Author: Michelle Korhonen
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.My fondness for the acknowledgments section of books runs very deep. Sometimes I flip to them first, though I try to hold off on this guilty pleasure. I love the way they can reveal a writer’s true, gushy self beneath the veneer of authorial control and style, reminding us of the human being who struggled to bring these pages into existence. But acknowledgments also do something else: They show us what a collaborative act it is to produce a…
This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.The bedrock of the AI revolution is the internet, or more specifically, the ever-expanding bounty of data that the web makes available to train algorithms. ChatGPT, Midjourney, and other generative-AI models “learn” by detecting patterns in massive amounts of text, images, and videos scraped from the internet. The process entails hoovering up huge quantities of books, art, memes, and, inevitably, the troves of racist, sexist, and illicit material distributed across the…
Since 2017 nearly a million Rohingya people have languished in camps in Bangladesh. Four young Rohingya are being honored by the U.N. refugee agency for documenting their life in vivid photos. (Image credit: Mohammed Salim Khan for NPR)
From the standpoint of many on the left, former President Donald Trump did exactly two good things in office. He supported Operation Warp Speed, which facilitated the development and production of the first COVID-19 vaccines. And in 2018, he signed the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal-justice bill that shortened federal prison terms, gave judges more latitude in sentencing, and provided educational programming to ease prisoners’ eventual return to the outside world.The best account of how Democrats and Republicans improbably joined forces in the lead-up to this effort to reduce mass incarceration comes from the political scientists David Dagan and…
Unionized workers picket outside the Providence Community Health Centers on Oct. 12, 2023. Lynn Arditi/The Public’s Radio hide caption toggle caption Lynn Arditi/The Public’s Radio Unionized workers picket outside the Providence Community Health Centers on Oct. 12, 2023. Lynn Arditi/The Public’s Radio First, her favorite doctor in Providence, R.I. retired. Then her other doctor, at a health center a few miles away, left the practice. Now, Piedad Fred has developed a new chronic condition: distrust in the American medical system. “I don’t know,” she said, eyes filling up. “To go to a doctor that doesn’t know who you are? That…
“I’ll take my kid playing PlayStation all night over getting drunk and driving around, that’s for sure,” one reader says.Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Archive Photos / Getty.December 22, 2023, 10:35 AM ETWelcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekSince you’ve gamely indulged my inquiries all year, it’s only fair that I give you a chance to ask me anything––pose a question about any issue under the sun, any article I’ve written…
Everyone says Lytton was a beautiful place to live. The small Canadian town sits at the confluence of two rivers and was built on one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in North America—the Nlaka’pamux people have called it home for more than 10,000 years. About 250 people lived in the Lytton of the recent past, on a few cross streets and several dozen lots—you could take it in all in one breath. One blistering June evening in 2021, a wildfire burned through the entire place, and the neighboring Lytton First Nation.Patrick Michell, the former chief of a nearby Nlaka’pamux…
Let us be thankful for the AI industry. Its leaders may be nudging humans closer to extinction, but this year, they provided us with a gloriously messy spectacle of progress. When I say “year,” I mean the long year that began late last November, when OpenAI released ChatGPT and, in doing so, launched generative AI into the cultural mainstream. In the months that followed, politicians, teachers, Hollywood screenwriters, and just about everyone else tried to understand what this means for their future. Cash fire-hosed into AI companies, and their executives, now glowed up into international celebrities, fell into Succession-style infighting.…
In 2005, Israel forcibly removed more than 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and ceded the territory to Palestinian control. But far from ushering in an era of peace, the Israeli exodus kicked off a new stage of the region’s conflict. Hamas took over the strip and turned it into a launching pad for rocket attacks on Israeli population centers, while Gaza’s evicted settlers began advocating for Israel to retake and resettle the territory. Today, for the first time in nearly two decades, this aspiration is no longer a fantasy.That’s not to say the Israeli public would welcome such…
Every time I see a high schooler on TikTok flying through a tutorial of how she gets perfect beach waves with her Dyson Airwrap hair wand, I think of the time my mother straightened my ringlet-curly hair with an iron. Like, on the ironing board, in the kitchen, before a middle-school dance in the 1990s. Or my first Conair flat iron, purchased with money saved up from my summer job, which only got hot enough to make me look like the lead singer of a hair-metal band. Or the time I spent in my freshman college dorm, trying and mostly…