All posts tagged: Atlantic

The Pinball President – The Atlantic

The Pinball President – The Atlantic

In 1946, the year that Donald Trump was born, the pinball machine offered everything but control. The bumpers were propulsive, the lights flashed, but the player’s only honest move was to pull a spring-loaded plunger. After that, the ball belonged to the machine, zinging and zooming wherever the bumpers sent it. This is how many Americans experience the Trump presidency today: antic caroming that they can do little more than watch. The ballroom. The Iran war. The threats against Canada. Greenland. Portraits of himself as Christ, a decorated general, or the pope. The arch. The Kennedy Center. Prosecution of enemies. Pardons. Imaginary Reflecting Pool vandals. Federal incursions into voting. Tariffs on. Tariffs off. Tariffs on again. The Qatari plane. Endless promises—to release tax returns, to end corruption, to deliver $5,000 checks—that never materialize. No president has been more with us than Trump, because no president has been better at seizing public attention. But there is a difference between getting attention and doing something with it. For months, the president has been unable to convince the …

Guatemala’s Democracy Dilemma – The Atlantic

Guatemala’s Democracy Dilemma – The Atlantic

Just over three years ago in Guatemala, a coalition of young and Indigenous voters helped propel Bernardo Arévalo, a reformer who campaigned against corruption, to an astounding presidential win. Guatemala had not only refused the global trend toward populist authoritarianism; it had also defied what its citizens called “the pact of the corrupt,” a loose alliance of politicians, judges, criminal networks, and crony capitalists that had gained control of the country’s institutions. Today the mood in Guatemala is less hopeful. Some of Arévalo’s former allies, and many of those who voted for him, are dejected, convinced that the president missed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the country. When I met with Arévalo in Guatemala City in May, he defended the pace of his administration’s progress and suggested that the alternative would have been to abuse the powers of a government he was elected to reform. In Latin America, “we never truly got used to understanding that the rule of law is fundamental,” he told me. “Rule of law is not the same as rule by …

College Sports Are Great – The Atlantic

College Sports Are Great – The Atlantic

For a decade, I’ve been a member of a faculty committee that works closely with the athletics department at Northwestern University. A fellow professor once complained to me about the special admissions considerations that athletes receive, arguing that we could admit more oboists if athletes didn’t get so many spots. At the time, the university was being sued as part of athletics-department scandals involving sexual harassment and hazing. One case was dropped, and others were settled without the university admitting wrongdoing. During the same period, the university announced the construction of a brand-new football stadium that would be the most expensive ever built for a college team. It was a lot to digest all at once. In answer to my colleague, I nodded in agreement, thinking, Yeah, more oboists. But as I considered the mission of our university—helping students decide what they want to do after college, cultivating the knowledge and skills they need to achieve their goals, supporting faculty research, and raising capital to ensure that we can continue to do that work—I became …

The Wisdom of Uncertainty – The Atlantic

The Wisdom of Uncertainty – The Atlantic

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. How comfortable are you with saying, “I don’t know”? Most of us spend our lives trying to know more. We look things up, seek expert advice, and gather information before making decisions. In many cases when we disagree with someone, we assume that if we could just establish the facts, one of us would turn out to be right. We accumulate knowledge until, we hope, the uncertainty disappears. But what if uncertainty never fully goes away? In a recent Atlantic essay, the physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that modern science complicates the idea that we can ever arrive at a completely objective description of reality. Even physics suggests that what we see can depend on the relationship between the observer and what they’re looking at. We are not standing outside the world looking in, Rovelli writes. We are part …

It’s Jon Ossoff’s Moment – The Atlantic

It’s Jon Ossoff’s Moment – The Atlantic

If you’re a Democrat, attending a Jon Ossoff rally feels very good. Therapeutic, even. Many Democrats feel as if every day of the second Trump administration has brought some fresh horror: a discouraging development in the never-ending Iran war; a new vow of retribution from the 80-year-old leader of the free world; or the revelation of yet another money-making venture cooked up by the Trumps. But now, from the South, a young senator has emerged, with a deep voice promising change and a speaking cadence not unlike Barack Obama’s. His dark hair sits just so; his skin is perfectly even—is that makeup he’s wearing? Never mind. We’re looking at his sleeves now, which are carefully rolled up and emphasize biceps that are, well, quite noticeably larger than they were when Georgia voters sent him to Congress in 2021. More important, this senator sounds different from other Democrats. Ossoff is doing something on the campaign trail that basically no one else in his party seems able to pull off: elegantly and comprehensively skewering the Trump administration, …

College Is Coming Apart – The Atlantic

College Is Coming Apart – The Atlantic

AI arrived on campus as a crisis but has since become banal. Students can now do basically all their schoolwork automatically with AI—answering scientific problem sets, writing computer code, and drafting essays. Professors like me have no idea whether we are really teaching or just LARPing for students who are also pretending to occupy their role. Worse, some of us are offloading the drudgery of writing recommendation letters, grant proposals, and even scientific papers to AI. But at the same time that AI fouled up the student-teacher relationship, the technology benefited other corners of campus. Researchers quickly discovered that AI is enormously useful for knowledge production, especially in the natural and applied sciences: in protein-structure prediction, materials design, and drug discovery, for example. Pressured, in part, by donors, boards, employers, and parents, college administrators have announced AI initiatives, invested in AI infrastructure, and established AI degree programs. These two forces—students using AI to their detriment and colleges using it to their benefit—might seem to be in conflict. Students are supposed to do everything longhand to …

Canada-Trade-war-Trump-midterms – The Atlantic

Canada-Trade-war-Trump-midterms – The Atlantic

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Donald Trump loves a deal, even if, at times, it’s just the idea of a deal. The president’s trade dispute with Canada continues to drive one of America’s closest allies into a closer relationship with its chief competition. Although Trump is insisting that “Canada wants to make a deal very badly,” there is very little evidence that’s true, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney—enjoying broad national approval for his combative response to the American leader—looks to strengthen its alliances in Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, AI leaders are publicly calling for a slowdown. That was the gist of the message delivered by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei this weekend in an essay warning that the technological advances of AI are outpacing the ability to ensure that they are safe. His concerns were echoed by some of the biggest names in tech—OpenAI leader Sam Altman and Elon Musk. But the president saw something else in their warnings: “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against …

Trump’s See-No-Evil AI Policy – The Atlantic

Trump’s See-No-Evil AI Policy – The Atlantic

Not long ago, most of Washington was scrambling to be as friendly as possible to the rise of artificial intelligence. Lawmakers from both parties saw a chance to bolster the nation’s economy—and their campaign coffers. But rarely has public opinion flipped so quickly and so thoroughly as it has on AI in recent months. While AI was making some tech leaders unfathomably rich, many Americans in states both red and blue grew alarmed by the proliferation of loud, electricity-guzzling data centers, convinced that AI would first make life more expensive and then, for good measure, eliminate their job. In the past few days, some of the top voices in the AI industry have gone further, warning that unless development of the technology is slowed, and slowed soon, all of humanity could be made extinct. These fears have rattled markets and galvanized a bipartisan set of leaders into calling for the government to step in. AI has now become a central issue in the midterm elections. But President Trump, who first came to power by closely …

How Long Can the U.S. Escape an Atlantic Hurricane?

How Long Can the U.S. Escape an Atlantic Hurricane?

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. Every president likes to take credit for good news on their watch, but most of them have at least a little shame about it. Not Donald Trump. September 10 is typically the peak of Atlantic Ocean hurricane season. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expected a relatively restrained year, but as the meteorologist and hurricane specialist Michael Lowry writes, the season “has never gone beyond September 11th in the reliable records (since at least 1950) without a hurricane” in the Atlantic Ocean—until this year. There aren’t even any strong prospects forming. Amid spreading violence in the Middle East, warnings of an AI apocalypse, and high fuel prices, it’s a rare piece of good news, and Trump wants credit. Over the weekend, the White House flagged the news, commenting, “Thank you, President Trump!” This is absurd, though maybe no one …