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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is our staff writer Ross Andersen. Ross has written about a prospective woolly-mammoth reserve in Siberia, a grisly slaughter at the National Zoo, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s ambition to build a superintelligence. He is working on a book about the quest to find intelligent life beyond Earth.

Ross is dreaming big dreams for the Lakers this season, obsessing over Don DeLillo, and taking loved ones to an immersive museum exhibition that leaves them feeling wobbly but grateful.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Cover story: The patriot The 22 most exciting films to watch this season Millennials have lost their grip on fashion.

The Culture Survey: Ross Andersen

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: The NBA season is starting, and for the first time in years, my Lakers have an intelligently constructed roster. (Rob Pelinka, all is forgiven.) In the spirit of preseason expansiveness, I will note that this year, the Lakers could possibly—an elastic word!—notch their 18th NBA championship, passing the Celtics, who also have 17. There is even some chance they could do it by beating the Celtics themselves in the finals. As the winter wears on, timelines will branch, and many hoped-for futures will fall away. But so long as that one is alive, I’ll be locked in. [Related: It had to be the Lakers (From 2020)]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I’ve been on a Don DeLillo kick, primarily for the line-to-line style. I tore through The Names and am now reading Underworld, but between them I read Libra, my favorite book of his so far. It’s a fictionalization of the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo’s novel alleges a conspiracy, but does so largely within the established facts of the Warren Commission’s report. The result is a dark, paranoid American fable that reads so real, I’m making it my nonfiction pick, too. [Related: Don DeLillo on the anniversary of Apollo and Earthrise]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet: Air’s “Alone in Kyoto,” especially on a train. Loud: Rihanna’s sludgy, wall-of-sound cover of Tame Impala’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes.” The original was already great, but I haven’t returned to it since hearing her version.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: I fell hard for R&B during its ’90s golden age. At one point, the intro to my voicemail was D’Angelo’s “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine.” No regrets. Almost all of it still bangs, but some of the genre’s more saccharine songs are getting a skip from me now. Keith Sweat’s “Make It Last Forever” is safe. Most Boyz II Men songs aren’t, except for the one with Mariah.

An author I will read anything by: Lauren Groff. As a result of some bad decisions, I once had to spend nine hours at the Denver airport. I coped by bingeing Fates and Furies, Groff’s much-copied dueling-perspective take on marriage. I liked that book a lot, but it was her fourth novel, Matrix, that really set the hook. It takes place in a 12th-century convent in England that she reimagines in great sensory detail—to have read this book is to remember the chill of the convent’s stone walls. Groff always has at least one eye on the natural world, and I love that she’s unafraid to write in a spiritual key. It puts her books into larger, more ancient conversations than your average work of Brooklyn autofiction. [Related: The writer who saw all of this coming]

The last debate I had about culture: I’ve been making a regular, if somewhat half-hearted, case that Lewis Strauss, Robert Downey Jr.’s character in Oppenheimer, is misunderstood. [Related: Oppenheimer’s cry of despair in The Atlantic]

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: My son and I just saw a rerelease of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Alamo Drafthouse. It was nominally for research; I’m writing a nonfiction book about a team of scientists who are trying to make first contact. But he and I also have history with this movie. A few years ago, we saw a 70-mm print on the IMAX screen at the Smithsonian. The late Douglas Trumbull, who did many of the special effects, gave introductory remarks. This viewing couldn’t match that, but the images still cast a spell. There was a small collective gasp among the audience when the screen filled up with the famous tracking shot of Dave, the red-suited astronaut, walking through a shimmering octagonal corridor toward the pod-bay doors and the deeper human future.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Rilke: “Spring has come again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: As part of a recent career retrospective, the artist Laurie Anderson painted an entire room at the Hirshhorn Museum, here in Washington, D.C., with a base layer of slick black. She then used chalky white paint to cover its floor and walls with illustrations and quotes, many of them existential in one way or another. When it first opened, I went with my daughter, and we were both taken aback by its forcefulness. No matter where you looked, you couldn’t escape Anderson’s thoughts. A lot of what gets marketed as immersive art these days is a warm bath—a swirly Van Gogh light show set to tinkly music. Anderson’s room is confronting. I’ve taken several people to it since, and they’ve all come out wobbly, but grateful.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Our October cover story, “Jenisha From Kentucky.” Among its other virtues, it’s a brilliant detective tale. The writer, Jenisha Watts, conducts a thorough and painful excavation of her childhood. She uncovers family secrets and holds them up to the light. She reimagines her past, present, and future selves. The language is beautiful and direct. It’s perfect for a Sunday morning. [Related: What it’s like to tell the world your deepest secrets]

The Week Ahead

Land of Milk and Honey, a novel by C. Pam Zhang about a chef who escapes a dystopian smog by taking a mysterious job on a mountaintop in Italy (on sale Tuesday) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved tale, directed by Wes Anderson and starring Benedict Cumberbatch (streaming on Netflix this Wednesday) Season 4 of Lego Masters, where enthusiasts compete in various building challenges, (premieres Thursday on Fox)

Essay

Richard Kalvar / Magnum

Dogs Need Understanding, Not Dominance

By Kelly Conaboy

In 2022, the researchers Lauren Brubaker and Monique Udell recruited 48 parents and their children for a study on the behavioral effects of different parenting styles. The adult subjects were given a survey about their expectations for their children, and how they typically respond to their needs; the children were tested to determine their attachment style, sociability, and problem-solving skills. I should probably mention that the children involved were dogs.

The dogs who were cared for by owners with an “authoritative” style, meaning one where high expectations matched a high responsiveness toward their dog’s needs, were secure, highly social, and more successful at problem-solving …

The language might sound familiar to those acquainted with the concept of “gentle parenting,” a philosophy that’s become popular in recent years. Tenets of gentle parenting, including a focus on empathy in parent-child interactions, and avoiding punishment in favor of helping the child understand the reasons behind their actions and emotions, have been linked to positive outcomes for kids.

And although children are obviously very different from dogs, a parallel shift in approach has been happening in humans’ relationships with their canine kids.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Russell Brand wasn’t an anomaly. Tolstoy was wrong about happy families. Nixon between the lines What Emily Dickinson left behind The overlooked danger that’s massacring wildlife ​​The undoing of a great American band Some good news about your malaise Parent diplomacy is overwhelming teachers. A high-water mark in American mass culture Viewfinder: Confronting the unbelievable Poem: “Distressed Haiku” Poem: “All Our Pretty Sons”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Anne Applebaum: The American face of authoritarian propaganda Airlines are just banks now. The tragedy of Google Search

Photo Album

French tightrope walker Nathan Paulin walks on a wire during a performance of "Les Traceurs Theatre de Chaillot au Musee d'Orsay" by Rachid Ouramdane, as part of the European Heritage Days and the Cultural Olympiad in Paris, on September 16, 2023. (Julien De Rosa / AFP / Getty)

A reenactment of a 17th-century civil war in England, a cotton harvest in Uzbekistan, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters.

In the past year or so, since the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, people have been making their peace with the idea that an omnipotent AI might be on the horizon. Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, “believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships,” my colleague Ross Andersen reported after the two had several conversations. “ChatGPT was a way of serving notice.”

But OpenAI isn’t Altman’s only project, and it’s not even his only project with ambitions to change the world. He is also a co-founder of a company called Tools for Humanity, which has the lofty goal of protecting people from the economic devastation that may arise from AI taking human jobs. The company’s first major project is Worldcoin, which uses an evil-looking metallic orb—called the Orb—to take eyeball scans from people all over the world.

Those scans are converted into unique codes that confirm you are a real, individual human, not a bot. In the future, this will theoretically grant you access to a universal basic income parceled out through Worldcoin’s cryptocurrency, WLD. (You will want this because you will not be able to find work.) More than 2 million people in 35 countries have been scanned already, according to Tools for Humanity’s World ID app. Although it’s not yet available in the United States, the WLD token has been distributed elsewhere, and the company has also recruited users through cash incentives in countries such as Indonesia and Kenya.

In its coverage of the Orb, The New York Times made a reference to the 2002 sci-fi thriller Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise must replace his eyeballs in order to evade a techno-police state he helped build. On social media, people have called the concept “scary,” “nightmare fuel,” and “blackmirror asf” (asf meaning “as fuck”). Even Vitalik Buterin, a co-creator of the Ethereum cryptocurrency and a supporter of the project, acknowledged in a blog post its “dystopian vibez.” These reactions aren’t anchored in the concept of a UBI supplied through cryptocurrency, or in the idea that iris verification might someday be necessary to differentiate bots from people (though plenty of legitimate criticism has been made of both those things). No: It’s because it’s an orb and it’s scanning your eyes, specifically to prepare you for a future of which many people are reasonably terrified.

[From the September 2023 issue: Does Sam Altman know what he’s creating?]

Ordinarily, a solid idea for marketing something new would be to position it as the opposite of dystopian. This is what Apple did in its 1984 Super Bowl commercial, which was 1984-themed and directed by Ridley Scott. It portrayed IBM as Big Brother, a force for vaguely fascist conformity and dreariness. Meanwhile, the Macintosh was a symbol of vital energy and freedom. That ad is famous at least in part because it’s very edgy: It’s really a risk to feature lockstep-marching skinheads in a commercial at all, even if what you’re ultimately saying is that your product can be personified as their opposite (a sprinting female model in athletic shorts).

But recently, even Apple has acknowledged dark times ahead—“I’m Pretty Sure Apple Knows We’re All Going to Die Soon,” the reporter Katie Notopoulos summarized last year, after the company revealed its new satellite-emergency-calling feature and an Apple Watch that can withstand extreme weather. And more often, the tech companies lean in—they say, We are the dystopia. Nobody forced Tools for Humanity to go with the Orb. Nobody ever makes tech companies glaze their products and their marketing with upsetting science-fiction or fantasy references, but they do it all the time. They toy with us.

Peter Thiel’s highly secretive data-analytics company, Palantir, was named in reference to the all-seeing eyelike stones primarily used by the evil characters in the Lord of the Rings series. Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta and went all-in on the metaverse, borrowing the term from the 1992 Neal Stephenson novel, Snow Crash, apparently unaware that the book is not exactly pro–virtual reality. (It’s about how awful it would be to live in an even more class-segregated society, made possible by technology that originally sounded egalitarian.) Even Google’s onetime “Don’t be evil” motto was a bit tongue-in-cheek, maybe. It suggested, at least, that the company had the capacity to do a lot of evil if it wanted to.

[Read: America already has an AI underclass]

Probably the most famous instance of the dystopia-taunting phenomenon is the meal-replacement drink Soylent, which debuted in 2013 and was named after a product in the 1966 sci-novel Make Room! Make Room! The 1973 film adaptation of this book, Soylent Green, is better known. In the book, the soylent is soy and lentils; in the movie, the soylent is smushed-up people. The company openly winks at the gloomy connotations of knocking back a joyless blend of nutrients to stay alive while opting out of the time-consuming process of selecting and eating foods that one might actually enjoy. To announce a new mint-chocolate flavor, Soylent created ads promoting the hashtag #plantsnotpeople. “Clearly I’m wanting someone to investigate it a little deeper if I’m calling it Soylent,” a co-founder, Rob Rhinehart, told Ars Technica.

Buying a bottle of Soylent is a consumer choice. But for tech companies, inevitability is the point. They shape the world we live in, whether we want them to or not. The basic premise of Worldcoin is that everyone will need to be scanned. Not that everyone will want to be and prefer to be. The Orb is not a playful nutrient slurry; it is not meant to be a wink.

I asked Tiago Sada, head of product at Tools for Humanity, about the device’s appearance. He told me it is meant to seem “friendly” and “familiar.” When you set it down, it looks upward at 23.5 degrees, the same angle of Earth’s tilt in its orbit around the sun. Other iris scanners are “super creepy,” Sada said. “You feel like you’re going to the doctor.” I asked him: Say that you hadn’t built the Orb and were just coming across it for the first time; what would it look like to you? A Christmas ornament, he decided. To other people, it looks like a disco ball, he said. They love it. When John Patroulis, the chief marketing officer for Tools for Humanity, brought an inactive Orb to The Atlantic’s office so that I could hold it, I also asked him if he thought there was anything scary about the Orb’s appearance. No. “I think it looks cool,” he said.

[Read: The monk who thinks the world is ending]

In fairness, the company’s designers are in a tight spot: What should an object look like if it’s scanning your eyes to help bring about a future in which people have lost their jobs to artificial intelligence and are being paid a universal basic income as a result? I wouldn’t want it to be cute. I wouldn’t want it to be scary. Probably I just wouldn’t want it. But now that it’s here, I’m fascinated by the Orb. So I downloaded an app and made an appointment to be scanned.

On a Friday morning, I walked over to the Meatpacking District and was buzzed in to a co-working space run by a venture-capital fund. The Orb was sitting on a stool in a corner of the room, near an open supply closet. Truthfully, it did look friendly. The upward tilt of its little face made it appear curious. (Anything can be anthropomorphized!) An Orb operator named Nick walked me through the process. In the World ID app, I checked a few boxes saying I understood what was happening. Then I checked a box saying it was okay for the company to store my iris photos and use them in its training data. I did this because there was a person standing next to me and I didn’t want to seem stingy. I’m an organ donor. I always tip. And I didn’t want to be rude to the machine.

Nick held the Orb up for me while I looked into it, which actually was frightening for a second because a bunch of tiny red lights came on. But they were quickly replaced by a white ring of light and a confirmation that I had successfully verified myself “as a real and unique person.” I sent this information to my boyfriend, and he said I shouldn’t have done it. Well, too late. I sent this information to my editor, who I thought might be more excited. He said, “Congratulations,” and then “Now what.” I honestly had no idea; I guess we wait for the future to arrive.

The Atlantic is today announcing new speakers––including former Secretary of State and United States Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton––appearing at the 15th annual Atlantic Festival, taking place on Thursday, September 28, and Friday, September 29, at The Wharf in Washington, D.C. Clinton will be in conversation with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, discussing existential threats to democracy. Goldberg will also interview Secretary of State Antony Blinken and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Also announced today are an interview with Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra with senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II; and a conversation led by Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder and president of Emerson Collective, with the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie G. Bunch III.

The Atlantic is pleased to welcome and announce CBS News as the exclusive broadcast media partner for The Atlantic Festival. CBS News journalists will moderate a number of conversations at the festival, and the network will have a presence throughout the event.

The festival’s two days will feature interviews with the actor, producer, and activist Kerry Washington; Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania; Governor Spencer Cox of Utah; Representative Joaquin Castro; the 2024 Republican presidential candidate Will Hurd; former Representative Gabby Giffords; the chief technology officer of OpenAI, Mira Murati; and the authors Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lauren Groff, and Jake Tapper. The evening of September 28 will feature the debut of Netflix’s forthcoming docuseries Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul, followed by a conversation featuring the series’s director and renowned documentarian, R. J. Cutler. September 29 will feature a night of live storytelling with the filmmaker Spike Lee, in conversation with the Atlantic contributing writer Jemele Hill.

Additional program announcements include:

Along with Goldberg, Newkirk, and Hill, many of The Atlantic’s journalists will lead and participate in conversation across the festival, including Tim Alberta, Ross Andersen, Julie Beck, Gal Beckerman, Ron Brownstein, McKay Coppins, Caitlin Dickerson, David Frum, Claudine Ebeid, Franklin Foer, Megan Garber, Adam Harris, Sarah Laskow, Helen Lewis, Shirley Li, Mark Leibovich, Annie Lowrey, Tom Nichols, Elaina Plott Calabro, Rebecca Rosen, Hanna Rosin, Clint Smith, Andrea Valdez, and many more.

CBS News’ anchors and correspondents who will moderate festival events are John Dickerson, anchor of CBS News Prime Time with John Dickerson; Nancy Cordes, chief White House correspondent; Weijia Jiang, senior White House correspondent; and correspondent Christina Ruffini.

The Big Story: The Future of Major League Baseball (September 28, 4:30–5:30 p.m.)
The Atlantic staff writer Mark Leibovich will be in conversation with Major League Baseball executives Morgan Sword and Raúl Ibañez for a discussion on the league’s recent innovations and the future of America’s pastime.

Radio Atlantic LIVE (September 29, 5:30–6:30 p.m.)
The host of Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin, will lead a live podcast taping with the Atlantic staff writers Elaina Plott Calabro and Franklin Foer to talk about their in-depth reporting on the Biden administration and look ahead to the 2024 presidential election.

The Climate Summit (September 28, 2:30–4 p.m.)
This session will address today’s most urgent climate challenges and offer solutions for a more resilient future. Summit participants include David M. Turk, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy; and Rohit Aggarwala, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, and chief climate officer of New York City.

The Small-Business Summit: Scaling Sustainability (September 29, 12:45–2:15 p.m.)
The Atlantic staff writer Annie Lowrey will moderate this newly announced summit with speakers including Omi Shelly Bell, the founder and CEO of Black Girl Ventures; Emi Reyes, the CEO of the Latino Economic Development Center; Amir Tarighat, a co-founder and the CEO of Agency; Celena Gill, a co-founder and the CEO of Frères Branchiaux; and Ramunda Lark Young, a co-founder and owner of MahoganyBooks.

In Pursuit of Happiness Forum (September 29, 1–3 p.m.)
Cleo Wade and freestyle+ (part of Freestyle Love Supreme) have both been added to the In Pursuit of Happiness forum, which is led by the Atlantic contributing writer Arthur C. Brooks, and which also features the author Cheryl Strayed.

Atlantic Watch: Bad Press (September 29, 2:45–5:30 p.m.)
A screening of the new documentary Bad Press. Out of 574 federally recognized tribes, the Muscogee Nation was one of only five to establish a free and independent press—until the tribe’s legislative branch abruptly repealed the landmark Free Press Act in advance of an election, prompting a rogue reporter to take matters into her own hands. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the co-directors Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler, and Angel Ellis, the journalist at the center of the story.

In a session produced by our underwriter, supermodel, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Karlie Kloss and Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder and the CEO of Inflection AI, will be interviewed by The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, during “Leaps by Bayer Presents: Mind to Machine.” (September 28, 12:15–1 p.m.)

The 2023 Atlantic Festival is made possible through the generous support of Presenting Level Underwriters Leaps by Bayer, Pfizer, and Southern Company; Supporting Level Underwriter Allstate; and Contributing Level Underwriters AHIP, Barbour, Boston Consulting Group, City of Hope, Eli Lilly and Company, Genentech, Goldman Sachs, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Visit Seattle.

The Atlantic Festival
September 28–29, 2023
The Wharf, D.C., and Virtually
For Passes: https://theatlanticfestival.com

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.

The relationship between tech and sci-fi is closer—and messier—than observers might think.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Why married people are happier The real men south of Richmond The emptiness of the Ramaswamy doctrine

“A Spectrum of Futures”

I have some good news for readers of The Daily who are also active in the metaverse (if, indeed, you exist): Legs are on their way. Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, announced this week that its users would soon be able to add legs to their avatars in the VR versions of Meta Quest’s Horizon Home and Horizon Worlds. Before this update, figures in these virtual worlds were floating torsos that hovered above chairs and whooshed around conference rooms; legs were apparently a much-requested feature. Now the metaverse’s avatars will, in some ways, become more human, while also becoming more uncanny.

Reading about this news, I told my editor—mostly as a joke—that the metaverse users interested in accessing alternative realities and stepping into other lives should consider simply reading a novel. I stand by that cranky opinion, but it also got me thinking about the fact that the metaverse actually owes a lot to the novel. The term metaverse was coined in a 1992 science-fiction novel titled Snow Crash. (The book also helped popularize the term avatar, to refer to digital selves.) And when you start to look for them, you can find links between science fiction and real-world tech all over.

People often say that a new, hard-to-believe piece of technology (like eyeball-scanning orbs) seems plucked from science fiction. In many cases, the relationship between tech and sci-fi works both ways: Technologists might get ideas from sci-fi movies and books; scientists consult on sci-fi projects to make them more realistic. And creators of both tech and fiction are frequently sharing the same cultural anxieties and references. Sometimes the influence of sci-fi is explicit. The man credited with inventing the first cellphone reportedly drew inspiration from Dick Tracy; the government’s “Gorgon Stare” surveillance-drone technology can apparently be traced back to the Will Smith movie Enemy of the State. The name for the Taser references a young-adult science-fiction novel. The list goes on!

Often, though, the influence of science fiction on tech is less literal. Scientists are not generally reading novels and plucking new concepts for new inventions from them wholesale. But they may use pop-culture references to illustrate their ideas, or refer to science fiction in their research, Philipp Jordan, a lecturer in informatics at the University of Indiana, has found. His work has shown that nods to science fiction in computer-science papers have gone up in recent years, and that computer scientists have used fictional depictions of human-robot relationships—both positive, like with WALL-E, and dystopian, like with Skynet—as reference points in talking about the subject.

Jordan told me that there is a feedback loop between cultural output and technology. Science-fiction movies may reflect widespread fears about new technologies at a given moment—and then the public’s engagement with those films may be fed back into the scientific discourse. “I think [science fiction] is an extremely valuable asset for students, for the next generation of researchers, because it shows us a spectrum of futures, good and bad,” he said.

Ross Andersen, an Atlantic writer who covers science and technology, also told me he suspects that “a messy feedback loop” operates between sci-fi and real-world tech. Both technologists and writers who have come up with fresh ideas, he said, “might have simply been responding to the same preexisting human desires: to explore the deep ocean and outer space, or to connect with anyone on Earth instantaneously.” Citing examples such as Jules Verne’s novels and Isaac Asimov’s stories, Ross added that “whether or not science fiction influenced technology, it certainly anticipated a lot of it.”

The pattern of science fiction anticipating, or at least dovetailing with, cutting-edge real-world ideas is not new: In a 2016 article for The Atlantic, Edward Simon explored the sci-fi that was published during and before the peak of the scientific revolution, including such novels as Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Johannes Kepler’s Somnium. Literature helped spark curiosity as new scientific understandings were developing, he explained. “Science fiction alone did not inspire the scientific revolution, but the literature of the era did allow people to imagine different realities—in some cases, long before those realities actually became real,” Simon wrote.

Literature—even beyond pure science fiction—can help us imagine modes of living alongside new technologies. Don DeLillo’s work, notably White Noise, is freighted with the anxieties of the Cold War era. A more recent novel of his, Zero K, is laced with awe and longing about the capacity of science to ward off death. Works of climate fiction have attempted to reconcile enjoying life with living morally in a time of chaos and destruction, and many Silicon Valley novels throw the ethical shortcomings of dangerous inventions into relief. If art and technology have an invention feedback loop, perhaps they could develop an ethical one, too. Novels about technology tend to focus on the existence and the drama of dystopian tech itself—but they’re even more powerful when writers use narrative to examine the people that created those tools, and the human dynamics driving their existence. Writers have a unique power to explore moral questions about any new invention. Even more than new gadget ideas, the real world of tech could stand to learn from that.

Related:

The science fiction that came before science   What happens if China makes first contact?

Today’s News

According to an annual filing made public today, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has now formally disclosed taking three trips funded by the billionaire Harlan Crow. Joe Biggs, a former leader of the Proud Boys who assisted in the January 6 insurrection, was sentenced to 17 years in prison for seditious conspiracy, among other crimes. The attending physician to Congress said that Mitch McConnell was “medically clear” to continue with his schedule following an incident yesterday in which he appeared to freeze in front of reporters.

Evening Read

H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock / Getty

High-School English Needed a Makeover Before ChatGPT

By Daniel Herman

Maybe you have also experienced the distinctive blend of emotions elicited by first using ChatGPT—a deflating sense of wonder, a discomfiting awe. I certainly have. Since the emergence of generative AI last year, trying to envision the world we’re rapidly heading toward has been a vertiginous exercise. Coders may be replaced by algorithmically perfected, non-salary-receiving robots. In 2027, your favorite thing to listen to while walking the dog may be AI Taylor Swift giving you personalized affirmations about getting over your ex and moving on with your life.

At the moment, much of that remains in the distance. Meanwhile, teachers like myself are standing at the leading edge of comprehending what our jobs mean now.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

This hurricane season is unprecedented. How to pick the right sort of vacation for you Very, very few people are falling down the YouTube rabbit hole.

Culture Break

Corinna Kern / Reuters

Read. Two new books—The Emotional Life of Populism, by Eva Illouz, and Zionism: An Emotional State, by Derek Penslar—explore how emotions, such as love and fear, shape Israeli politics.

Listen. Tomorrow Texas will join the 20 or so other states that have banned all medical procedures enabling gender transition for minors. The latest episode of Radio Atlantic explores how the law changed one teenager’s life.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Bookforum is back! I am a subscriber to the magazine, which shut down for several months earlier this year, so I was delighted to find the new issue in my mailbox a few days ago. The issue contains many excellent reviews, but I especially recommend Tarpley Hitt’s essay on cryptocurrency’s “first celebrity anti-promoter,” and Ed Park’s writing on the rediscovered canon of a gossip columnist cum raconteur’s novels.

— Lora

Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

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