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The Ukrainians are making progress in their long-awaited counteroffensive. Meanwhile, the Russian president is talking like a gangster and rattling the nuclear saber—again.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The woman who bought a mountain for God Justice comes for Hunter Biden. The failure of affirmative action

A Slow, Bloody Business

While we’re all distracted—understandably—by the spectacle of a former U.S. president under multiple criminal indictments, the war in Europe grinds on, consuming lives, burning cities, and threatening global peace. The Ukrainian counteroffensive is now clearly under way, and Kyiv’s forces are making incremental but concrete gains along the front. The Ukrainians are, for the moment, calm and confident; the Russians less so.

Ukrainian officials have been cautious in their evaluations of this early stage of the counteroffensive because they know it’s going to be a long summer. “Hot battles continue,” according to a statement from Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar, and the situation is “difficult.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has acknowledged Russian counterattacks but said yesterday that no positions have been lost, while other areas have been “liberated.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, is talking tough—which itself is a tell, a sign of how he thinks this war is going.

Putin is trying to turn up the global temperature with some swagger about nuclear weapons. This past March, Putin said that he would base Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, close to Ukraine. Moscow and Minsk have since signed a formal agreement, and Putin now claims that the first weapons have arrived in Belarus. This may or may not be true; Putin has previously said that storage facilities for Russian warheads wouldn’t be ready until July, and the Russian military is not exactly known for getting things done ahead of time, so it’s unclear how much of this is (at this point) mere bluster. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said a few days ago that the United States does not “see any indications that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon”—which isn’t quite the same thing as saying that the weapons haven’t moved—but also that America has “no reason to adjust our own nuclear posture.”

Putin, meanwhile, said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last week that he had no interest in returning to any conversations with the West about arms control. “We have more of these weapons than NATO countries do,” he said in answer to an interviewer’s question. “They know that, and they keep telling us to start negotiations on reductions. Well, you know, fuck ’em. As our people would say.”

CNN tried to render this Russian expression—хрен им—more gently, as “shove it,” but that’s not even close. Putin has often used this kind of gangsterish tone when he’s trying to project strength, especially to his own people in Russia. (He used similarly rough language, much to the Russian public’s delight, when speaking of what he would to do to Chechen terrorists, using a phrase that, in American Mob idiom, would basically translate as a vow “to whack them in their shithouses.”)

The leader of a nuclear-armed power sounding like Tony Soprano is alarming, but Putin is likely emphasizing Russia’s nuclear deterrent because his conventional forces have been repeatedly humiliated in combat. More to the point, although Russia still has a large military, Moscow has lost its best units and most highly trained officers and soldiers after a year of ghastly losses on the ground.

So what should we expect, and how should we think about this new phase in the war?

First, Americans especially should put aside what they know about recent U.S.-led wars such as the campaigns in Iraq: There will be no gathering on a “line of departure” followed by a massive air, armor, and infantry blitz. Nor is this like D-Day, with men storming the beaches and overwhelming enemy pillboxes. The counteroffensive had no real “beginning,” in that sense; the initial phase probably began with some tentative engagements against the Russians on the edges of Bakhmut shortly after Putin’s forces finally took what’s left of the town a few weeks ago.

Sadly, the Ukraine war is now more like World War I: Both sides have settled in along a large, static line. The Russian high command has been dreading this Ukrainian counteroffensive since last winter, and so the Russians have dug in, taking up defensive positions inside fortifications and huddling in trenches that will have to be cleared out one by one. (The Ukrainians have already released footage of their soldiers fighting in Russian trenches.) The Ukrainians must now probe, feint, and strike where they can, while trying to attack and disrupt Russian supply and reinforcements waiting in the rear, farther back from the battlefield.

Second, there will be no official “end” to the counteroffensive, either. (Well, unless Russia sues for peace, I suppose, but Putin has no apparent interest in any of that.) War is an uncertain and contingent thing; as we teach students at our senior military colleges, the enemy gets a vote on your strategy. Luck always gets a say as well. Americans are used to conflicts in which the United States deploys a large force, seizes the initiative, and keeps it for as long as we wish. The Ukrainians have no such luxury.

Although we should keep an eye on those Russian nukes (and whether Putin is really moving them), the real news in the coming weeks will be whether the Ukrainians can break through points along those Russian lines. The Russians are already engaging in savage counterattacks in an effort to blunt Ukrainian operations, and although sudden collapses and dramatic wins and losses on either side are always possible, the more likely story is one of Ukrainian progress measured by the names of small villages and the coordinates of grid squares on a map—a slower and far bloodier business.

As for Putin’s threats, the Russian president seems to be venting and showing off, which is one way to know that we are not yet in a crisis. When national leaders stop appearing in public, and both Moscow and Washington go quiet, that’s a time to worry. Putin is indulging his usual vulgar sense of humor, and though Americans, like Russians, also have some colorful local expressions, it is better for the Americans and NATO to be the resolute adults in the room, as they have been since the beginning of this criminal Russian onslaught.

Related:

The true purpose of Ukraine’s counteroffensive What happens if Russia stashes nukes in Belarus

Today’s News

Rescue crews are continuing the search for a submersible with five people aboard that went missing while traveling to tour the Titanic’s wreckage. As of this afternoon, it has about 40 hours of oxygen left. Hunter Biden, the president’s son, has reached a proposed plea deal with federal prosecutors. He will plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to owning a gun illegally, and will likely avoid jail time. China and Cuba are holding conversations about forming a new joint military-training facility on the island, according to U.S. officials.

Evening Read

Paramount / Everett

The Real Lesson of The Truman Show

By Megan Garber

Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the world’s most popular TV show, is supposed to be an everyman. The Truman Show is set in an island town, Seahaven, that evokes the prefab conformities of American suburbia. Truman is a brand in a setting that is stridently generic. Since his birth, he has navigated a world manufactured—by Christof, the creator of his show—for lucrative inoffensiveness. Everything around him exists to fulfill the primary mandate of a mass-market TV show: appealing to the widest possible audience.

The Truman Show hits a snag, though, and the problem is Truman. As he grows up, he proves himself to be less a bland everyman than someone who is quirky and restless and, in the best way, kind of a weirdo. Truman is also unusually inquisitive—a great quality for anyone who is not a piece of IP. Christof, consequently, has spent much of the show’s run trying to squelch Truman’s curiosity. He wants to be an explorer, an excited Truman tells a teacher. “You’re too late,” she replies, on cue. “There’s really nothing left to explore.”

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic*

Read. Robert Gottlieb, who edited Toni Morrison, Robert Caro, and others, died last week at 92. His memoir, Avid Reader, is an account of his storied career. Check out the book, and read a remembrance of him by Cynthia Ozick.

Listen. Janelle Monáe’s newest album, The Age of Pleasure, in which joy, extremity, and cheesiness are the mood.

Play. Try out Caleb’s Inferno, our new print-edition puzzle. It starts easy but gets devilishly hard as you descend into its depths.

P.S.

Nuclear weapons are always a grim business. But I have long been fascinated by how nuclear arms and fears of nuclear war seeped so deeply into our popular culture during the Cold War. (In fact, I used to teach a course about it at Harvard Extension School.) So if you’re looking for a little light music to accompany your reading about nuclear issues—such as this article by me last year and another here by my colleague Ross Andersen—I have a playlist for you.

This list won’t include all your sentimental favorites—sorry, fans of “99 Red Balloons”; we’ve heard that one enough—but there’s some odd stuff here: Did you know that Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was actually the flip side of a single about a nuclear war that leaves only one man and 13 women alive? (Bill sounds pretty happy about it.) And there are songs that even I didn’t realize were about nuclear war, such as “I Melt With You,” a favorite from my college days that I thought was about “melting” emotionally but, as it turns out, was about, you know, actually melting. Enjoy!

You’ll see a bit less of me in the next few weeks as I complete my last tour teaching in Harvard’s Summer School—a bittersweet milestone that rounds out 35 years of my previous career as an educator. I will be taking time this summer to work on an updated version of The Death of Expertise, in which I’ll talk about how the rejection of expertise is a problem that has gotten much worse in recent years, even before the coronavirus pandemic. (You’ll get the first peek at that in an excerpt here in The Atlantic sometime in the fall.)

—Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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After more than a decade, autocorrect “fails” could be on their way out. Apple’s much-maligned spelling software is getting upgraded by artificial intelligence: Using sophisticated language models, the new autocorrect won’t just check words against a dictionary, but will be able to consider the context of the word in a sentence. In theory, it won’t suggest consolation when you mean consolidation, because it’ll know that those words aren’t interchangeable.

The next generation of autocorrect was one of several small updates to the iPhone experience that Apple announced earlier this month. The Photos app will be able to differentiate between your dog and other dogs, automatically recognizing your pup the same way it recognizes people who frequently appear in your pictures. And AirPods will get smarter about adjusting to background noise based on your listening over time.

All of these features are powered by AI—even if you might not know it from how Apple talks about them. Its conference unveiling the updates included zero mentions of AI, now a buzzword for tech companies of all stripes. Instead, Apple used more technical language such as machine learning or transformer language model. Apple has been quiet about the technology—so quiet that it has been accused of falling behind. Indeed, whereas ChatGPT can write halfway-decent business proposals, Siri can set your morning alarm and not much else. But Apple is pushing forward with AI in small ways, an incrementalist approach that nonetheless still might be the future of where this technology is headed.

Since ChatGPT debuted last fall, tech leaders have not been very subtle about AI’s potential—for good and for evil. Sam Altman, the CEO at OpenAI, tweeted last month that AI “is the most amazing tool yet created.” The Microsoft founder Bill Gates has called AI “the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface.” At a Google conference, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said “AI” 27 times in a 15-minute speech. (He’s also been known to say that AI will be “more profound” than fire.)

Apple, meanwhile, isn’t even pretending to talk a big game when it comes to AI. John Gruber, a longtime Apple follower who runs the technology blog Daring Fireball, told me that he doesn’t expect any of the machine-learning features Apple announced this year to significantly alter the iPhone-user experience. They’ll just make it nominally better. “We expect autocorrect to just work,” he told me over email. “We notice when it doesn’t.”

The new autocorrect, which will be available in an iOS upgrade later this year, is sort of like a less powerful ChatGPT in your pocket. Apple says the software will be better at fine-tuning itself to how we type, as well at predicting what words and phrases we will use next. When you ask ChatGPT a question, you are accessing the same giant large language model stored on the cloud that everyone else is. But the much smaller and more personalized language model that will now power autocorrect will be living on your iPhone. Apple has not shared more details on how the feature will work, and the exact technical approach that Apple is using here is not clear, Tatsunori Hashimoto, a computer scientist at Stanford University, told me. Researchers, including Hashimoto, have been hard at work figuring out how to scale down large language models so that they fit on a mobile device.

Meanwhile, AirPods will now use “Adaptive Audio” to analyze sound around you and adjust accordingly. For example, your Airpods might automatically lower the volume of your music when you start talking to the barista at a coffee shop, and then raise it when you stop. Apple says it will use machine learning to understand your volume preferences in general and optimize your listening experience.

All of this is deeply Apple, Gruber said: focusing on what a feature does rather than how it does it. “The fact that it’s using AI behind the scenes is no more relevant to users than, say, which programming language they used to create it,” Gruber said. It also emphasizes user privacy, which Apple has long prioritized (or at least claimed to prioritize). Because the company is using an “on device” model, it could pose less of a privacy risk than giant, cloud-based models like ChatGPT do. “In a sense, it’s private because the user data doesn’t leave their phone [and] the model that is fine-tuned to that user doesn’t leave their phone,” Mohsen Bayati, an AI expert at Stanford Business School, told me.

Some of the differences between Apple’s approach to AI and that of the other tech companies can be explained by their respective business models. The tech giants don’t all make money in the same way. Google and Meta control about half of the digital-ad market, and AI-powered chatbots could become just another way to get us to buy things. Microsoft is less in the ad business, but it hopes that adding chatbot functionality to search could help chip away at Google. Amazon’s enormous cloud-hosting business stands to gain from the adoption of large language models (they have to live somewhere!). Apple is a luxury brand, more deeply in the business of making using your computer and phone enjoyable above all else. “So it isn’t surprising that Apple is approaching AI cautiously, with a product-oriented focus,” Gruber said.

Still, the iPhone might be where lots of people first encounter new advances in AI, in part because how chatbots will manifest in our daily lives remains uncertain. ChatGPT was a big hit, garnering 100 million users within two months of its launch, but it’s not clear how many of them are still using it with any regularity. (When asked about current average monthly users, a spokesperson for OpenAI would not share numbers.) Many companies are adding chatbot capabilities of their own—the Instacart app is now using AI to serve up recipes, and Salesforce recently debuted something called “Einstein GPT”—but chatbots continue to have real limitations. They make things up all the time, have biases, and are a copyright nightmare.  

Small technical inconveniences are easy to chafe at, but there’s a reason “No, autocorrect, I didn’t mean ‘ducking’” became such a meme. A better autocorrect adds up across billions of phones, tablets, and computers: The majority of smartphones in the U.S. are now iPhones, and the company counts more than 2 billion active devices worldwide. Other tech giants are also using AI to make small upgrades to existing products; Google recently unveiled a feature to draft Gmail replies via chatbot. The scenario of humanlike chatbots taking over everything is not the only way AI can change the world. Lots of tiny tweaks right under our noses can amount to something big. In a sense, they already have: For years, machine learning has served us targeted ads, filtered our social-media feeds, and helped determine our search results.   

Like the rest of Silicon Valley, Apple may soon take bigger swings. Daniel Ives (that’s Ives, not Ive), a technology analyst at Wedbush Securities, thinks Apple’s new AI features amount to “just the appetizer before the main entrée.” His team has estimated that the company has spent $8 to $10 billion on AI in the past four or five years—the same amount that Microsoft invested in OpenAI in January—and Apple is reportedly on the hunt for AI talent.

Hey Siri, perhaps your days are numbered.

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For years, many conservatives who object to criminal investigations into Donald Trump have asked a pointed question: What about Hunter Biden?

Now we know the answer. Biden, the oldest living child of the president, has been charged with and pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges. He also faces a felony gun charge, but it will be dismissed if he completes two years of probation while remaining drug-free. He is also never allowed to own a firearm.

[Sarah Chayes: Hunter Biden’s perfectly legal, socially acceptable corruption]

In any other circumstance, this would be a pedestrian criminal matter: He committed crimes, he pleaded guilty, and he’s facing punishment. Politics are what make it notable. For the president, the plea is likely a source of personal suffering—he has long expressed his deep love for his son, through private and legal travails—and political pain, since no elected official benefits from a family member’s conviction.

But the result also undercuts a long-running right-wing talking point. MAGA conservatives have insisted that the fact that Donald Trump faced investigations, and now federal charges, while Hunter Biden did not proved that the Department of Justice was politically biased against the former president. The supposed refusal to go after Hunter Biden has been a key theme of House Republicans’ subcommittee on the “weaponization” of the department. In fact, though, the Justice Department had been investigating him for months. Attorney General Merrick Garland promised Congress he would not be involved, and that decisions would be made by the Trump-appointed top federal prosecutor in Delaware.

[David A. Graham: The House should call Hunter Biden to testify]

The plea will not sway the hardest-core Trump fans. Some will quietly move on to another talking point, but others will paint this agreement as too soft, because it involves no prison time and sidesteps the most explosive (and most speculative) claims about Hunter Biden. Having convinced themselves that Hunter is a criminal mastermind rather than the garden-variety ne’er-do-well nepo baby he seems to be, they will never be satisfied. House Oversight Chair James Comer, for example, issued a statement calling the plea a “sweetheart deal” and “a slap on the wrist” that “reveals a two-tier system of justice.” (Block that metaphor!) Trump, on his social-media site, wrote: “Wow! The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket.’ Our system is BROKEN!”

But for most people, the plea ought to bolster faith in the justice system. That’s not because of any one-for-one equivalence or exchange, but because it shows that no one is above the law. Whether you are the son of the president or yourself a former president, prosecutors can and will investigate you. And notably, the sitting president neither shut down the investigation nor preempted it with a pardon.

The types of federal crimes with which Hunter Biden and Donald Trump are charged are very different. Biden pleaded guilty to cheating on $1 million of taxes, and he is alleged to have owned a gun while using illegal drugs. (The Trump Organization did plead guilty to tax evasion in New York court in January.) Trump was charged last week with absconding with information sensitive to national security and obstructing the federal government from recovering it.

[Ana Marie Cox: I wanted to find humility in Hunter Biden’s book]

But the legal troubles the two men share three big things in common. First, both men face charges that they might have otherwise avoided if not for their public profiles (for Trump this is true of the New York charges; the federal charges would likely have been brought against anyone, though not anyone could have committed those crimes in the first place). Second, the most salacious allegations against both remain unproven and uncharged. And third, much of the most deplorable behavior from both men is legal.

It does not excuse Biden’s crimes to say that he would probably not have ended up in federal prosecutors’ sights if not for his famous father. Similarly, Trump and his business ended up under investigation in New York for financial maneuvers that he seems to have used for decades but that didn’t attract attention until he entered politics. In this sense, Hunter Biden is less a symbol of elite impunity than an example of how the price paid for the privilege of being a member of the elite can sometimes be heightened scrutiny.

If you believe that Hunter Biden was engaged in massive influence peddling that changed the course of federal policy, leading the U.S. to force out Ukrainian officials to benefit the gas company Burisma, then this plea will indeed seem like a letdown. The problem is that evidence for that claim doesn’t add up, and what exists has been circulated by unreliable actors such as Rudy Giuliani. Federal investigators reportedly looked into Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine and China. (If new persuasive evidence emerges, Biden and anyone else involved should face consequences.) Similarly, the most salacious claims about Trump’s documents, like suggestions that he sold them to adversaries, appear to be entirely made-up. Nevertheless, large factions on each side are convinced that both men are getting off easy.

[David A. Graham: It’s all about the investigation]

The most appalling thing that Hunter Biden did was not skip taxes or possess a gun. It was that he used his father’s name as a way to make millions of dollars in business, including service on Burisma’s board, for work that he does not appear to have been qualified to do. Rather than actually influence-peddling, he persuaded foreign businesses to treat him seriously even though Americans, including his father, apparently didn’t. That is both nauseating and entirely legal, as Sarah Chayes wrote in The Atlantic in 2019.

In another world, where Hunter Biden was not his adversary’s son, Trump might respect the hustle. Just today, The New York Times reported on the fraught ethics of a recent Trump real-estate agreement in Oman, a crucial American ally. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, has richly benefited from ties to Saudi Arabia, with whose government he worked as a top White House adviser. None of this appears to have broken any laws, though. The real scandal, as is often the case, is what’s legal.

Early date, which remains tentative, shows federal judge's intent to move quickly with the classified documents case.