The climate activist was on trial for disobeying a police order to leave the protest in Malmo last month.

Swedish telecoms company Ericsson also looking into reports that Iraq has suspended its work permits there.

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A Trump-Biden rematch is inevitable in 2024, even though polling has shown that most Americans wish it weren’t (and even though the former president is possibly facing a third indictment). But the 2024 field is still quite crowded—and the contenders can tell us a few things about America’s politics and anxieties.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Gary Shteyngart: “I watched Russian television for five days straight.” Being anxious or sad does not make you mentally ill. Climate collapse could happen fast.

A Race for Silver

Today, the long-shot Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified in a hearing organized by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. If the GOP using a Democratic presidential contender as an empathetic witness in a hearing sounds strange to you, you’re not alone. But the choice makes more sense when you understand how RFK Jr.’s conspiracy-theory-laden platform speaks to many voters, and how scores of right-wingers are promoting his candidacy.

RFK Jr.’s role in today’s hearing underscores his unique place in contemporary American politics, my colleague John Hendrickson, who recently profiled him, told me today. RFK Jr. is not the only 2024 contender who, despite low odds for winning the presidential race itself, has managed to hold on to something of a spotlight—or at least to elicit some fear from the competition. Below is a short guide to some of these candidates.

The first MAGA Democrat has real support.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign was initially written off by some as a stunt. But Kennedy’s support is not a joke, John noted last month: “So far, Kennedy is polling in the double digits against Biden, sometimes as high as 20 percent.”

Kennedy is “tapping into something burrowed deep in the national psyche,” John writes: “Large numbers of Americans don’t merely scoff at experts and institutions; they loathe them … Scroll through social media and count how many times you see the phrase Burn it down.” And Kennedy is promising to do just that. On the campaign trail, he speaks about collusion among state, corporate, media, and pharmaceutical powers. He has said that if elected, he would “gut” agencies like the FDA and order the Justice Department to investigate medical journals for “lying to the public.”

Across the GOP, it’s a race for second place.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues to lag far behind Trump in polling because “his basic theory of the campaign is turning out to be wrong,” my colleague Helen Lewis wrote yesterday. “He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes. The result is ugly enough for the Republican base to recoil.”

DeSantis has long believed that “mainstream journalists are the enemy and should be treated with undisguised contempt,” Helen writes. But his decision earlier this week to sit down for an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper suggests that he finally understands he needs the mainstream media’s support if he hopes to bolster his candidacy.

I called my colleague David A. Graham, who keeps up our 2024 election “cheat sheet,” to see how he’s thinking about the non-Trump GOP contenders right now. “Tim Scott and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are all in this interesting place where you could imagine them busting out of the pack to either match or supplant DeSantis as the leading non-Trump contender, but it’s hard right now to imagine any of them mounting a serious challenge to Trump,” David told me. In the end, he said, “it seems like this is all just a vigorous race for silver.”

And the third-party problem is coming into view.

The centrist group No Labels, whose founding chairman is the former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, is preparing to back a third-party presidential ticket in 2024—“to the growing alarm of Democrats,” my colleague Russell Berman wrote earlier this week. (So far, the group has refused to discuss who its nominees might be.)

No Label leaders say they’re hoping to protect voters from a rematch between Trump and Biden. “But Democrats and more than a few Republicans fear that such a plan might ensure exactly what Lieberman insists he would hate to see: Trump’s return to the White House,” Russell notes. No Labels says it will decide whether to nominate a ticket in the spring of 2024. The group might be holding out for two unlikely scenarios, Russell explains: that Biden will change his mind about running for reelection, or that “Trump’s legal woes will finally persuade Republican voters to look elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, a long-shot candidate is inspiring outsize fear in the White House. The academic, civil-rights activist, and Green Party candidate Cornel West will probably not win, my colleague Mark Leibovich writes today, but West has Democrats worried all the same. “West inhabits a particular category of Democratic angst, the likes of which only the words Green Party presidential candidate can elicit,” Mark explains; Jill Stein, as you may recall, swept up votes in key battleground states in 2016 that exceeded the margins by which Hillary Clinton lost in those states.

Democrats’ fear of a third-party candidate is not unfounded: As Mark notes, recent polling suggests that in a head-to-head race between Trump and Biden, Trump is more likely to benefit from the addition of a third-party candidate.

We may see the first real test of the GOP contenders next month, at the first Republican debate on August 23; Trump is reportedly considering skipping the event entirely. The Democratic National Committee, for its part, will not be holding primary debates, which is the norm for the party of an incumbent president seeking reelection. As we head into this next phase of the election, the race for silver will intensify. And other surprises could still await.

Related:

The humiliation of Ron DeSantis The long-shot candidate who has the White House worried

Today’s News

Wheat prices rose for a third day after Russia pulled out of a wartime deal that protected the export of Ukrainian grain, a move that could stoke a global food crisis. A planned burning of the Quran in Stockholm led to counterprotests in Iraq and the expulsion of the Swedish ambassador from the country. New York City will pay about $13.7 million to settle a class-action lawsuit arguing that unlawful police tactics violated the rights of protesters demonstrating after George Floyd’s murder.

Evening Read

Richard Kalvar / Magnum

Seriously, What Are You Supposed to Do With Old Clothes?

By Amanda Mull

In February, I ran out of hangers. The occasion was not exactly unforeseen—for at least a year, I had been rearranging the deck chairs on my personal-storage Titanic in an attempt to forestall the inevitable. I loaded two or three tank tops or summer dresses onto a single hanger. I carefully refolded everything in my dresser drawers to max out their capacity. I left the things I wore most frequently on a bedroom chair instead of wedging them into my closet. I didn’t buy anything new unless I absolutely needed it. Eventually, though, I did need some things, and I didn’t have anywhere to put them.

Realizing you’ve exceeded the bounds of your closet is a low-grade domestic humiliation that’s become familiar to many Americans.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty.

Read. Paula Marantz Cohen’s new book, Talking Cure, uncovers the secret to a good conversation.

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Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you, like me, are waiting for various loved ones to return to town before joining the Barbie-Oppenheimer fray (or if tickets are sold out), I’d suggest seeing Past Lives, a beautiful film released by A24 still playing in select theaters. My colleague Shirley Li put it perfectly: The movie is an ode to the kind of love that can be both platonic and romantic at the same time; somehow, that gives the film double the resonance and the depth of a classic romantic tale. It’s not overly sentimental, either; the movie is suffused with subtle wit throughout.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Tensions have risen over past political stunts in Sweden where Islam's holy book has been vandalised and burned.

Hundreds of people have stormed Sweden’s embassy in Iraq to protest a planned burning of the Quran.

Protesters angered by burning of copies of the Quran in Sweden set fire to Swedish embassy in Iraqi capital: Reports.

Three important things occurred at NATO’s Vilnius summit: a breakthrough, a little-noticed but hugely consequential success, and a disappointment. The breakthrough was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan finally consenting to Sweden’s membership. The success—the most important outcome of the summit—was approval of more than 4,000 pages of military plans for the actual defense of NATO countries. The disappointment was that Ukraine was not given a path to NATO membership.  

The breakthrough made early headlines from the meeting. President Erdoğan had been blocking Swedish accession for months, demanding that Sweden extradite about 120 alleged Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) activists and Gülenists (something the U.S. also locks horns with Turkey over); lift its embargo of arms to Turkey; and adopt friendlier legislation on terrorism, “mechanisms to prevent provocations,” and even changes to its constitution. Turkey got commitments on most of these measures. But then, on the eve of the summit, Erdoğan added yet another precondition: Turkey’s admission to the European Union. Fortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, Erdoğan assented to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s bargain, which evidently included a bilateral meeting with President Joe Biden, U.S. delivery of F-16 fighter planes to Turkey, and the creation of a NATO “special coordinator for counterterrorism.”  

But with Erdoğan, nothing is ever over, and we may yet see another round of negotiations, because Swedish courts have now (after the agreement was announced) blocked extraditions and the Turkish Parliament won’t be in session for another two months, so there is time for more demands.   

The great success in Vilnius was the adoption of a comprehensive plan for meeting NATO’s fundamental responsibility—defending its members’ territory. The alliance has had no such program since 1991. Attempting to allay Russian concern about extending the security of NATO membership to former Warsaw Pact and then to former Soviet Union countries, NATO professed to have no reason to station either nuclear weapons or substantial combat forces in the new member countries. That commitment was contingent on the security environment, which has changed dramatically with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

[Anne Applebaum: Multilateral man is more powerful than Putin realized]

The new plans adopted in Vilnius run to 4,000 pages—a testament to their seriousness—and the governments of NATO countries have agreed to them. They allow NATO military commanders to task different national forces with specific obligations, facilitating an effective common defense should a NATO ally be attacked. And the arrangement locks in a sharing of responsibilities between the United States and its European allies, which will need to reduce their reliance on Washington by increasing their military spending and providing space and cyber assets of their own.  

Coalition warfare is a delicate and difficult undertaking. Understanding in advance what allies are willing to do, and where their forces’ strengths can best be matched to need, will reassure those allies most exposed to potential Russian aggression and improve the ability of all of the allies to act effectively together. Just the fact that NATO has designed, agreed to, and set aside resources for these plans should help deter attacks on its frontline states.

The Vilnius meeting did not conclude, however, without a disappointment. More than 500 days have passed since Russia invaded Ukraine. Although they have supplied Ukraine with weapons and cooperation, the United States and the United Kingdom have failed to fully honor the commitment they made to ensure Ukraine’s security, in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arsenal, under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. All the while, Kyiv has been agitating for a clear path to joining NATO. Ukraine acknowledged that membership wasn’t possible while the country was still at war (although NATO has in the past found creative solutions to that problem), but hoped for a pledge that once the war was over, it would become a member. Instead, President Biden said ahead of the Vilnius meeting that Ukraine wasn’t ready for NATO membership.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was incensed. He posted an enraged tweet in the face of rebuffs from both National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace; the latter suggested that Ukraine ought to show gratitude for all the support it’s been given.

NATO countries have indeed strongly backed Ukraine, but for people in safety to tell those under attack that they should be grateful is unbecoming. The Biden administration unfairly wants to benefit from its expansive rhetoric—the U.S. president has promised to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” for Ukraine to win the war—without facing criticism for the timorousness of its decisions regarding the weapons Ukraine desperately needs. Washington is still holding back long-range munitions such as Army Tactical Missile Systems, for example, under a policy driven by what The Washington Post describes as the “conviction that a U.S. misstep in Ukraine could start World War III.”  

President Biden isn’t wrong to be concerned about the risk of direct involvement in the war, nor is he wrong to be stingy about extending NATO’s Article 5 security guarantee to a country at war with Russia. But the administration is wrong, both morally and practically, to defend those choices by effectively disparaging all that Ukraine is doing. Casually dismissing Ukraine’s readiness for NATO membership feels of a piece with President Biden blaming the debacle of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on Afghan security forces instead of on our own policies.

[Read: ‘It’s extremely important that we don’t forget the brutality’]

The standards for NATO membership have always been subjective. They were subjective when Greece and Turkey had military coups after being admitted in 1952; when a divided Germany’s western half was admitted in 1955; when a democratizing Spain was admitted in 1982. More demanding standards have been set and relaxed depending on the geostrategic circumstances, and those geostrategic circumstances argue for having given Ukraine a more morale-boosting prospect of eventual membership.

Losing his composure was one of Zelensky’s few diplomatic missteps in the course of  this war, and he quickly corrected it. The Ukrainian president’s subsequent spin was reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s after the 1941 meeting at which Britain wanted but did not get American commitments to fight Nazi Germany: closer than ever, not whether but when.  

At the same time as the NATO summit, the G7 released a statement that the members would begin negotiating bilateral security arrangements with Ukraine. It was intended to be less than a NATO commitment but more than nothing. But the group’s promise was only to begin discussions—about commitments from the very countries that have been unwilling to make security commitments through NATO, and, in the case of the U.S. and the U.K., those that failed to carry out the commitments they made to Ukraine in 1994.

The best possible gloss to put on Ukraine’s continued exclusion from NATO is that the Biden White House moved next year’s 75th-anniversary NATO summit four months past the actual anniversary and closer to the 2024 presidential election in order to make a big political splash welcoming Ukraine into the NATO family at a time of maximal political value to the president. Here’s hoping the political operatives in the White House prove less timid than the national-security team.

To me, AI’s scariest aspect is the so-called singularity—the threat of a runaway intelligence explosion leaving humanity in the dust. But today’s state of the art in artificial intelligence is already auguring smaller but still shattering scenarios.

Some people so deeply yearn to climb Mount Everest that they prepare for years, spend vast sums of money, exhaust themselves for weeks in the climb itself, and repeatedly put their lives at risk. Does that sound like you? Or would you rather just land on its summit in a helicopter and feast yourself on the great view? And what about scaling the metaphorical Everest of a foreign language? Two small episodes in my life in the past month led me to serious musings along these lines.

Two weeks ago, I watched, for the first time ever, a video of myself back in 2018 in Hangzhou, China, as I struggled mightily for three minutes to make a few off-the-cuff remarks to about 20 young people from Shanghai who belonged to a club of AI enthusiasts. They had traveled 200 miles to Hangzhou to meet me for dinner, and for two and a half hours we had spoken only English together, but toward the evening’s end they asked me if I wouldn’t mind saying something very brief in Chinese for those club members who hadn’t been able to make the trip. Uh-oh! Panic city! Even though I had devoted many arduous years to the study of Chinese (always thinking of the daunting phrase “Learning Chinese is a five-year lesson in humility” as a ridiculous understatement), and had worked like the devil during the previous three months in Hangzhou, I was caught way off guard by their request and, although in the end I obliged them, I felt super jittery while doing so. Shortly thereafter they sent me the video, but for all these years I hadn’t dared to look at even the opening few seconds of it, so scared was I of seeing myself linguistically stumble all over the place.

But what I saw, when I finally dared to watch myself very recently, was surprising. I saw a person who was not just struggling hard to express himself in a very difficult alien tongue, but who was actually doing a fairly decent job of it, while at the same time coming across as insecure and vulnerable, yet courageously willing to take the bull by the horns. In short, today’s me felt proud of my 2018 self! Since that day five years ago, sadly, my once-okay Chinese has gone to the dogs, and today I couldn’t give a three-minute talk in Chinese to save my life, so I’m thrilled to have proof that at one time in my life, I was actually able to wing it, actually able to give a tiny “talk” in Chinese, even if only a three-minute one.

So that’s the first episode; here’s the other. A few weeks ago, my very dear Italian friend Benedetto Scimemi passed away, and I spent hours writing heartfelt emails of condolence to all the members of his family. It happens that I lived in Italy for nearly three years and, on top of that, my two children and I have spoken Italian for 30 years as our family language, so my Italian is very fluent and comfortable—but, even so, it is not the Italian of a native speaker. In writing those difficult and emotional emails, I was constantly adjusting my words and phrases, lovingly remembering Benedetto and all the wonderful things we had done together, and pushing my Italian to its very limits. It took me perhaps two or three times as long as it would have taken me in English, but I did it with all my heart. I looked up lots of words in the big, heavy dictionary that I always keep right by my computer, and I felt my words were really me; my caring concentration on each and every turn of phrase made them mirror my feelings of love for my late friend in the most intensely personal way. Once again I was proud of myself and of the manner in which, over decades, I had come to be able to express myself clearly, strongly, and with a deeply felt voice in a tongue that was not my mother tongue.

Over the course of my life, I have studied lots of languages to various degrees, and I jokingly call myself “pilingual,” meaning that if you were to add up the fractional levels of mastery of all the languages I’ve tackled, you’d get a number a bit over 3, counting English as 1, French as 0.8, Italian as 0.7, and going down from there, with Chinese as maybe 0.3, at its apex (probably just 0.1 today).

[Read: The coming human renaissance]

Leaving aside my native tongue, I have devoted many thousands of hours of my life to each of seven languages (French, Italian, German, Swedish, Russian, Polish, and Chinese)—sometimes flailing away desperately and sometimes finding enormous gratification. But through thick and thin, I have relentlessly bashed my head against each of those languages for years, because I love each one’s sounds, words, intonation patterns, idioms, proverbs, poetry, songs, and so on. It’s hard to think of anything else, in the world of the mind, that has pulled me as intensely as my craving to internalize the magic logic of an alien tongue from a faraway place.

But today we have Google Translate. Today we have DeepL. Today we have ChatGPT—and so on. There’s no need for me to list all the powerful technologies that allow anyone today—a monolingual American, say, who has never devoted a single moment to learning, say, Chinese—to write fluent passages in Chinese. Today it’s a piece of cake to send an email in a tongue you don’t know a word of. You just click on “Translate” and presto! There it is! Or at least, there it is, in a certain sense. Assuming that there are no egregious translational blunders (which there often still are), what you are sending off is slick but soulless text.

Just imagine if the Shanghai AI club had asked me to say a few words for the club’s absent members not in Chinese but in English, and then, while I was speaking, they ran my English words through a speech-transcribing app, then a translation app, then a speech-producing app, so that my English words came out, in real time, in Chinese. (In fact, if this were happening today, the speech-producing app could even use my very own voice, speaking with a perfect Mandarin accent!) Had the club gone that techie-type route, which they might well have liked to do, we could have bypassed any need for me to struggle and strain to express myself in their tongue. For both me and the club members, it would have been effortless.

However, in this scenario, the video watchers would be deprived of coming to know key aspects of the very human personality of their invitee. They would not see Douglas Hofstadter (known in Chinese as “Hou Daoren”) groping for Chinese words, would not witness his insecurity, his vulnerability, or, for that matter, his dogged determination; they would merely see an American casually speaking in his native tongue (though what they would hear is perfect Chinese); they would get no sense for the real me who had devoted thousands of hours, spread out over many years, to grappling with their native tongue. My ideas would come across, more or less, but not those hidden aspects of my self.

But let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. Today’s AI technology allows people of different cultures to communicate instantly and effortlessly with one another. Wow! Isn’t that a centuries-long dream come true, weaving the world ever more tightly together? Isn’t it a wonderful miracle? Isn’t the soon-to-arrive world where everyone can effortlessly speak every language just glorious?

Some readers will certainly say “yes,” but I would say “no.” In fact, I see this looming scenario as a great tragedy. I see it as the beginning of the end of the age-old tradition of learning foreign languages—not only here in America, but even in lands like Holland and Sweden, fabled for their citizens’ near-universal mastery of several tongues. The problem is that people of all cultures instinctively follow the path of least resistance.

Why would anyone want to devote thousands of hours to learning a foreign language if, by contrast, they could simply talk into their cell phone and it would instantly spit out “the same message” in any language of their choice, in their own voice, and with a perfect accent, to boot? Who wouldn’t want to be able to have complex conversations with anyone they wish, in any country, no matter what language it involves? Why bother to take countless courses in Chinese and still feel deeply inadequate in it when, in a flash, you can communicate not only in Chinese but also in French, Hungarian, Swahili, and so on?

Suppose I had composed my condolences to Benedetto’s family in English and had then run them through a translation program such as DeepL. The words would have come out very differently from what I wrote in Italian. When I was writing in Italian, I was thinking in Italian, not in English. I was using words and phrases that I have made my own over decades, by having countless intimate conversations with close Italian friends (such as Benedetto himself), by reading hundreds of children’s books in Italian to my kids when they were little tykes, by listening hundreds of times to CDs of lilting Italian songs from the 1930s, by devouring Italian newspapers, by giving untold dozens of lectures in Italian, by watching scores of old Italian movies, by memorizing a few Italian poems, and so on. All that unique flavor, reflecting the myriad idiosyncratic pathways by which I lovingly internalized the Italian language, would be missing from an email that I composed in English and that was instantly converted into Italian by a machine.

You might say that such a loss is a small price to pay—a teeny price to pay!—for the amazing luxury of being able to produce flawless, flowing emails in a hundred different languages, the luxury of being able to give lectures in real time in a hundred different languages, and so forth and so on. Well, I would reply that the “you” who is “writing” or “speaking” so fluently in all these different languages is not you at all. It is, rather, a deepfake version (or a set of deepfake versions) of you.

When I was in the roughest times in my endless battles with the Chinese language, I often wished that I could just get an injection that would make me perfectly fluent in Chinese in a flash. How wonderful it would be to be able, at last, to understand everyone around me, to say anything I wanted to say, and so on! But when I thought about it for only a few seconds, I realized that after getting such an injection, I would not feel proud of having learned Chinese by struggling for many years. My instant fluency in Chinese would, in that case, be a trivial acquisition rather than a precious goal obtained thanks to immense hard work. It would mean nothing to me, emotionally. It would be like arriving at the summit of Everest in a helicopter. It would be like taking a new wonder-drug that hugely boosted my muscles and hugely sped up my reflexes, making me (even at age 78!) suddenly able to run faster than anyone else in the world. Next thing you know, this old geezer would be winning a gold medal in the Olympic 400 meters. But big deal! “My” gold medal would be a hollow victory proving nothing about my athletic abilities. It would be purely the result of technological cheating. Likewise, my Chinese-fluency injection would be a hollow victory, because “my” Chinese would not in any way represent my very human, very fallible, but also very determined mind and spirit.

When, in my teenage years, I was striving so passionately to learn French, I sometimes wished that I had just grown up in France with my American parents, so that both French and English were 100 percent native to me. But when I thought about it more carefully, I realized that the reason I was so in love with French was precisely that it was not my mother tongue, and that if it had been, then I wouldn’t be able to hear it in anything like the same way I heard it as an outsider.

Of course, over my six-plus decades of speaking French I have become less and less of an outsider to it, but still I have somehow preserved the intense love that came from confronting the huge challenge of making French my own in my teenage years, as opposed to simply imbibing it like mother’s milk, as a small child. And I am oh-so proud of myself if, after half an hour’s conversation, my native-French interlocutor is startled to learn that I did not grow up speaking French. By dint of intense concentration over decades, I’ve earned that supreme compliment, and knowing I’ve reached that long-dreamed-for level thanks to my years of really hard work is as great a feeling as any I have ever had.

Today’s young people (even in Holland and Sweden) who grow up with translation software, however, will not be lured in the same way that I, as a teenager, was lured by the fantastic, surrealistic goal of internalizing another language. They won’t feel the slightest temptation to devote a major fraction of their lives to slowly and arduously acquiring the sounds, vocabulary, grammar, and cultural richness of another language. To them, someone with my self-punishing atttitude would seem hopelessly wedded to the past. Why on earth cling to riding a horse or a bicycle for transportation, when you can drive a car (not to mention flying in an airplane)? What’s the point of going super slowly when you can go superfast? Okay, okay, on a horse or bicycle you’ll see the scenery a bit better, but is it really worth it, when you can cross an entire continent in hours or days, instead of in weeks or months?

The question comes down to why we humans use language at all. Isn’t the purpose of language just the communication of facts? If so, then why not simply go for maximizing the number of facts transferred per second? Well, to me, this sounds like a shockingly utilitarian and pragmatic description of what I view as a perpetually astonishing and quasi-magical phenomenon that lies at the very core of conscious life.

When I speak any language, as all my friends know well, I am always searching for the most appropriate word or idiom, frequently hesitating, stumbling, or suddenly changing course midstream, constantly joking by playing with ambiguity, having fun by putting on droll accents and personas, not to mention coming out with puns (some lovely, some lousy), using alliterative phrases, concocting new words on the fly, making accidental mistakes and laughing at myself, committing deliberate grammatical errors, unconsciously blending idioms and thus creating delightful new turns of phrase, tossing in words from other languages left and right, citing proverbs and quoting snippets of poetry, mixing metaphors, etc., etc. Speaking any language, for me, is a living, dynamic process that is permeated by my own unique humanness, with all its frailties and strengths. How is all of this wildly bubbling richness in Language A going to be mirrored in real time in Language B by a mechanical device that has nothing of those qualities driving it, that has no sense of humor, has no understanding of irony or self-mockery, has no awareness of how phrases are unconsciously blended, and so on?

For me, using language is the very essence of being human. When I speak, I am communicating not only facts, but a way of being. Through my word choices and subtle intonations and tiny hesitations and droll puns and dumb errors (and so on), I am revealing who I am. I am not a persona, but a person.

Today, though, it strikes me as possible—in fact, quite likely—that humans are collectively going to knuckle under and throw in the towel as far as foreign languages are concerned. Are we language-users going to obsequiously hand over all engagement with other tongues to chatbots? Will young people in the coming decades share my youthful ardent desire to tackle towering linguistic Everests demanding long years of dedication? Or will they opt for the helicopter/chatbot pathway, preferring their linguistic lives to be struggle-free? If everything we might ever wish for is just handed to us gratis on a silver platter, then what, I wonder, is the purpose of living?

As my friend David Moser put it, what may soon go down the drain forever, thanks to these new AI technologies, is the precious gift that one can gain only by immersing oneself deeply in another culture and thereby acquiring an entirely new set of ways of looking at the world. It’s a gift that can’t help but turn any human being into a far richer and broader one. But David fears that it may soon become as rare as hen’s teeth. And, I might add, David knows perfectly whereof he speaks, since in his thirties he recklessly threw himself into the bustling, boiling cauldron of China and its mysterious language, and after long years of tenaciously clambering up its nearly vertical slopes (sorry for the mixed metaphor!), he emerged as a marvelously fluent speaker of Chinese, able to come out with breathtakingly witty puns on the fly and to do stand-up comedy on national television, not to mention hosting his own weekly TV show, in Chinese, about little-known facets of Beijing.

To Mo Dawei, as David Moser is known in China, it’s incredibly depressing to contemplate the profound impoverishment of people’s mental and emotional lives that is looming just around every corner of the globe, thanks to the slick seductiveness of AI translation apps, insidiously creeping their way into ordinary people’s lives and sapping their desire to make other tongues their own.

When children first hear the sounds of another language, they can’t help but wonder: What in the world would it feel like to speak that language? Such eager childlike curiosity might seem universal and irrepressible. But what if that human curiosity is suddenly snuffed out forever by the onrushing tsunami of AI? When we collectively abandon the age-old challenge of learning the languages of other lands, when we relinquish that challenge to ultra-rapid machines that have no inner life of their own but are able to give us fluent but fake façades in other languages, then we will have lost a major part of what it is to be human and alive.

Speaking to reporters in Vilnius, ahead of the NATO leaders summit, he said President Erdogan and Swedish Prime Minister Kristersson had agreed to terms to advance Sweden's NATO application.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg announces that President Erdogan agreed to forward Sweden's bid to Turkey's parliament.