Author: Lance Garrison
“You said something quite a while ago. This is before Biden announced. You said that you thought time for new blood, time for a changing of the guard, open primary season. Then, within the last month or so, you said you wish there would be an open convention, like the old-fashioned days, where they’d broker and find a candidate. And that was a little upsetting to me because this is about whether or not we preserve our 249 years of self-rule or we slip into a theocratic autocracy.” “I don’t think people really appreciate how bad Biden’s poll numbers are.…
Alarms are blaring about artificial intelligence deepfakes that manipulate voters, like the robocall sounding like President Biden that went to New Hampshire households, or the fake video of Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump.Yet there’s actually a far bigger problem with deepfakes that we haven’t paid enough attention to: deepfake nude videos and photos that humiliate celebrities and unknown children alike. One recent study found that 98 percent of deepfake videos online were pornographic and that 99 percent of those targeted were women or girls.Faked nude imagery of Taylor Swift rattled the internet in January, but this goes way beyond her:…
There is no particular mystery to unravel around the political views of Elon Musk, the billionaire technology and social media executive. He is — and for some time, has been — on the far right wing of American politics. He is an enthusiastic purveyor of far-right conspiracy theories, using his platform on the website X to spread a worldview that is as extreme as it is untethered from reality.Musk is especially preoccupied with the racial makeup of the country and the alleged deficiency of nonwhites in important positions. He blames the recent problems at Boeing, for example, on its efforts…
It is springtime, and I want to turn to thoughts of love.In my case, love of this world, love of nature, love of our life in and as part of it. How I wish we all still loved that way.New York City’s winter leaf cover has been blown away and stuffed into large, shiny, pristine black plastic bags. Left behind is the detritus of winter’s walkers. That would be the squashed plastic bottles, baggies full of dog poop, takeout containers (some with dinners that rats missed), dead balloons, lost neoprene gloves and abandoned plastic toys, pacifiers, baby bottles, combs, condoms.…
If you believe President Biden’s aides and allies, he intends to fight the 2024 election primarily on the threat that Donald Trump poses to American democracy. In their view, this worked in 2020, when Biden promised to protect the “soul of the nation” from Trump’s depredations, and again in the 2022 midterms, when Biden made the threat to democracy his closing argument and Democrats then overperformed. So there’s no reason it can’t work just one more time.By the time November rolls around, Biden’s longtime adviser Mike Donilon told The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos recently, “the focus will become overwhelming on…
Last year, Major League Baseball instituted a slew of new rules that were largely intended to have a single effect: to speed up the game and make it more watchable for fans.Despite some early wariness from players about things like pitch clocks and the predictable moaning of baseball traditionalists, who’ve always measured their openness to change in geologic time, the updates were eventually celebrated as a near-universal success story. Action in the form of runs scored and stolen bases went up, even as the average time of a nine-inning game went way down — sliced by nearly 25 minutes from…
Americans have always loved a royal scandal, even a smidgen more than British royalists do themselves. Some of this is easily attributable to our inborn desire for no more kings. Lately, however, the British royals have been given the same reality-star treatment every microcelebrity in America attracts.Give us everything. Or you’ll regret it.Historically, of course, the royals have provided. There was the Duke of Windsor’s abdication and apparent support for Nazism. Prince Charles’s and Princess Diana’s flagrant infidelities and divorce. Prince Andrew’s close ties with the since convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his own accusations of sexual abuse. And…
UC Berkeley’s harvesting box can extract water from air in the middle of the desert. Imagine a small box that can harvest drinking water from the air, even in the Mojave Desert. It’s just one of the new mind-bending technologies aimed at solving the global water crisis, the scale of which demands science fiction-level innovation.More than 2 billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking water, according to the United Nations. Facing natural water scarcity and climate change-amplified droughts, many people have limited access to water, while others suffer from contaminated water supplies. Many face both problems.Imaginative tools…
You likely know from experience that sleep and mood go hand in hand. A sleepless night can leave you feeling crabby the next morning and put a damper on your whole day. When you have chronic insomnia, night after night of lying in bed awake can take an even bigger, longer-lasting toll on your mood.To understand the connection between sleep and mood, look no further than your brain. Deep inside the brain, the region known as the amygdala is probably best known as the control center for our emotions. But it also plays a role in sleep.Some research suggests that…
On Wednesday night I went to see “Corruption” at Lincoln Center. Written by J.T. Rogers and directed by Bartlett Sher, the play unspools the chilling true saga of Rebekah Brooks. With her mop of red Renaissance curls and steely ambition, Brooks became the favorite lieutenant of Rupert Murdoch. She got in trouble more than a decade ago in the phone-hacking scandal in Britain — before she zoomed back to the top of the Murdoch empire. The British newspaper editors and politicians trying to stop the journalistic corruption leaned into The New York Times back then and our reporters Don Van…