Society

There is no possibility, if you consume any kind of media, that you will not be aware of Kate Middleton’s absence from public view over the past couple of months. For a time, it was possible to put the various rumors and speculation down to over-excited people on the internet with too much time on their hands and over-vivid imaginations. Then, in an apparent attempt to quell speculation, Kensington Palace released a strangely Photoshopped image of the princess on Britain's Mother’s Day, and all hell broke loose. Even those who would normally have sighed at the increasingly prurient stories found themselves saying things like, “I’m not a conspiracy theorist but...

Has it ever bothered you that all the Founding Fathers were white? Fear not: Google Gemini AI is here to save the day. In February, Google updated its artificial intelligence LLM, or Large Language Model, releasing one called Gemini. The hope was that tech companies could build off each other’s platforms and that Google’s new AI would correct earlier mistakes made by Microsoft’s Bing, which in turn corrected mistakes made by OpenAI. Shortly after Google released Gemini to the public, internet users began quizzing the AI. Immediately problems were apparent, especially within Gemini’s image creation. When asked to replicate portraits of medieval British kings, for example, Gemini provided images containing historically inaccurate ethnicities.

Garrett Hardin was a professor of biology and environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. His “commons” was a metaphor drawn from the traditional English practice of shared grazing and agricultural land to which all members of a community had access. Commons were inherently prone to abuse, Hardin argued, because every user of the commons will exploit it to maximize personal benefit without regard to the other users, leading ultimately to the collapse of the commons as a useful resource. Hardin extended the metaphor of the commons to include all natural resources, including the air, water, other species, even the entire Earth. The tragedy of Hardin’s expansive commons was the inexorable march to environmental doom, driven by the folly of human freedom.

National Harbor, Maryland “CPAC 2024 was a HUGE success!,” the conference’s account tweeted this morning. Cockburn isn’t sure how they’re measuring that: the gathering was decidedly muted when compared with previous Trump-era affairs. After the former president spoke on Saturday and Argentinian president Javier Milei offered attendees an economics lecture, Steve Bannon closed out proceedings. He led the CPAC crowd in chants of “Trump won, Trump won, Trump won” and branding Joe Biden “a usurper in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” Bannon has never feared courting controversy.

The artificial intelligence space is strange. Significantly overfunded, overhyped and overcovered — in part because AI can easily produce bad, generic copywriting, which is how many journalists presently earn their livelihoods. Though AI tools have rapidly advanced over the past year, few look to be truly society-morphing, and it’s fairly obvious when something is a product of AI, or it hasn’t mattered. Do you really care if a cliché-ridden cover letter was produced by an unimaginative human mind or a chatbot? But Thursday’s announcement of OpenAI’s new video-creating tool, Sora, is something different.

It used to be you had to get in close to hear Father Paul Wierichs speak. For two years the former FBI chaplain couldn’t talk above a whisper. Now he is a little louder, but very hoarse; though he still struggles to swallow you can at least hear his voice. Bell’s Palsy keeps him from moving the left side of his face, and he has a difficult time seeing out of that eye. His scalp is bandaged where the doctors removed a growth. There’s cancer in his prostate, too. He’s still held onto a good amount of hair for his age and his troubles — but he expects to lose it to surgeries by the end of the month. “I wore my collar on 9/11,” Father Paul recalled on a frozen January morning in Queens. “I had to throw them out, because they were covered in dust.

After more than eight years away from the anchor desk, Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show on Monday night for its election 2024 coverage. The late-night host came out swinging with pointed jokes at both eighty-one-year-old Joe Biden and seventy-seven-year-old Donald Trump. "They are the oldest people ever to run for president, breaking, by only four years, the record that they set,” Stewart said.  https://twitter.com/thedailyshow/status/1757253512625586177?s=46&t=KTzG0soGgiCKUdkuiUQOwA Cockburn can’t say that Stewart’s attacks on the elderly presidential candidates are all that original, but it’s a marked improvement on the hackneyed, partisan commentary of his successor Trevor Noah.

Tucker Carlson is a master contortionist. As conservative strategist David Reaboi reminded us this week, one of the most egregious examples of Carlson’s tendency for reality deformation came in the form of an interview with Kanye West, the troubled rapper who sat for an interview on Carlson’s erstwhile Fox News show a couple of years ago. It was the middle of West’s antisemitic meltdown, but because West was embracing Donald Trump, Carlson presented him as a sensible, even brilliant thinker. “Is West crazy?” Carlson asked at the top of the interview, before concluding at the end: “Not crazy. Worth listening to, even if you disagree with him.

Judging by some of the responses to Tucker Carlson’s announcement of his forthcoming interview with Vladimir Putin, you'd think the former Fox News host had been caught driving a tank into Kharkiv. Naturally, Cockburn is reserving judgment until he's seen the conversation itself — which is scheduled to be released this evening. Of course, Carlson has a track record of going easy in interviews with morally dubious guests such as Andrew Tate, Russell Brand and Kevin Spacey — and several other outlets were declined the opportunity to grill Putin by the Kremlin. Nonetheless, the reactions to Carlson's presence in Moscow seem particularly highly strung given no one currently knows what questions he asked. Among the most vocal critics of Carlson has been Hillary Clinton.

The past few days have been all smiles for E. Jean Carroll. She flashed her pearly whites at the jury after defeating Donald Trump in a defamation case on Friday. She beamed for the cameras outside the courtroom. And she’s been radiant in her CNN and MSNBC interviews. But it's not justice or vindication that has Carrol elated: it's the promise of a brand-new wardrobe.  Carroll plans to foot the bill with the $83.3 million in defamation damages that a federal jury ruled Trump must pay her. Carroll appeared on MSNBC Monday night, alongside her lawyers, to dish about her winnings with Rachel Maddow. She had previously hinted that she would use the “money for something that Donald Trump hates,” like a fund for women that he has reportedly sexually assaulted.

"We are not the Fox News of the left,” says Tara McGowan. “We are legitimate journalism.” We are sitting in the lobby bar of the Edition Hotel in Manhattan as McGowan tells me about Courier, the network of local-news outlets she founded in 2019 after a successful career in Democratic politics. Courier, in McGowan’s telling, “is a network of pro-democracy newsrooms across the country that reach passive news consumers where they are with good factual local news and reporting.” McGowan rejects allegations that Courier is a partisan political operation masquerading as a news outlet. Courier isn’t pro-Democratic Party, she says. It’s “pro-democracy.