No former president of the United States has ever been indicted at either the federal or state level. That more-than-two-centuries-old record, if you want to call it that, looks like it could soon be broken—something that should have happened a long time ago.

A few American presidents have certainly behaved questionably enough to meet the standard of probable cause needed for an indictment. Given this, the fact that no former president has ever been prosecuted implies some kind of political tradition—one the Founders never intended to establish. They made clear in the Constitution—specifically in Article I, Section 3, Clause 7, which says an impeached president can be tried after he leaves office—that indictments of former presidents aren’t supposed to be taboo.

Yet our system of government has had a hard time mustering the will to prosecute disgraced presidents. The closest the country has ever come to such a moment, until now, was in January 2001, when Independent Prosecutor Robert Ray decided not to seek an indictment of former President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Ray had wanted to indict Clinton. Sources later told the legal scholar Ken Gormley that Ray was “ready to pull the trigger” once Clinton left office. Ultimately (reportedly after being persuaded by his deputy, Julie Thomas), Ray decided that if Clinton agreed to a deal that included publicly admitting to having been misleading and evasive under oath, the country would get closure after the long Whitewater investigation and didn’t need to see him indicted.

[David A. Graham: If they can come for Trump, they can come for everyone]

Twenty-five years earlier, Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski had been far less enthusiastic than Ray about prosecuting a different former president—Richard Nixon. Jaworski’s posture may seem surprising given the crimes not only that Nixon was accused of but for which there was direct evidence on tape—it certainly surprised me when, in the 2000s, I immersed myself in the history of Watergate as the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. An overwhelming majority of Jaworski’s Watergate-trial team didn’t share his reluctance to indict Nixon. Jaworski’s deputy, Henry Ruth, described eloquently the weight of the decision Jaworski faced. Ruth wrote to the special prosecutor in the summer of 1974:

Indictment of an ex-President seems so easy to many of the commentators and politicians. But in a deep sense that involves tradition, travail and submerged disgust, somehow it seems that signing one’s name to the indictment of an ex-President is an act that one wishes devolved upon another but one’s self. This is true even where such an act, in institutional and justice terms, appears absolutely necessary.

“Yeah, well, I just don’t think it would be good for the country to have a former president dumped in the D.C. jail,” Nixon told the vice-presidential nominee Nelson Rockefeller in a telephone conversation on August 24, 1974. Nixon accepted that as a former president he could be indicted, but he had his lawyer argue against indictment on the basis that a fair trial would be impossible—effectively a violation of Nixon’s Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury—because of the highly publicized impeachment process. And Jaworski agreed. “I knew in my own mind that if an indictment were returned and the court asked me if I believed Nixon could receive a prompt, fair trial as guaranteed by the Constitution, I would have to answer … in the negative,” he wrote in his Watergate memoir, The Right and the Power.

Jaworski hoped Nixon’s successor, Gerald R. Ford, would take the decision out of his hands. After Ford revealed at his first press conference, on August 28, 1974, that he was considering pardoning Nixon, Jaworski told his top lieutenants, “I certainly would not ask the grand jury to indict Nixon if President Ford intended to pardon him.” Fortunately for Jaworski, Ford didn’t want to wait for an indictment. The day after his press conference, Ford instructed his closest advisers to review whether a president could pardon an individual before an indictment. When Jaworski met with Philip W. Buchen, Ford’s White House counsel, on September 4 to signal to the president that if he intended to pardon Nixon, it should be done before an indictment, Jaworski was pushing an already open door. Two days earlier, Ford’s team had told the president he didn’t have to wait for the special prosecutor to act.

A number of considerations compelled Ford to act quickly (Nixon’s poor health, concerns over the protection of Nixon’s tapes and papers, which in that era a former president had the right to destroy), but the anticipated costs to the presidency and the nation of a drawn-out prosecution—and the difficulty of a fair trial—figured prominently among them. At his meeting with Jaworski, Buchen asked Jaworski how long he thought it would take for the Watergate scandal to die down enough to make a fair trial possible for Nixon. Jaworski’s answer was discouraging.  “A delay, before selection of a jury is begun, of a period from nine months to a year, and perhaps even longer,” Jaworski wrote in his formal reply to Buchen after the meeting. As for jury selection itself, Jaworski wouldn’t even hazard a guess about how long that could take. America could have been well into its bicentennial year—and a presidential-election year—before Nixon stood trial. Four days later, Ford pardoned Nixon.

[Tim Naftali: The worst president in history]

In the cases of both Clinton and Nixon, the behavior at issue occurred during their time in office. Until Donald Trump, you have to go back to the late 19th century to find even the whiff of possibility that a former president would be indicted for something done before or after his presidency. Following the collapse of his Wall Street brokerage firm, Grant & Ward, in 1884, former President Ulysses S. Grant came under some suspicion when his partner, Ferdinand Ward, was arrested for fraud. But Grant, who was dying of throat cancer and would spend his last painful months writing his memoirs in order to leave an inheritance and enable his widow to pay back the family’s debts, turned out to be as much a victim of Ward’s lies as his investors were.

There will be a lot of discussion in the coming days about the political utility (for Trump) and political price (perhaps for his detractors) of Trump’s indictment for a felonious scheme in New York City, but taking the long view, it is about time our country set this precedent. Good government requires a little fear among the powerful, including presidents. Presidents especially need to know that if they engage in criminal acts, their power cannot protect them forever.

Should a group of New York grand jurors soon decide that the indictment of Trump is “absolutely necessary,” they will finally confirm, as the Founders expected, that ordinary citizens have the power to treat former commanders in chief like anyone else. And that’s something that should always have been an American tradition.

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.

Yesterday, not four months after unveiling the text-generating AI ChatGPT, OpenAI launched its latest marvel of machine learning: GPT-4. The new large-language model (LLM) aces select standardized tests, works across languages, and can even detect the contents of images. But is GPT-4 smart?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Welcome to the big blur. Ted Lasso is no longer trying to feel good. How please stopped being polite A Chatty Child

Before I get into OpenAI’s new robot wonder, a quick personal story.

As a high-school student studying for my college-entrance exams roughly two decades ago, I absorbed a bit of trivia from my test-prep CD-ROM: Standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT don’t measure how smart you are, or even what you know. Instead, they are designed to gauge your performance on a specific set of tasks—that is, on the exams themselves. In other words, as I gleaned from the nice people at Kaplan, they are tests to test how you test.

I share this anecdote not only because, as has been widely reported, GPT-4 scored better than 90 percent of test takers on a simulated bar exam, and got a 710 out of 800 on the reading and writing section of the SAT. Rather, it provides an example of how one’s mastery of certain categories of tasks can easily be mistaken for broader skill command or competence. This misconception worked out well for teenage me, a mediocre student who nonetheless conned her way into a respectable university on the merits of a few crams.

But just as tests are unreliable indicators of scholastic aptitude, GPT-4’s facility with words and syntax doesn’t necessarily amount to intelligence—simply, to a capacity for reasoning and analytic thought. What it does reveal is how difficult it can be for humans to tell the difference.

“Even as LLMs are great at producing boilerplate copy, many critics say they fundamentally don’t and perhaps cannot understand the world,” my colleague Matteo Wong wrote yesterday. “They are something like autocomplete on PCP, a drug that gives users a false sense of invincibility and heightened capacities for delusion.”

How false is that sense of invincibility, you might ask? Quite, as even OpenAI will admit.

“Great care should be taken when using language model outputs, particularly in high-stakes contexts,” OpenAI representatives cautioned yesterday in a blog post announcing GPT-4’s arrival.

Although the new model has such facility with language that, as the writer Stephen Marche noted yesterday in The Atlantic, it can generate text that’s virtually indistinguishable from that of a human professional, its user-prompted bloviations aren’t necessarily deep—let alone true. Like other large-language models before it, GPT-4 “‘hallucinates’ facts and makes reasoning errors,” according to OpenAI’s blog post. Predictive text generators come up with things to say based on the likelihood that a given combination of word patterns would come together in relation to a user’s prompt, not as the result of a process of thought.

My partner recently came up with a canny euphemism for what this means in practice: AI has learned the gift of gab. And it is very difficult not to be seduced by such seemingly extemporaneous bursts of articulate, syntactically sound conversation, regardless of their source (to say nothing of their factual accuracy). We’ve all been dazzled at some point or another by a precocious and chatty toddler, or momentarily swayed by the bloated assertiveness of business-dude-speak.

There is a degree to which most, if not all, of us instinctively conflate rhetorical confidence—a way with words—with comprehensive smarts. As Matteo writes,“That belief underpinned Alan Turing’s famous imitation game, now known as the Turing Test, which judged computer intelligence by how ‘human’ its textual output read.”

But, as anyone who’s ever bullshitted a college essay or listened to a random sampling of TED Talks can surely attest, speaking is not the same as thinking. The ability to distinguish between the two is important, especially as the LLM revolution gathers speed.

It’s also worth remembering that the internet is a strange and often sinister place, and its darkest crevasses contain some of the raw material that’s training GPT-4 and similar AI tools. As Matteo detailed yesterday:

Microsoft’s original chatbot, named Tay and released in 2016, became misogynistic and racist, and was quickly discontinued. Last year, Meta’s BlenderBot AI rehashed anti-Semitic conspiracies, and soon after that, the company’s Galactica—a model intended to assist in writing scientific papers—was found to be prejudiced and prone to inventing information (Meta took it down within three days). GPT-2 displayed bias against women, queer people, and other demographic groups; GPT-3 said racist and sexist things; and ChatGPT was accused of making similarly toxic comments. OpenAI tried and failed to fix the problem each time. New Bing, which runs a version of GPT-4, has written its own share of disturbing and offensive text—teaching children ethnic slurs, promoting Nazi slogans, inventing scientific theories.

The latest in LLM tech is certainly clever, if debatably smart. What’s becoming clear is that those of us who opt to use these programs will need to be both.

Related:

ChatGPT changed everything. Now its follow-up is here. The difference between speaking and thinking Today’s News A federal judge in Texas heard a case that challenges the U.S. government’s approval of one of the drugs used for medication abortions. Credit Suisse’s stock price fell to a record low, prompting the Swiss National Bank to pledge financial support if necessary. General Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the crash of a U.S. drone over the Black Sea resulted from a recent increase in “aggressive actions” by Russia. Dispatches The Weekly Planet: The Alaska oil project will be obsolete before it’s finished, Emma Marris writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf argues that Stanford Law’s DEI dean handled a recent campus conflict incorrectly.

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Evening Read Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic

Nora Ephron’s Revenge

By Sophie Gilbert

In the 40 years since Heartburn was published, there have been two distinct ways to read it. Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel is narrated by a food writer, Rachel Samstat, who discovers that her esteemed journalist husband is having an affair with Thelma Rice, “a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed.” Taken at face value, the book is a triumphant satire—of love; of Washington, D.C.; of therapy; of pompous columnists; of the kind of men who consider themselves exemplary partners but who leave their wives, seven months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, to navigate an airport while they idly buy magazines. (Putting aside infidelity for a moment, that was the part where I personally believed that Rachel’s marriage was past saving.)

Unfortunately, the people being satirized had some objections, which leads us to the second way to read Heartburn: as historical fact distorted through a vengeful lens, all the more salient for its smudges. Ephron, like Rachel, had indeed been married to a high-profile Washington journalist, the Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. Bernstein, like Rachel’s husband—whom Ephron named Mark Feldman in what many guessed was an allusion to the real identity of Deep Throat—had indeed had an affair with a tall person (and a future Labour peer), Margaret Jay. Ephron, like Rachel, was heavily pregnant when she discovered the affair. And yet, in writing about what had happened to her, Ephron was cast as the villain by a media ecosystem outraged that someone dared to spill the secrets of its own, even as it dug up everyone else’s.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Financial regulation has a really deep problem” The strange intimacy of New York City Culture Break Colin Hutton / Apple TV+

Read. Bootstrapped, by Alissa Quart, challenges our nation’s obsession with self-reliance.

Watch. The first episode of Ted Lasso’s third season, on AppleTV+.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

“Everyone pretends. And everything is more than we can ever see of it.” Thus concludes the Atlantic contributor Ian Bogost’s 2012 meditation on the enduring legacy of the late British computer scientist Alan Turing. Ian’s story on Turing’s indomitable footprint is well worth revisiting this week.

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

In the 40 years since Heartburn was published, there have been two distinct ways to read it. Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel is narrated by a food writer, Rachel Samstat, who discovers that her esteemed journalist husband is having an affair with Thelma Rice, “a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed.” Taken at face value, the book is a triumphant satire—of love; of Washington, D.C.; of therapy; of pompous columnists; of the kind of men who consider themselves exemplary partners but who leave their wives, seven months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, to navigate an airport while they idly buy magazines. (Putting aside infidelity for a moment, that was the part where I personally believed that Rachel’s marriage was past saving.)

Unfortunately, the people being satirized had some objections, which leads us to the second way to read Heartburn: as historical fact distorted through a vengeful lens, all the more salient for its smudges. Ephron, like Rachel, had indeed been married to a high-profile Washington journalist, the Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. Bernstein, like Rachel’s husband—whom Ephron named Mark Feldman in what many guessed was an allusion to the real identity of Deep Throat—had indeed had an affair with a tall person (and a future Labour peer), Margaret Jay. Ephron, like Rachel, was heavily pregnant when she discovered the affair. And yet, in writing about what had happened to her, Ephron was cast as the villain by a media ecosystem outraged that someone dared to spill the secrets of its own, even as it dug up everyone else’s.

The pushback was inevitably personal. “There are also those who say that Heartburn, though funny and sad, is a great misuse of talent, a book whose only point is to nail Carl Bernstein,” New York’s Jesse Kornbluth observed. Writing under the pseudonym Tristan Vox (possibly a play on the Latin for “sorrowful voice”) in Vanity Fair in 1985, the literary critic Leon Wieseltier huffed so tempestuously about the proposed movie adaptation of Heartburn that one can only assume he passed out midway. Ephron, he insisted, had written “one of the most indecent exploitations of celebrity in recent memory.” To be unfaithful to one’s pregnant wife, he concluded, was “banal compared with the infidelity of a mother toward her children,” and if Bernstein had committed adultery, Ephron, by exposing her family to strangers with only the lightest of fictional glosses, was committing “child abuse.”

I’m a few months younger than Heartburn; I grew up amid the wreckage of a similarly busted marriage and contentious divorce. And I’ve come to think of the book over the years as something more than a juicy revenge novel or an infinitely pleasurable roman à clef. Arriving in the tail winds of the fast-and-loose 1970s, it made, amid the jokes, a sincere point about infidelity: that it wasn’t banal at all but could in fact be an irrevocable cleaving open of one’s life, one’s heart, one’s sense of home and stability and self. More radically, Heartburn also emphatically rejected the idea that infidelity was something women—or men, given the portrayal of Thelma’s husband—should have to tacitly endure.

This argument, I think, was what led to such vigorous denunciations of the book (and the movie) from certain quarters. It was too iconoclastic, too righteous. After all, excavating one’s romantic life for the sake of art and a paycheck wasn’t particularly original: In an 2004 introduction to Heartburn, Ephron wrote, “Philip Roth and John Updike picked away at the carcasses of their early marriages in book after book, but to the best of my knowledge they were never hit with the ‘thinly disguised’ thing.” Rather, the collective outrage over the novel was an attempt to wrest the narrative away from Ephron, who, some parties complained, wasn’t being fair with it. Bernstein reportedly threatened to sue; he also requested explicit provisions in their custody agreement that would give him sway over how he might be portrayed in the film.

His reaction, Ephron noted in the 2004 introduction, was “one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it!” And yet, it’s undeniable that Heartburn achieved what she wanted it to: It cast the story of her marriage definitively in her terms. This is the power a gifted writer can wield. Is it fair? Not necessarily. But it’s also a power that, as Ephron accurately discerns, is almost exclusively critiqued when it’s exercised by women. Late last year, the internet erupted over an essay by the writer Isabel Kaplan about a boyfriend who had broken up with her because he was threatened by her job. “The more I share about our relationship and breakup, the more vindicated he will feel in his fears,” Kaplan wrote, citing Ephron as an example. “But if I don’t write about it, he succeeds in forcing my silence.”

[Read: The redemption of the bad mother]

That tension runs through Heartburn too. But to take the novel on its own terms for a moment, it is a wholly joyful read, a 178-page stand-up routine about marriage that’s entirely one-sided and openly so. Mark, Rachel’s husband, is introduced as a man who’s both immediately unfaithful and vividly humorless, prone to perusing home-design magazines in bed, forgetting to clean his nails, and lying about books he’s read. Thelma, apart from being tall, makes “gluey puddings.” (Rachel, a food writer, is doubly betrayed when she realizes that during the affair, she gave Thelma one of her recipes.) Rachel also skewers her parents—like Ephron’s, both alcoholics who got rich by investing in Tampax stock—her therapist, Mark’s “dumb Hemingway style he always reserved for his slice-of-life columns,” and sensitive types who express themselves through poetry. (“Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn,” Rachel observes in one chapter, “and I’ll show you a real asshole.”)

Some critics have raised stylistic objections to the novel, particularly its structural looseness—wherein Rachel recounts a few weeks of her life while thinking insistently about food—that was perhaps ahead of its time. More often, though, Heartburn’s detractors focused exclusively on Ephron’s supposed sin of betrayal. The movie, Mark Harris notes in his biography of its director, Mike Nichols, was subsequently dismissed as a trifling “woman’s picture” with “the tunnel-vision point of view of the offended party.” And yet, for the past four decades, people have pressed it into one another’s hands, as a friend pressed it into mine. They have read it and shared it and read it again. They’ve found something thrilling and metamorphic in the way that Ephron, by putting her pain on the page, transforms it into comedy. “If I tell the story, I control the version,” Rachel explains at the end of the novel. “If I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much.” Heartburn, you may conclude, is ultimately less about revenge than about self-preservation.

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.

Many critics of Donald Trump concluded long ago that Attorney General Merrick Garland was not equal to the challenge of holding the former president accountable. It might be time for them to reassess.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

There’s something odd about the dogs living at Chernobyl. The real reason eye cream is so expensive Why is Biden attacking democracy?

Deliberate Aggression

No one would mistake Merrick Garland for a firebrand. When President Joe Biden nominated him to lead the Justice Department, the former federal judge cited Edward Levi, the attorney general who restored faith in the department after Watergate, as a role model. But Garland faced a potentially more complicated charge than Levi: Whereas Richard Nixon had resigned, been pardoned, and withdrawn from the national stage, Garland had to rebuild the DOJ while also delivering accountability for Trump, who remains unrepentant and is running to return to office.

As weeks turned to months and we passed the one-year mark of Biden’s term, Garland’s apparently slow pace on the second task rattled observers who worry that Trump will end up facing little punishment for attempting to steal the election and inciting an insurrection—and that he might even return to the White House. But deliberation is not the same as inaction. The first sign that Garland was not as disengaged as he might have seemed came when the FBI executed a warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August, seeking government records—some highly sensitive—that Trump had allegedly improperly taken. And the more we learn, the more aggressive Garland’s approach looks.

This week, The Washington Post reported on how the surprise August search was the culmination of a running disagreement between the FBI and Justice Department prosecutors. (All of them ultimately report to Garland.) Some of the FBI officials were reluctant to push Trump too hard and wanted to ask him for permission or to slow-walk the process. My colleague Adam Serwer notes the irony that the bureau, which Trump and Republicans have portrayed as implacably politically opposed to him, was actually quite eager to protect him. But backed by Garland, who personally approved the search, the prosecutors ultimately won the day.

Separately, the Justice Department argued in a court filing yesterday that Trump can be liable for actions of the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A group of Capitol Police officers and members of the House of Representatives have sued the former president for physical and psychological damage from the riot. Trump’s lawyers contend that he cannot be held liable for inciting the riot because he was acting as president at the time, which confers immunity. But the Justice Department disagreed.

“Speaking to the public on matters of public concern is a traditional function of the Presidency, and the outer perimeter of the President’s Office includes a vast realm of such speech,” government attorneys wrote in the filing. “But that traditional function is one of public communication. It does not include incitement of imminent private violence.”

While all of this happens, the criminal investigations into Trump’s actions around the 2020 election and the Mar-a-Lago documents are moving swiftly. After Trump announced his presidential campaign in November, Garland appointed Jack Smith, a former Justice Department lawyer, to oversee the probes, and Smith has demonstrated an aggressive streak. In the past month, he has subpoenaed Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and former Vice President Mike Pence. CNN also reports that Smith “is locked in at least eight secret court battles” related to the Trump investigations. (Garland also appointed a special counsel to look into classified documents found in one of Biden’s houses and a former office space. He has said that the DOJ can handle an investigation into Hunter Biden, the president’s son, internally.)

My colleague Franklin Foer saw all of this coming in an October profile of the attorney general. He wrote that Garland did not seem to relish the position in which he found himself, but that the very qualities that worried Garland’s naysayers—his institutionalism, caution, and fastidiousness—were the ones that would likely lead him to indict Trump. “I’ve reached the conclusion that his devotion to procedure, his belief in the rule of law, and in particular his reverence for the duties, responsibilities, and traditions of the U.S. Department of Justice will cause him to make the most monumental decision an attorney general can make,” Frank wrote.

What the attorney general has not managed to do so far is depoliticize public perceptions of the department. By all reports, he’s returning a greater professionalism to the department after some of the lowlights of the Trump presidency, but the Mar-a-Lago search and other investigations have made the DOJ a subject of greater political strife. Despite his painstaking approach to the Trump investigations, Garland was grilled by Republicans during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week, and accused (unconvincingly) of conducting a witch hunt against conservatives. An indictment of Trump would only exaggerate complaints of bias from the right.

There is, to be fair, a big gap between investigating and indicting. Trump is clearly upset about how things are going. He issued an angry comment after the DOJ’s filing yesterday, and last month released a long, unusual statement, replete with very un-Trumpian footnotes, that I wrote was a preview of the legal strategy he might use if charged with crimes connected to the insurrection. The strategy might work, either as a defense or at least as a deterrence to charges. And, as I reported in January, any case against Trump would also have to move fast, with the goal of concluding before January 20, 2025, when a Republican president could take office and shut it down.

But whatever ultimately happens to Donald Trump, what we’ve seen over the past month should be enough to put to rest the idea that Garland is letting the former president off easy. Perhaps the Trump years made us forget that the Justice Department can get things done without messy public drama.

Related:

The FBI desperately wants to let Trump off the hook. A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump

Today’s News

The former South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh was convicted of murdering his wife and son, and was sentenced to life in prison. Merrick Garland made an unannounced trip to Ukraine, according to a Justice Department official. It is his second trip to the country since Russia first invaded. The storm system that damaged parts of the central U.S. this week is now headed toward New England.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson asks: Why are we still arguing about masks? The Books Briefing: Elise Hannum reflects on the importance of the coming-of-age novel.

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Evening Read

Matt Chase / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Vindication of Ask Jeeves

By Charlie Warzel

It was a simpler time. A friend introduced us, pulling up a static yellow webpage using a shaky dial-up modem. A man stood forth, dressed in a dapper black pinstriped suit with a red-accented tie. He held one hand out, as if carrying an imaginary waiter’s tray. He looked regal and confident and eminently at my service. “Have a Question?” he beckoned. “Just type it in and click Ask!” And ask, I did. Over and over.

With his steady hand, Jeeves helped me make sense of the tangled mess of the early, pre-Google internet. He wasn’t perfect—plenty of context got lost between my inquiries and his responses. Still, my 11-year-old brain always delighted in the idea of a well-coiffed man chauffeuring me down the information superhighway. But things changed.

Read the full article.

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Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Reading news about the train derailment last month in East Palestine, Ohio, has gotten me thinking about disaster songs, one of my favorite niches in the folk-music tradition. Consider the engineer Casey Jones. The U.S. endured several huge wrecks in 1900, but the only one most people might have heard of is the single-fatality crash that claimed Jones’s life—because a folk song about him provided him a sort of immortality. Singers have memorialized deadly railroad catastrophes, mining disasters, storms, and even the sinking of the Titanic, but if songs like this are being written today, the music industry as it has come to exist precludes any path for them to achieve the same permanence. East Palestine’s misfortune is more likely to be recorded in documentary films, whose dominance my colleague Megan Garber described in her great recent cover story. Both media mix fact and fiction to grab an audience; perhaps we can call disaster songs the infotainment of their era.

— David

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Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.