All posts tagged: America

50 Songs That Explain America

50 Songs That Explain America

Published by Daniella Wilson

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. I wouldn’t be here—in America, or inside my nervous system as it’s currently constituted—without American music. That’s no exaggeration. As a metalheaded, punk-rock-obsessed, hip-hop-curious English teenager, I projected my mind toward America. The music summoned me: I couldn’t wait to be around it. On my first trip to New York, 18 years old, I bought cassettes (cassettes!) of LL Cool J’s Radio and Metallica’s Master of Puppets. Holding them in my hands, I felt touched by some essential binary. Big spare beats over here, pulverizing guitars over there: Had the dual nature of reality just revealed itself? I chased bands, I chased sounds, city to city: New Orleans, San Francisco, D.C., Boston. It was a quest. American music roused me and deepened me. Sometimes I wondered whether I had an American self: louder, braver, more committed to his own evolution than my smelly-socks English self. I’ve now lived here for 30 years, and I’m still wondering about that. As …

Macron visits remote French territory in the North America, a first in over a decade

Macron visits remote French territory in the North America, a first in over a decade

Published by Sam Flores

President Emmanuel Macron embarks on a rare and symbolic visit to a remote French territory in the North Atlantic on Saturday, hosting Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at a time of growing tensions with Washington. The three-day visit to Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a three-island archipelago of under 6,000 people just off Newfoundland, will be the first by a French president in over a decade. Peter O’Brien tells us more about France’s only remaining possession in North America. Keywords for this article Source link

America Is Using The Wrong Artificial Intelligence Scoreboard

America Is Using The Wrong Artificial Intelligence Scoreboard

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Paul Meeks via RealClearMarkets, Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, America has kept score in the artificial intelligence race by asking which lab has the best model. Unfortunately, that scoreboard is dangerously incomplete. Frontier capability matters, but temporary benchmark leads do not by themselves create durable technological dominance by any single nation. The true national edge comes when its technology becomes the platform on which the world builds. The distinction came into focus at the White House in August. Administration officials met with leading AI companies to discuss a voluntary framework for government testing of the most advanced models before release. However, the framework will not cover open-weight models, whose underlying parameters can be downloaded and adapted. That was the right decision. But declining to restrict open models is not the same as having a strategy to ensure that the world builds on American models. The Trump administration already understands the stakes. Its AI Action Plan warns that open models could become global standards in business and research and therefore have “geostrategic …

A Rare America Show of Note

A Rare America Show of Note

Published by Jenni Sidey

When people remember what art museums did this year to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, they will not recall the plethora of anodyne collection shows staged across the nation, many of which have centered on vague notions of democracy and discontent. Instead, I hope they remember Taryn Simon’s paranoid freak-out of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, whose rotunda she has filled with photographs about surveillance, lies, violence, and—that most American topic of all—foreign intervention. Opening to the public on Friday, the show is entirely composed of a single new body of work: Father Country I Do Love You, an exhilarating 42-part installation that doubles as a hefty conceptual artwork and an unconventional form of investigative reporting. It began in 2017, when Simon came across an agent’s name in FBI files from the ’90s. She tracked him down, met with him at a Mexican restaurant in Maryland, and established a rapport, interviewing him repeatedly over much of the past decade. (Simon has concealed the agent’s identity, in part to …

Yes, America, this is really who we are. Vote if you want to change it

Yes, America, this is really who we are. Vote if you want to change it

Published by Sam Flores

“This is not who we are.” After every recent political tragedy, from shooting American citizens to killing Iranian schoolchildren, someone always says that: Somehow, it’s not who we really are. Seriously? The people running the world today are the people — mostly guys, let’s be real — who couldn’t get a prom date and probably had embarrassing potty-training accidents that haunt them to this day. Don’t overanalyze it.  Look at anyone who holds high elected office. Does it fit or not?  Thus, the most devastating blow to the American ego in 2026 is the realization that if you saw the Trump administration as a movie of the week, you’d have the plot twists figured out before the first commercial break. Reality is a different story. Some still don’t get it. A clergyman I met at Reagan National Airport recently told me that our world is as filled with corruption as a Latin American animal shelter is filled with fleas. I don’t know where he came up with that analogy, but who am I to argue? …

Who Made America Poorer and Dirtier?

Who Made America Poorer and Dirtier?

Published by Sam Flores

At last week’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Vice President Vance painted a bleak picture of American life before the second Trump administration: “Two years ago, we have to remember, our nation, ladies and gentlemen, was tired. We were tired of seeing our factories close. We were tired of our neighbors dying of drug overdoses. We were tired of not being able to afford anything. We were tired of seeing the cartels and the criminals given free rein over our great country,” Vance said. “And we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.” Who is responsible for this terrible state of affairs? The opposition party and immigrants, apparently. Vance went on to say, “The Democrat legacy of the last few years was that they bankrupted our country and left us poor. They left our country weaker. They left our border wide open and our communities less safe.” But this account represents a preposterous inversion. Almost every problem Vance lists, the …

South Park Returns as South America as Plot Stays Local and Trump-Free

South Park Returns as South America as Plot Stays Local and Trump-Free

Published by Daniella Wilson

South Park, one of the longest-running comedy series on television, returned to Comedy Central for its 29th season after making the unexpected move of changing the show’s name to “South America” — a gag that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone announced as a possible marketing gimmick but is certainly also a jab at President Donald Trump. Wednesday night’s season premiere provided little explanation as to when and why the name change happened for the fictional Colorado town, but it does offer a vague metaphor for current U.S. politics around immigration. Seasons 27 and 28 of South Park had shifted from the show’s traditional stand-alone episodes to a season-long arc centered on fictionalized happenings within the White House, including President Trump’s clandestine affair with Satan. With the premiere, the show appears to be returning to its traditional format — stand-alone episodes that may still carry overarching themes. It’s not entirely clear whether we’ve seen the last of South Park‘s satirical Trump character and the supporting cast of cabinet officials, hangers-on and vice-president-turned-lover J.D. Vance, but …

Can AI regulation keep America ahead of China? | Technology

Can AI regulation keep America ahead of China? | Technology

Published by Sam Flores

As Washington debates how to regulate AI without falling behind China, industry experts say that governance doesn’t have to mean hitting the brakes. Al Jazeera’s ‘This is America’ explores whether rules managing AI’s risks can also give American companies room to innovate. Published On 17 Sep 202617 Sep 2026 Share Can AI regulation keep America ahead of China? on social media share-nodes Share googleAdd Al Jazeera on Googleinfo Source link

Doc on Black-Jewish Relations in America

Doc on Black-Jewish Relations in America

Published by Daniella Wilson

The coalition between Blacks and Jews was integral to shaping 20th-century America, steering entertainment, sports and politics as two groups often “othered” within our cultural tapestry found power in unity. But where shared values and purpose led to joint fights against fascism and prejudice, events like the Crown Heights riots and the aftermath of the tragedies of October 7, 2023, exposed schisms. The relationship has been so crucial to the identities of both groups and to our country that Henry Louis Gates Jr. produced Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, which premiered on PBS in February of this year. It’s a great docuseries, though one that feels like it’s barely scratching the surface of this interwoven history in four hours. Re/Pair The Bottom Line So-so as history, but a potent conversation-starter. Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF Docs)Director: Lacey Schwartz Delgado 1 hour 41 minutes It’s no surprise, then, that Lacey Schwartz Delgado’s Re/Pair, a new 101-minute documentary premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, feels important but short of essential. If you haven’t …

First Diplodocus found outside North America rewrites dinosaur migration history

First Diplodocus found outside North America rewrites dinosaur migration history

Published by Jenni Sidey

Fourteen tail vertebrae from eastern Spain provide the first confirmed evidence that Diplodocus lived outside North America about 150 million years ago. Anatomical comparisons and multiple evolutionary analyses consistently placed the Spanish specimen within Diplodocus, close to the species D. hallorum. The discovery strengthens evidence that dinosaurs moved between Europe and North America during episodes when temporary land connections may have crossed the developing proto-Atlantic. For nearly 150 years, every confirmed Diplodocus fossil had come from the western United States. A series of remarkably preserved tail bones in eastern Spain has now broken that geographic boundary. Paleontologists identified 14 vertebrae and several chevrons from the La Tejería site in El Castellar, Teruel, as belonging to Diplodocus. The animal lived about 150 million years ago during the Late Jurassic and may have stretched roughly 25 meters, or 82 feet, from head to tail. The finding represents the first confirmed Diplodocus outside North America. It also adds unusually direct evidence to a larger paleontological question: how similar dinosaur communities appeared on opposite sides of the developing North …