The legalizations of vices can be followed by gleeful oversaturation, and that period of chaos and moral myopia may obscure what is good about letting people openly engage in something that was previously hidden
In Los Angeles, a task force of detectives is battling organized retail theft, in which boosted goods often end up for sale online—or commingled on store shelves with legitimate items.
“A misdemeanor is a misdemeanor, a theft is a theft. You can’t pick and choose what you want to enforce.” The impounded evidence included an illegal fixed-blade knife, found in the right front pocket of a young man who had arrived on a Razor scooter. Later, at the operation’s debriefing, Probart told the squad, “Only one guy with a weapon this time.”
A global network of violent predators is hiding in plain sight, targeting children on major platforms, grooming them, and extorting them to commit horrific acts of abuse.
“Their main aim is to traumatize you,” says Anna, a young woman groomed and victimized by 764, one of the most notorious groups under the com umbrella. “They want to make you suffer. And for you to take your own life. They really are very sadistic people.”
But within the context of Isaacson’s nine books, Musk is not an anomaly. In method and thesis, it is perfectly in line with a career built on promoting elite interests under the guise of biographical neutrality and insipid humanism. This time, though, his “genius” subject is idiotic enough to throw the bullshit at the heart of the project into stark relief. Musk is not just the natural successor to Isaacson’s genius canon; he may be its necessary conclusion.
Unlike VAT fraud with mobile phones, no empty vans were required. The carbon market rendered even the pretense of real-world trade unnecessary because its product was an absence, an unemitted ton of gas. All someone needed to exploit the system was a good internet connection that allowed them to make trade after trade among the entities in their carousel. As one scammer told me, “It was easier than sending an email.”
Meet the guy who taught US intelligence agencies how to make the most of the ad tech ecosystem, “the largest information-gathering enterprise ever conceived by man.”
They realized they could track world leaders through Locomotive, too. After acquiring a data set on Russia, the team realized they could track phones in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s entourage. The phones moved everywhere that Putin did. They concluded the devices in question did not actually belong to Putin himself; Russian state security and counterintelligence were better than that. Instead, they believed the devices belonged to the drivers, the security personnel, the political aides, and other support staff around the Russian president; those people’s phones were trackable in the advertising data. As a result, PlanetRisk knew where Putin was going and who was in his entourage.
“Soon after the printing press emerged in the 15th century, the scriptoriums for copying manuscripts in monasteries rapidly began shutting down,” said Mr. Fidler, now 81 and living in retirement in Santa Fe, N.M. “I’m not very optimistic about the survival of the majority of newspapers in the United States.”
Mr. Kremic said that a rough guide to how much the population had dropped was a study conducted last year by his Institute of Statistics to assess usage of Bosnia’s farmland. It found that 30 percent of the farming households recorded during the 2013 census had disappeared.
To be a public servant in America is to contend with a fair amount of trauma. The institutions are collapsing, and public librarians, especially, have a front row seat to the fallout. Every day, the collapse comes to our door and sets up camp. Because when the social safety net fails you—and it will fail you—you can still come to the library. As a result, we librarians are armored up for a job we didn’t expect.
Are you able to describe how you’ve built a sense of morality? Just because I don’t care about someone else’s pain, so to speak, doesn’t mean I want to cause more of it. I enjoy living in this society. I understand that there are rules. I choose to follow those rules because I understand the benefits of this world, this house where I get to live, this relationship I get to have. That is different from people who follow the rules because they have to, they should, they want to be a good person. None of those apply to me. I want to live in a world where things function properly. If I create messes, my life will become messy. I think people are uncomfortable with the idea of, You don’t really care? What does it matter? What does it matter why I choose to help the woman cross the street? Why does it matter why I choose to pick up a wallet and hand it to the person in as opposed to keeping it? It’s not because I’m a good person. It’s not because I would feel shame or guilt. But why does that matter?
revolution in education! A resuscitation of the university mission! To happen in, of all places, not the pompous old northeast or the debauched West Coast, not New York or California but the countr…
In the ensuing Q&A, however, at least one person in the audience evinced disappointment. This student asked Bari Weiss why a school that promised “constructive debate” had failed to invite any speakers who were left-of-center. Weiss had difficulty with that one. Perhaps because it so plainly pointed to what most attendees knew but blithely kept unspoken. UATX quite clearly embraces some “truths” over others, and the discussions it fosters are like those that might take place at the Hoover Institution or a rightwing message board. There was only the most superficial range to the opinions and ideas held. Almost all the speakers droned smugly on about the same points. DEI is ruining higher education. Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies are worthless. “Gender ideology” is destroying America’s social and moral fabric. IQ is the best measure of merit. These positions have as their end the maintenance—the naturalization—of existing race and class hierarchies. Inviting speakers from the left would pose an obstacle to that naturalization.
In an interview that lasted more than two hours, the Russian President aired well-trod grievances and gave a lecture full of spurious history meant to justify his war in Ukraine.
Carlson didn’t interrupt or challenge Putin on the many—too many to count—occasions when Putin told falsehoods about the history of Ukraine, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the relationship between Russia and nato, probably his conversations with former U.S. leaders, and, perhaps most egregiously of all, the Russian Army’s withdrawal from the suburbs of Kyiv after a month of invasion in 2022. Putin claimed that this was a gesture of good will aimed at achieving a speedy negotiated peace; in fact, it was a military defeat. This would also have been a good moment for Carlson to ask Putin about the well-documented war crimes Russian soldiers allegedly committed during that month of occupation. He passed up this opportunity.
What strategic bombing does to a city is to produce, by military means, something similar to the massive urban destruction of last year’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria: mangled pipes and wires, the ganglia of shorn rebars and masonry, homes cut in half, exposing their foundations like uprooted trees. Somehow there seems to be more debris than the total mass of the original buildings. Who could ever clear all this away, and where would it go? How would diggers sort the rubble from the bone?
She returned to Colorado when she learned her house was being foreclosed on. But the news of the border convoy inspired her to make the fourteen-hour trip to Quemado, driving through the night, fuelled by European energy drinks. She was parked among a cluster of old friends. “That’s Soupmama—she was one of the cooks there at Hagerstown,” she said, pointing out a van with a “freedom isn’t free” decal on the back. “And his name’s Joe, and then Linda.” Onstage, a speaker was saying something about child trafficking across the border. But Boots had more obscure conspiracies on her mind: chemtrails, ancient giants
The Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, was even more blunt as he took the extraordinary step of publicly bashing the G.O.P. members who chose Trump over Ukraine this week. “Dear Republican Senators of America,” he wrote on social media on Thursday. “Ronald Reagan, who helped millions of us to win back our freedom and independence, must be turning in his grave today. Shame on you.” Sometimes, the farther away you are, the clearer the view.
It’s the big threat. A cheap, white powder — 50 times more powerful than heroin — which kills more than 70,000 people each year in the United States and countless others across the rest of the Western Hemisphere. EL PAÍS, in a long-term investigation that spanned two continents and included interviews with anti-drug czars in the U.S. and China, visited the clandestine laboratories in Sinaloa, where fentanyl is manufactured. In the vicinity of these Mexican labs, addicts serve as guinea pigs for drug traffickers. This newspaper has gathered testimonies about how this lethal substance crosses the border to the north and spreads like a plague through the streets of the most powerful country in the world. The trafficking of fentanyl is part of a global network with one foot in China, which the White House has declared war on
The bodyguard made a gesture to her from the passenger seat and she managed to crouch down as best she could in the back of the car. Then, a rain of bullets began: 36 shots welcomed her as mayor of Manzanillo, Mexico.
Amid worries about what Big Tech is doing to our privacy, politics, and psyches, many stakeholders—from activists to technocrats—are calling for a new rule book.
The proposal, part of a bigger push for what Xi Jinping has called a more “sovereign” Internet, was supported by Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, among other countries. The E.U., the United States, and various technical bodies (including the I.E.T.F.) stood in opposition. The simmering divisions came to a head in 2022, during the election for the post of secretary-general of the I.T.U., which pitted Rashid Ismailov, a Russian official who had worked at Huawei, against Doreen Bogdan-Martin, a former U.S. Department of Commerce official. Bogdan-Martin won the election, and the threat of New I.P. appears to have receded, at least for now. But, for a moment, the Internet as we know it appeared to hang in the balance. An apparently arcane dispute over technology standards was really part of the clash between two very different visions of the economy, society, and the relationship between citizens and state in the digital era.
Lucian Grainge, the chairman of UMG, has helped record labels rake in billions of dollars from streaming. Can he do the same with generative artificial intelligence?
In October, Don Was told me about his session with Lyria. He prompted the model with the name of a famous artist, a legendary singer-songwriter he had worked with in the past, asking for a song about his first car. The DeepMind team suggested adding the command “produced by Don Was.” The A.I. generated four different fragments of songs about cars, all with lyrics, melodies, and orchestration, and sung in the A.I.-generated voice of the artist, which had been learned from YouTube videos. Was described the experience as “a combination of awe and terror simultaneously.” His first thought was “This is better than anything I could have done.” His second was “I could collaborate with myself on my very best day.” For that reason, he told himself, “the songwriters are going to like this more than anybody, as long as you can’t steal from them.” He imagines an A.I. that has been trained on an artist’s complete works, and which other songwriters could collaborate with, for a fee. The songwriter, he mused, “gets paid, and he can put his name on the song if he likes it, take it off if he doesn’t.”
Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga was one of the first mothers separated from her children at the border by the Trump Administration. The cruelty she suffered in the United States was matched only by what she was forced to flee in Honduras.
One morning, in November, 2011, two men on a white motorcycle parked in front of Keldy and Mino’s house and took photographs. They said they would be back later to evict them. Around this time, Keldy received a call from Luis Fernando. “I’m in the middle of something sensitive,” he told her. “If you don’t hear from me, it’s because I can’t talk.” In January, 2012, Luis Fernando and his wife were shot and killed while driving in their car. There was no time to mourn. Other family members were being threatened. “I’m asking the authorities to help me,” her brother Óscar said, according to a police report filed that June. “I don’t know what to do and my fear is that they’re going to kill me.”
