our country’s deeply divided climate. For instance, one debate between a group of “anti and pro feminists” arguing over a slew of women’s and trans issues ends with some of the participants talking to the camera about their experiences. Ultimately, they leave more affirmed in their established beliefs than moved by other arguments.  Jubilee’s “Surrounded” series feels more like a MrBeast-inspired game show in its pure stuntiness. Even the way the channel highlights the number of people debating against one another resembles his excessive model. The prompts displayed in the top corner of the videos — like “trans women are women” or “Kamala Harris is a DEI candidate”— aren’t rigorous or challenging. They feel primed to become “rage bait” clips meant to get viewers excited or angry, to the tune of millions of clicks.  Still, this content is sort of genius in the way it attracts and satisfies a range of audiences because there’s typically someone you can agree with and believe made the better argument. For instance, someone can watch Jubilee’s video of Charlie Kirk being schooled by college students with more educated arguments and still, if they’re a fan of his, believe he won the debate. Broderick says that Jubilee, despite the pugnacious nature of their videos, inadvertently creates this sort of “feel-good centrist” content designed for everyone.  “I can’t fathom watching this and thinking that Charlie Kirk looks good,” says Broderick. “But from what I’ve seen of right-wingers watching this stuff, they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, he’s the one that’s making sense.’” Online debates have become a successful way to self-brand   Conservative pundits, in particular, have taken online debate culture to competitive and self-serving extremes. The phrase “debate me, bro” has become  largely associated with the very online and combative community of right-wing commentators, like Dinesh D’Souza and Steven Crowder — a.k.a. the guy in the “change my mind” meme — who are constantly challenging liberal politicians, women, or practically anyone who disagrees with them on the internet to verbally spar.  For personalities like Kirk, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson, these videos have become a promotional tool to prove their authority in the marketplace — or, more precisely, battlefield — of ideas. Given that many of them host debates or upload in-person confrontations on their media platforms, they’re able to edit or advertise themselves as outsmarting their opponents. For instance, the YouTube channel for Turning Point USA features videos of Kirk supposedly “destroying” “arrogant” and “naive” students on liberal college campuses on his speaking tours. These videos are not actually about producing an interesting dialogue but rather humiliating their opponents and highlighting their supposed stupidity.  @itsdeaann Full Rally Video Tmr, Friday the 28th at 10am PST! On YT: ParkerGetAJob @Parker ♬ 哔 短消音 – Official Sound Studio Leftists, like YouTuber Destiny and livestreamer Hasan Piker, have also gained visibility and clicks via their eagerness to argue with conservatives. Journalist Max Read, who writes the newsletter Read Max, says that, when it comes to these chronic debaters, the line between “self-promotion and movement-building” can be very thin. “I can understand the idea that you’re not just boosting your own profile; you’re boosting the profile of your politics and trying to bring more people into it,” says Read. “However, I’m inclined to be more generous to YouTubers who make explanatory response videos than join debates.”  Dean Withers, who’s participated in several Jubilee videos, hosts livestreams on TikTok where he debates with users about political subjects. He also posts solo responses to right-wing talking points. He says he understands people’s criticism around his debate content as clicky and unproductive. However, he says he uses these exchanges as opportunities to educate his audience.  “The main prerogative of my platform is to inform the people watching the debates that I have on what the issues are, why they matter, and why you should agree with me,” he says. “I know that getting my opponent to agree with me is more than likely to never occur.”  For someone, like Withers — who was in middle school when Trump was elected and whose political consciousness was developed in the social-media age — debating with strangers online may just seem like an obvious approach to activism. Research has found, though, that this phenomenon may create a more toxic picture of how humans engage in political discourse.  Political boxing matches might be entertaining, but they don’t reflect how we communicate in reality A March study found that political debates on social media often give the impression of a climate that’s more combative and divided than it actually is. Specifically, research found that Americans are more likely to argue over political topics with people they know and trust, like family and friends, than strangers on the internet, and often leave these interactions with positive feelings. University of California Berkeley professor Erica Bailey, who co-authored the study, says these intense, Jubilee-like debates “almost never happen in real life.”  “While these debates can seem ubiquitous because we’re constantly being fed them through our screens, my research has found that the typical American debates hot-button issues infrequently,” she says. “Of the most common topics, like vaccines, reproductive rights, and policing, only about half of Americans have debated these topics in the last year.”  On the rare occasion that you may be forced to defend a political stance, it can still be a pretty daunting task and cause feelings of anxiety. This seems to be one of the reasons we can’t stop watching these videos. On the whole, these exchanges seem generally unpleasant, but it can provide a sense of relief to watch an expert — or someone who claims to be an expert — confidently expressing their opinions.  “When you engage in debate, you often find out all the ways in which your knowledge and understanding is incomplete,” says Bailey. “Watching debate videos is cathartic because we get to cosplay as an excellent debater who can articulate our position with ease. It also helps that these clips are certainly edited to show us the most persuasive moment of the exchange.”  Humans also just tend to engage more with content that elicits a strong emotional response. It’s one of the reasons even the most obvious “rage bait” is hard to avoid on social media, whether you’re the type of person who would ordinarily click on it or not. This behavior, plus algorithms that boost this sort of controversial content, has created a cycle of doom content we can’t escape.  While content like Jubilee’s abounds, the staginess and over-produced structure of these videos underlie a comforting truth: This level of antagonism surrounding political discourse may be clicky but it is thankfully not natural.   “It might be surprising given the state of polarization,” says Bailey. “But humans are typically wired toward social cohesion. In the end, we really don’t want to fight; we want to belong. ” 

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