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Robert Menendez has held on to his Senate seat and retained the loyalty of many Democratic colleagues through past scandals. But, given the current political environment and the gravity of the charges he now faces, many fellow Democrats have had enough—and voters might turn on him too.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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Undermining the High Ground

Yesterday afternoon, a couple of hours after pleading not guilty to the charge that he had conspired to act as an agent of a foreign government, Senator Robert Menendez announced that “the government is engaged in primitive hunting, by which the predator chases its prey until it’s exhausted and then kills it. This tactic won’t work.”

The senior senator from New Jersey’s plea—and subsequent defiant statement—came just a few weeks after he pleaded not guilty to three separate counts of corruption. Menendez and his wife, Nadine, were accused of accepting bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for helping the government of Egypt and several businessmen. The original indictment was quite dramatic, peppered with talk of more than $500,000 of stashed-away cash and photos of gold bars found in his New Jersey home. Within hours of Menendez’s indictment, several state leaders, including the governor, called on him to step down. But Menendez is fighting hard against the allegations, even as colleagues turn on him.

Menendez has positioned himself as a victim, and has invoked identity politics in trying to defend himself. “It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat,” he said shortly after his initial indictment was announced. He has also accused “those behind this campaign” of smearing him as part of their political agenda: “For years, forces behind the scenes have repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave,” he said in a statement last month. “Menendez has been using explicitly Trump-y talking points in his defense,” my colleague David Graham, who has covered the Menendez charges, told me.

The Menendez imbroglio puts the Democrats in a difficult position. The party has enjoyed some moral high ground as Donald Trump faces various criminal indictments. But having a member of their own party facing such galling corruption charges—and saying in his own defense that, essentially, the deep state is out to get him—may not only undermine that high ground, David said. It may weaken Democrats’ case against Trump’s own statements about being the victim of deep-state machinations, and it could damage voters’ faith in the Democratic Party.

This is not Menendez’s first time facing federal bribery charges: In 2015, he was accused of receiving gifts and some $750,000 in campaign donations from a Florida eye doctor. Those charges resulted in a hung jury, and ultimately the judge declared a mistrial. Menendez was able to maintain his seat through the turmoil, and he denied any wrongdoing. His colleagues, by and large, stood by him. But this time, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called on Menendez to resign almost immediately after his indictment, and other state Democratic leaders soon followed. Cory Booker, the junior senator from New Jersey who has called Menendez a mentor and friend, urged his colleague to step down a few days after the indictment. Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, has reportedly confronted Menendez in the halls of Congress (or, more precisely, on an escalator) to tell him to resign. More than half of Senate Democrats have called on Menendez to resign, though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been more reserved. “The Senator has made it clear that he is innocent and will not resign from his position as the senior U.S. Senator for New Jersey,” Robert Julien, a spokesperson for Mendendez’s office, told me in an email.

Part of the reason that many of Menendez’s colleagues are turning against him this time, David explained, has to do with the relative severity of the charges. Bribery charges are never a great look, but the charges Menendez currently faces cut to the core of his committee work in the Senate, accusing him of using his position as the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to work on behalf of a foreign power.

The calculations are likely political too: The last time Menendez faced bribery charges, Republican Chris Christie was the governor of New Jersey. If Menendez had given up his seat, Christie could have appointed a Republican in his place. Now the state has a Democratic governor in Murphy, who would presumably appoint a Democrat to replace him, David explained. Even so, Democrats are anxious about introducing uncertainty when they have such a razor-thin majority over Republicans in the Senate. Democrats have become more and more obsessed with beating their Republican opponents. That fixation on winning comes at a cost, David said: “If you are so focused on beating Republicans that you’re willing to look past corruption allegations, you ultimately undermine yourself, even if you can win the next election.”

But whether Menendez can actually win his next election is still a major question. He is a savvy backroom fighter, David explained, which has helped him stay in power in the cutthroat world of New Jersey politics. “There’s lots of backstabbing in ways that are totally legal, but not necessarily savory,” he said. Menendez has hung on through turbulence, but whether he can make it through this scandal intact will be, in part, up to the courts. It will also be up to voters.

Menendez’s trial is scheduled to begin on May 6, about a month before the primary race for his Senate seat. So far, Menendez has made no public indication that he won’t run for reelection. But his odds are not looking promising. He is being trounced in polls by Andrew Kim, a member of the House of Representatives who announced his campaign for Menendez’s seat the day after the senator was indicted. Menendez is innocent until proven guilty, but his constituents might just be ready to move on.

Related:

Bob Menendez never should have been senator this long in the first place. The case against Bob Menendez (From 2015)

Today’s News

A third former Trump-campaign lawyer, Jenna Ellis, pleaded guilty in the Georgia election-interference case. Israel escalated attacks on targets in Gaza, including a refugee camp. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said that more than 700 people were killed in a 24-hour period. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer has dropped out of the Speaker of the House race, just hours after becoming the nominee.

Evening Read

Fryderyk Gabowicz / picture-alliance / dpa / AP

Britney Finally Tells Her Story. It’s Dark.

By Spencer Kornhaber

One of the most disturbing parts of Britney Spears’s story has long been the way people talk about her. As soon as the pop star was released from the legal guardianship of her father in November 2021, ending a 13-year ordeal that she has described as torture, some onlookers asked whether one of the most successful women on Earth could handle living as an adult. In barroom chitchat, meandering podcasts, and online comment sections, you can now find people claiming that freeing Britney—allowing her to, for example, choose how she spends her money or what she eats for dinner—was a mistake. They cite alleged evidence of erratic behavior such as the recent video that the 41-year-old Spears posted of herself dancing sexily with prop knives.

Usually such skeptics speak in a conspiratorial tone, indicating that they think of themselves as radical truth-tellers defying the pink-uniformed groupthink of the #FreeBritney movement. But Spears’s new memoir makes clear that this shaming and second-guessing, using the language of care and concern, is deeply conventional. She portrays herself—including with the title The Woman in Me—as battling the media expectation that she remain trapped in girlhood, virginal and helpless.

Read the full article.

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Read. A new book from Philippe Sands, The Last Colony, tells the story of the Chagossians, an island people who were expelled from their homes by the British and Americans.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The man I am looking at is very hot. He’s got that angular hot-guy face, with hollow cheeks and a sharp jawline. His dark hair is tousled, his skin blurred and smooth. But I shouldn’t even bother describing him further, because this man is self-evidently hot, the kind of person you look at and immediately categorize as someone whose day-to-day life is defined by being abnormally good-looking.

This hot man, however, is not real. He is just a computer simulation, a photo created in response to my request for a close-up of a man by an algorithm that likely analyzed hundreds of millions of photos in order to conclude that this is what I want to see: a smizing, sculptural man in a denim jacket. Let’s call him Sal.

Sal was spun up by artificial intelligence. One day last week, from my home in Los Angeles (notably, the land of hot people), I opened up Bing Image Creator and commanded it to make me a man from scratch. I did not specify this man’s age or any of his physical characteristics. I asked only that he be rendered “looking directly at the camera at sunset,” and let the computer decide the rest. Bing presented me with four absolute smokeshows—four different versions of Sal, all dark-haired with elegant bone structure. They looked like casting options for a retail catalog.

Sal is an extreme example of a bigger phenomenon: When an AI image-generation tool—like the ones made by Midjourney, Stability AI, or Adobe—is prompted to create a picture of a person, that person is likely to be better-looking than those of us who actually walk the planet Earth. To be clear, not every AI creation is as hot as Sal. Since meeting him, I’ve reviewed more than 100 fake faces of generic men, women, and nonbinary people, made to order by six popular image-generating tools, and found different ages, hair colors, and races. One face was green-eyed and freckled; another had bright-red eye shadow and short bleached-blond hair. Some were bearded, others clean-shaven. The faces did tend to have one thing in common, though: Aside from skewing young, most were above-average hot, if not drop-dead gorgeous. None was downright ugly. So why do these state-of-the-art, text-to-image models love a good thirst trap?

After reaching out to computer scientists, a psychologist, and the companies that make these AI-generation tools, I arrived at three potential explanations for the phenomenon. First, the “hotness in, hotness out” theory: Products such as Midjourney are spitting out hotties, it suggests, because they were loaded up with hotties during training. AI image generators learn how to generate novel pictures by ingesting huge databases of existing ones, along with their descriptions. The exact makeup of that feedstock tends to be kept secret, Hany Farid, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, told me, but the images they include are likely biased in favor of attractive faces. That would make their outputs prone to being attractive too.

[Read: We don’t actually know if AI is taking over everything]

The data sets could be stacked with hotties because they draw significantly from  edited and airbrushed photos of celebrities, advertising models, and other professional hot people. (One popular research data set, called CelebA, comprises 200,000 annotated pictures of famous people’s faces.) Including normal-people pictures gleaned from photo-sharing sites such as Flickr might only make the hotness problem worse. Because we tend to post the best photos of ourselves—at times enhanced by apps that smooth out skin and whiten teeth—AIs could end up learning that even folks in candid shots are unnaturally attractive. “If we posted honest photos of ourselves online, well, then, I think the results would look really different,” Farid said.

For a good example of how existing photography on the internet could bias an AI model, here’s a nonhuman one: DALL-E seems inclined to make images of wristwatches where the hands point to 10:10—an aesthetically pleasing v configuration that is often used in watch advertisements. If the AI image generators are seeing lots of skin-care advertisements (or any other ads with faces), they could be getting trained to produce aesthetically pleasing cheekbones.

A second explanation of the problem has to do with how the AI faces are constructed. According to what I’ll call the “midpoint hottie” hypothesis, the image-generating tools end up generating more attractive faces as an accidental by-product of how they analyze the photos that go into them. “Averageness is more attractive in general than non-averageness,” Lisa DeBruine, a professor at the University of Glasgow School of Psychology and Neuroscience who studies the perception of faces, told me. Combining faces tends to make them more symmetrical and blemish free. “If you take a whole class of undergraduate psychology students and you average together all the women’s faces, that average is going to be pretty attractive,” she said. (This rule applies only to sets of faces of a single demographic, though: When DeBruine helped analyze the faces of visitors to a science museum in the U.K., for example, she found that the averaged one was an odd amalgamation of bearded men and small children.) AI image generators aren’t simply smushing faces together, Farid said, but they do tend to produce faces that look like averaged faces. Thus, even a generative-AI tool trained only on a set of normal faces might end up putting out unnaturally attractive ones.

Finally, we have the “hot by design” conjecture. It may be that a bias for attractiveness is built into the tools on purpose or gets inserted after the fact by regular users. Some AI models incorporate human feedback by noting which of their outputs are preferred. “We don’t know what all of these algorithms are doing, but they might be learning from the kind of ways that people interact with them,” DeBruine said. “Maybe people are happier with the face images of attractive people.” Alexandru Costin, the vice president for generative AI at Adobe, told me that the company tracks which images generated by its Firefly web application are getting downloaded, and then feeds that information back into the tool. This process has produced a drift toward hotness, which then has to be corrected. The company uses various strategies to “de-bias” the model, Costin said, so that it won’t only serve up images “where everybody looks Photoshopped.”

Source: Adobe Firefly. Prompt: “a close up of a person looking directly at the camera”

A representative for Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator, which I used to make Sal, told me that the software is powered by DALL-E and directed questions about the hotness problem to DALL-E’s creator, OpenAI. OpenAI directed questions back to Microsoft, though the company did put out a document earlier this month acknowledging that its latest model “defaults to generating images of people that match stereotypical and conventional ideals of beauty,” which could end up “perpetuating unrealistic beauty benchmarks and fostering dissatisfaction and potential body image distress.” The makers of Stable Diffusion and Midjourney did not respond to requests for comment.

Farid stressed that very little is known about these models, which have been widely available to the public for less than a year. As a result, it’s hard to know whether AI’s pro-cutie slant is a feature or a bug, let alone what’s causing the hotness problem and who might be to blame. “I think the data explains it up to a point, and then I think it’s algorithmic after that,” he told me. “Is it intentional? Is it sort of an emergent property? I don’t know.”

Not all of the tools mentioned above produced equally hot people. When I used DALL-E, as accessed through OpenAI’s site, the outputs were more realistically not-hot than those produced by Bing Image Creator, which relies on a more advanced version of the same model. In fact, when I prompted Bing to make me an “ugly” person, it still leaned hot, offering two very attractive people whose faces happened to have dirt on them and one disturbing figure who resembled a killer clown. A few other image generators, when prompted to make “ugly” people, offered sets of wrinkly, monstrous, orc-looking faces with bugged-out eyes. Adobe’s Firefly tool returned a fresh set of stock-image-looking hotties.

Source: Adobe Firefly. Prompt: “a photo of an ugly person”

Whatever the cause of AI hotness, the phenomenon itself could have ill effects. Magazines and celebrities have long been scolded for editing photos to push an ideal of beauty that is impossible to achieve in real life, and now AI image models may be succumbing to the same trend. “If all the images we’re seeing are of these hyper-attractive, really-high-cheekbones models that can’t even exist in real life, our brains are going to start saying, Oh, that’s a normal face,” DeBruine said. “And then we can start pushing it even more extreme.” When Sal, with his beautiful face, starts to come off like an average dude, that’s when we’ll know we have a problem.

One of the most disturbing parts of Britney Spears’s story has long been the way people talk about her. As soon as the pop star was released from the legal guardianship of her father in November 2021, ending a 13-year ordeal that she has described as torture, some onlookers asked whether one of the most successful women on Earth could handle living as an adult. In barroom chitchat, meandering podcasts, and online comment sections, you can now find people claiming that freeing Britney—allowing her to, for example, choose how she spends her money or what she eats for dinner—was a mistake. They cite alleged evidence of erratic behavior such as the recent video that the 41-year-old Spears posted of herself dancing sexily with prop knives.

Usually such skeptics speak in a conspiratorial tone, indicating that they think of themselves as radical truth-tellers defying the pink-uniformed groupthink of the #FreeBritney movement. But Spears’s new memoir makes clear that this shaming and second-guessing, using the language of care and concern, is deeply conventional. She portrays herself—including with the title The Woman in Me—as battling the media expectation that she remain trapped in girlhood, virginal and helpless. But she also writes with mystification about the scale of her story, the extraordinary drama and unfairness of it. A reader may come away feeling that her struggle is older, more primal, than our cultural era. People seem to want her to be a scapegoat for all manner of human failings, and, in fact, they seem to want to punish her.

Readers expecting a breezy celebrity memoir will be shocked by the grim opening pages. Describing her childhood in rural Louisiana, Spears’s declarative sentences have the ominousness of the Old Testament, and her themes are Southern Gothic. “Tragedy runs in my family,” Spears writes, before describing her paternal grandfather, June, as an abusive man who committed two of his wives to mental hospitals. One of those wives killed herself on the grave of her infant child. June’s harshness, Spears feels, made her own father, Jamie, a cruel and demanding alcoholic.

Singing beckoned as an escape from her tense home life, but the stage provided no refuge from others’ judgment and control. In early adolescence she was cast on The Mickey Mouse Club; another Mouseketeer, Justin Timberlake, would become both her peer in teen stardom and her serious boyfriend from 1999 to 2002. In the book and in media coverage of late, Timberlake has been cast, almost too neatly, as an example of the gendered double standards of early-2000s pop culture. His public expressions of lust were cheered while hers were condemned. The book’s description of him pressuring her into a secret abortion at home suggests that the affable, gentlemanly reputation he’s long enjoyed was hollow.

But looking back, Spears almost appears less bothered by Timberlake’s treatment of her than by the media’s obsession with their romance. Her most intimate experiences were never her own; she mattered too much, to too many people. “As a child, I’d always had a guilty conscience, a lot of shame, a sense that my family thought I was just plain bad,” she writes in a section about being vilified after her breakup with Timberlake. “I knew the truth of our relationship was nothing like how it was being portrayed, but I still imagined that if I was suffering, I must have deserved it.”

As Spears matured, a cycle of scrutiny and rebellion accelerated, though the rebellions—such as Spears having kids with a “bad boy,” the backup dancer Kevin Federline, and attacking a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella—come off as tame in the book’s telling. (“Pathetic, really. An umbrella.”) She revisits the circumstances that led to the conservatorship, including the famous incident when she, in the midst of a custody dispute, locked herself with her younger son in a bathroom. But the underlying mysteries of her long legal saga remain vexing, both to the reader and to Spears herself. The public perception has long been that outlandish drug use or a terrible mental-health crisis must have justified her captivity. Spears admits only to popping Adderall—a very quotidian, if very dangerous, substance to abuse. “I know I had been acting wild but there was nothing I’d done that justified their treating me like I was a bank robber,” she writes. “Nothing that justified upending my entire life.”

Spears’s accounting of her years in the conservatorship is glum and maddening, rendered in a frank, can-you-believe-this-shit tone (“Pretty quickly, I called the weird-ass lawyer the court had appointed for me and asked him for help. Incredibly, he was all I really had.”). How could the people around her do what they did? Forced into a grueling performance schedule while being restricted to a $2,000-a-week allowance and a harsh diet, Spears says she found no commiseration from family members or legal counselors, many of whom were being paid handsomely by her efforts. She tried to play their games, acting the good girl in hopes of eventual release, but to no avail. She began to fear that the desired endgame for her handlers was her profitable and tidy death.

No satisfying explanation could ever exist for what Spears went through, and the book’s clear and measured prose—reportedly shaped by a ghostwriter—inevitably will make the reader wonder what’s left out. But the illogic of the story on the page does fit with the absurd weight Spears carried in the public consciousness. At the dawn of the internet age, Spears at first seemed the perfect everygirl, singing through a sweet smile. But with every passing month, she revealed herself as, instead, a human being with flaws and appetites. This was a reality that the machine around her could not abide. Spears’s famous hoisting of a python at the 2001 VMAs (a stunt that, she now writes, was legitimately frightening) is the enduring image of her career for a good reason: She was our era’s Eve, bearing the snake of sin on her shoulders. Her successors today—such as the self-directed and savvy Taylor Swift—clearly internalized that the public narrative, forged in blaring headlines and quiet conversations alike, can have terrible power.

Spears’s narrative has, in recent years, finally turned: She theorizes that members of the #FreeBritney movement “subconsciously” caught onto her pain and frustration a few years ago, and says that their support was integral to her finally speaking out in court against her father. For them, she is deeply grateful. But she hardly feels that the world has stopped exploiting her. Late in the book, she expresses discomfort with the recent wave of documentaries about her plight. “There was so much guessing about what I must have thought or felt,” she writes.

The Woman in Me clarifies how she’s felt—angry, horrified, confused—but perhaps more important, it seeks to close a long and dark chapter. Spears now wants to “get my spiritual life in order, to pay attention to the little things, and slow down,” she writes. Yet the discussion spinning around her, dissecting and judging and creating mythological storylines for the masses to get invested in, has hardly decelerated. Even before its release, the memoir was strip-mined for gossip items. “I don’t like the headlines I am reading,” Spears wrote on Instagram a few days ago. The post was a reminder that she is not a mere character on our screens, but a mortal woman who is alive and perceiving, and so perhaps we should all watch our mouths.