Likely voters favored Democratic candidates over Republicans by 11 percentage points in their congressional district, a New York Times/Siena poll found.
Many in Gaza and the West Bank are desperate to avoid more years of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, which has made life close to unbearable.
The move to release a man held for over four years on what the U.S. called fabricated charges buys good will with President Trump while costing Vladimir Putin little.
A prominent Venezuelan was seeking clemency. He got it not long after his daughter gave Alina Habba, a lawyer close to President Trump, a lucrative job.
Much remains unclear about why a driver ran a car into Helen Haines, a lawmaker. Even so, fellow representatives, especially women, spoke of feeling threatened in a polarized atmosphere.
Brazil spent years targeting electoral lies on the internet. Now, artificial intelligence is stumping the election authorities and reshaping a high-stakes race.
How White Evangelical Voters Made Trump’s Victory Possible—and Helped Legitimize Government by Certainty by Gordon Gamm
Donald Trump’s 2024 victory depended heavily on White evangelical or born-again Christian voters. National exit polling estimated that they constituted approximately 23 percent of voters and supported Trump over Kamala Harris by 82 percent to 17 percent.¹ Trump won the national popular vote by only about 1.5 percentage points—49.81 percent to Harris’s 48.34 percent.²
At the foot of burning Mount Doom, Samwise the gardener kneels beside his friend, Frodo, who can no longer walk. Frodo has been carrying a great weight– the One Ruling Ring, which grows heavier with every step. As Sam watches his friend press onward at a crawl, he knows he…
This piece was awarded first place in the Humanists of Greater Portland’s annual essay contest for high school seniors seeking funding for post-high school education. Every day reminds me how much we rely on tiny lines…
An Intimate Look at the Life of Thomas Jefferson in This Anniversary Year
“Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History”by Andrew Burstein
Over a long life encompassed by countless books while a student, professor or a researcher, it is only “once in a blue moon,” this reviewer encountered a magnificent book. One such is Andrew Burstein’s latest, “Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History.” I can only sing praises of this monograph. I had difficulty putting it down. This poignant book is a must read for those wishing to learn more about the author of several significant achievements that still ring the cause of freedom in the United States of America. Particularly in this 250th anniversary year of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, “well-armed with pulsating phrases,” one should spend time getting reacquainted with this man of particular talent and devotion to the cause of liberty. It is also the 200th anniversary of Jefferson’s death. Between these two anniversaries lie a testament to greatness, and devotion to his country. There are numerous history book offerings in this anniversary year, but surely this book stands apart from many others.
The war in Iran is far from the first time that U.S. policymakers have failed to appreciate the limits of American power. But the Trump administration’s use of military force against the Islamic Republic since February 28 offers a particularly glaring example of a mistake that has often characterized American strategy in recent decades. The war was launched without a clear rationale and with a constantly shifting set of objectives—from changing Tehran’s regime and squelching its nuclear ambitions to, more recently, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which wasn’t closed until the war started. The results, not surprisingly, have been bad both for U.S. interests and for the Middle East.
The series of recent steps by the president that seem to favor Vladimir Putin reflect his intensifying desire to normalize the relationship with Moscow even if it means further undercutting Ukraine.
The restrictions are part of a state effort to reassert control after the country’s largest riots in years, as those arrested in the chaos face expedited trials.
Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning is in theaters, with Mikey Madison as the whistleblower Frances Haugen and Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Its case, as RogerEbert.com puts it, is that Facebook’s algorithms steered users rightward and that “the January 6 riots are the end product of the machinations the movie lays out.”
Writing in UnHerd, Matt Feeney says the film has the wrong villain. The scandal was never mainly about content. It was about design. Platforms were engineered to be habit-forming, drawing on the behavioral-design playbook of Nir Eyal’s Hooked and the variable reward schedule, and everything users produce becomes training data for machines.
Liberals missed this, he argues, because they mistook the platforms for instruments of liberation. “Idealizing social media platforms as tools of emancipatory expression was always naïve.” His verdict on the movie is brutal: “The film is a publicity coup for its ostensible villain, Mark Zuckerberg.”
vs
THE ANSWER
Content is not a distraction from the business model. It is the business model. The engagement machine Feeney describes has to be fed something, and what it learned to feed us was outrage, because outrage holds attention better than agreement does. Design and content are the same problem seen from two angles.
The practical case cuts the same way. “Extraction” is an abstraction with no remedy attached, while content decisions are things a company can actually change, a regulator can actually audit, and a whistleblower can actually document. Haugen brought out the internal research. Nobody can subpoena a dopamine loop.
And Feeney grants more than he means to. He calls the harm to teenagers’ mental health “appalling,” credits Haugen for proposing algorithmic fixes, and concedes Trump bears primary responsibility for January 6. Those are the content critics’ own points, conceded and then set aside.
iC
THE INTELLITAKE
Feeney is right about the movie and wrong about the remedy. A film in which the worst charge against a man is that his product made people vote badly is, as he says, a gift to that man. It flatters the audience, hands the problem to a content-moderation department, and lets everyone go home.
But “extractive, not extremist” is a false choice. Extraction is the engine; extremism is the exhaust. A machine built to hold attention at any cost will find that fury holds it best, and will serve fury without anyone deciding to. That is worse than a conspiracy, not better, because there is no one to subpoena.
The real force of Feeney’s essay is a shift in the question. Ask not what the platforms are doing to our politics but what they are doing to our capacity to attend to anything at all. Every hour of scrolling is an hour the machine learns from and the reader does not. A citizenry can recover from believing false things. It is harder to recover from losing the ability to sit with a true thing long enough to understand it.
TODAY’S PROVOCATION
Check your screen time, then ask what you would have done with those hours in 2006. Which answer bothers you more?
They power our phones, cars, dishwashers—and the A.I. systems that prop up the economy. They’re also at the heart of fierce geopolitical rivalry. By Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Alarm about declining interest in books is perpetual. But, as bookselling reaches unexpected heights, James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, thinks a different future is at hand. By Nathan Heller
The cases of Christa Pike and Nidal Hasan show how vanishingly fine the line is between a routine execution and an unbearable one. By Amy Davidson Sorkin
To boost Senator Jon Husted, who is in a tight race to keep his seat, some Republicans who were making a jobs pitch have pivoted to focus on socialism.
The fighters are a key tool against Moscow’s latest weapon of choice. But deploying the multimillion-dollar planes to counter drones is an imperfect fix.
The line between dirty and clean gold is an industry fiction. Wall Street and governments profit off gold from criminals, gangsters and those who exploit children.
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi had called on Egyptian lawmakers to authorize military assistance to the kingdom, saying any support would be defensive.
Flávio Bolsonaro, the front runner in this month’s presidential runoff, is a strong advocate of environmental deregulation who has backed policies that scientists say could hurt the rainforest.
An “extremely reliable” informant told authorities about the missing murder weapon, according to newly unsealed records. The informant’s brother told The Times his sibling was at the crime scene.
Cabinet members are seldom major figures in campaigns, but the defense secretary’s forays into politics and his bravado in defense of an unpopular war have made him a target.
Voting rights advocates fear the Trump administration may use the federal government to cast doubt on the election, discourage participation or try to delegitimize results.
Bally Bagayoko, the mayor of a working-class suburb near Paris, has been a regular presence at student demonstrations, prompting both applause and condemnation.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
