Companies are increasingly caught up in governments’ competing aims. What to do?
Here is how to get him to sign up again
But there are still ways to step back from the brink
By Diana L. Eck
Lewis Mumford in introducing his now-classic study The City in History wrote, “This book opens with a city that was, symbolically, a world: it closes with a world that has become, in many practical aspects, a city.”1 He saw among the chief functions of the city the conversion of energy into culture. Indeed, the city of old was the anchor of the surrounding culture and synonymous with it. However in the decades since he wrote, the energies of cities have been fueled by an increasingly diverse population with increasingly diverse cultures. Cities are the very places where we see the effects of global migration and face the questions of identity in a complex multicultural society. Today there are a multitude of cities that are, symbolically, the world with all its diversity. Not just New York and London, but Minneapolis and Leeds are today’s world-cities. And the globalization of people, communications, and transportation has created a world that is, in many ways, a city.
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
The architectural profession is in the midst of a long-overdue ethical reckoning. For years, it could ride the tidal wave of globalization to bigger and better commissions while still claiming that it was fighting the good fight. Nowadays, architects are more likely to be on the defensive. Our most celebrated architectural minds are routinely chastised in the media for placing personal vanity above the interests of the general public. And the fact that many of them have been far too willing to brush aside a client’s dubious ethics for the right commission has done little to dispel that perception.
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Despite their wide use, large language models are still mysterious. Revealing their true nature is urgent and important.
Bloodstream infections by a common fungus are less deadly in mice engineered to have lower levels of a protein secreted by immune cells.
The Guardian Weekly (July 28, 2023) – Has Vox’s far-right bubble popped? The gridlocked reign in Spain. Plus: Goodbye to Britain’s fish and chips?
Socialist leader assures party ‘democracy can find a formula for government’ as left and right blocs try to form viable coalitions
The Spanish Socialist leader, Pedro Sánchez, has ruled out a return to the polls following Sunday’s inconclusive snap general election, insisting a new government can be formed after his ruling coalition was narrowly beaten by the opposition conservative People’s party (PP).
Plenty of people will tell you the East Neuk of Fife in Scotland is the best place in the world to eat fish and chips. So what happens when its chippies – and chippies across the UK – start to close?
Times Literary Supplement (July 28, 2023): War diaries – Marci Shore on Ukrainian accounts from the front line; Richard Russo reconstructed; Boris and other bounders; Family secrets and lies; and more…
Jeffrey Toobin’s book about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing traces the path from Ronald Reagan’s antigovernment ideology to today’s radicalized right.
By Sean Wilentz
Ronald Reagan’s pronouncement, in his first inaugural address in 1981, that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” marked a signal moment in what has become the most successful political counterrevolution in modern American history.
In 1847, Sir John Franklin and a crew of 128 men disappeared while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage. A National Geographic team sought to find evidence of their fate—but the Arctic doesn’t give up its secrets easily.
BY MARK SYNNOTT
Jacob Keanik scanned his binoculars over the field of ice surrounding our sailboat. He was looking for the polar bear that had been stalking us for the past 24 hours, but all he could see was an undulating carpet of blue-green pack ice that stretched to the horizon. “Winter is coming,” he murmured. Jacob had never seen Game of Thrones and was unaware of the phrase’s reference to the show’s menacing hordes of ice zombies, but to us, the threat posed by this frozen horde was equally dire. Here in remote Pasley Bay, deep in the Canadian Arctic, winter would bring a relentless tide of boat-crushing ice. If we didn’t find a way out soon, it could trap us and destroy our vessel—and perhaps us too.
BY SOREN WALLJASPER,
In 1845, British explorer Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 men set out in search of the Northwest Passage—a fabled sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific that would hasten trade between Europe and Asia. None of Franklin’s crew survived. The Norwegian ship Gjøa in 1903-06 made the first successful passage. In 2022, a National Geographic team attempted to retrace Franklin’s expedition to find fresh evidence of its undoing.
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ON AN UNUSUALLY rainy evening in Los Angeles this March, at the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, two investigative reporters from Germany gave a talk about a financial scandal known as “cum-ex.” Against the backdrop of a mid-century modern terrace, its polished cement looking dull and gray in the storm, the pair flashed through a series of slides about international tax embezzlement.
A relatively small drip of funds from the German cultural ministry sometimes supports talks like these in the name of Mann’s legacy. When the capital of German literary life was exiled to Los Angeles around the Second World War, the author built a home that now still hosts salons in the name of democratic cultural exchange.
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THE YEAR WAS 1971, the place Łódź. Journalist Hanna Krall was interviewing a pioneering heart surgeon named Jan Moll. The good doctor, apparently unhappy with the outcome of previous interviews, told Krall that everything journalists ever wrote about medicine was nonsense. So, if she wanted to avoid doing the same, he strongly suggested she have her article vetted by a certain cardiologist, a Dr. Edelman, who, said Moll, would correct her mistakes. Krall agreed and arranged a meeting. She sat down with Marek Edelman in the Grand Hotel café, where it took 15 minutes for him to read through her article.
With a common touch that appeals to juries and a client list that includes Elon Musk, Jay-Z, and Megan Thee Stallion, he’s on a winning streak that makes his rivals seethe.
From the issue of July 31, 2023
In the summer of 2018, four years before he bought Twitter, the entrepreneur Elon Musk was facing legal consequences for two of his more reckless forays on the social-media platform. A boys’ soccer team in Thailand had been trapped in a flooded cave for more than two weeks, and a caver involved in the rescue said on CNN that a bespoke submarine Musk had sent to save the children was a “PR stunt.” Infuriated, Musk told his twenty-two million Twitter followers, without basis in fact, that the caver, Vernon Unsworth, was a “pedo guy.” The tweet went viral, and Unsworth’s attorney threatened to sue Musk for defamation.
The dealer has been so successful selling art to masters of the universe that he has become one of them.
It was the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend on Further Lane, the best street in Amagansett, the best town in the Hamptons, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian was bumming around his eleven-thousand-square-foot modernist beach mansion, looking pretty relaxed for a man who, the next day, would host a party for a hundred and forty people. A pair of French bulldogs, Baby and Humphrey, waddled about, and Gagosian’s butler, Eddie, a slim man with a ponytail and an air of informal professionalism, handed him a sparkling water.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 23, 2023) – In this issue, Robert Kolker on a family’s struggle with a genetic mutation that leads to dementia in middle age; Caity Weaver tries to track down Tom Cruise; Jon Gertner on the future of Wikipedia as A.I. feeds off its human input; and more.
They all have a 50-50 chance of inheriting a cruel genetic mutation — which means disappearing into dementia in middle age. This is the story of what it’s like to live with those odds.
By Robert Kolker
Barb was the youngest in her large Irish Catholic family — a surprise baby, the ninth child, born 10 years after the eighth. Living in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, her family followed the football schedule: high school games on Friday night, college games on Saturday, the Steelers on Sunday. Dad was an engineer, mom was a homemaker and Barb was the family mascot, blond and adorable, watching her brothers and sisters finish school and go on to their careers.
Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right — without destroying itself in the process?
By JON GERTNER
In early 2021, a Wikipedia editor peered into the future and saw what looked like a funnel cloud on the horizon: the rise of GPT-3, a precursor to the new chatbots from OpenAI. When this editor — a prolific Wikipedian who goes by the handle Barkeep49 on the site — gave the new technology a try, he could see that it was untrustworthy. The bot would readily mix fictional elements (a false name, a false academic citation) into otherwise factual and coherent answers.
The action star has gone to great lengths to avoid the press for more than a decade. But maybe our writer could track him down anyway?
By CAITY WEAVER
In an interview with Playboy in 2012, Tom Cruise described Katie Holmes as “an extraordinary person” with a “wonderful” clothing line, and someone for whom he was fond of “doing things like creating romantic dinners” — behavior that, he confided, “she enjoys.” It would prove to be his last major interview with a reporter to date. Despite what may be recalled through the penumbra of memory, this sudden silence was not directly preceded by either of Cruise’s infamous appearances on television: not by his NBC’s “Today” show interview (in which he labeled host Matt Lauer both “glib” and “Matt — MattMattMattMatt”), nor even by his appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (in which he reverse-catapulted himself onto Winfrey’s fawn-colored couch multiple times in a demonstration of his enthusiasm for Holmes).
Boomers Daily 