All posts tagged: people’s lives

The Vanishing American Rabbi – The Atlantic

The Vanishing American Rabbi – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

In November 2021, Temple Israel in Springfield, Missouri, began looking for a new rabbi. A quick perusal of job listings from other Reform synagogues left the search committee stunned: Scores of congregations, many offering higher salaries in larger cities, had been unable to fill their positions for months, sometimes longer. Eventually, Temple Israel entered into a fee-for-service agreement with a rabbi two hours away. He would come in for Shabbat, High Holiday services, and adult-education classes, but he wouldn’t attend community meetings, collaborate with local faith leaders, or recruit new members to the synagogue. For only the second time in its 125-year history, Temple Israel wouldn’t have a full-time rabbi. Their experience is no outlier. A Conservative congregation just outside New York City, offering $150,000 a year plus benefits and a free three-bedroom home, spent three years trying to find a replacement for its rabbi after he announced his retirement in 2019. (Like other rabbis I spoke with, he delayed retirement to tide over the congregation.) There were simply not enough interested candidates. In the …

AI in Politics Is So Much Bigger Than Deepfakes

AI in Politics Is So Much Bigger Than Deepfakes

Published by skeptic

Last week, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, some of the state’s voters received a robocall purporting to be from President Joe Biden. Unlike the other such prerecorded calls reminding people to vote, this one had a different ask: Don’t bother coming out to the polls, the voice instructed. Better to “save your vote for the November election.” The message was strange, even nonsensical, but the voice on the line sure did sound like the president’s. “What a bunch of malarkey!” it exclaimed at one point. And caller ID showed that the call came from a former chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, according to the Associated Press. But this robocall appears to have been AI-generated. Who created it, and why, remains a mystery. Although the stunt likely had no real effect on the outcome of the election—Biden won, as anticipated, in a landslide—it vividly illustrated one of the many ways in which generative AI might influence an election. These tools can help candidates more easily get out their message, but they …

A stubborn workplace holiday tradition

A stubborn workplace holiday tradition

Published by skeptic

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. So much can go wrong at an office holiday party. And yet … see you in the break room at 5:30. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: A Baked-In Norm Many Americans have reconsidered the role of work in their lives in recent years. Is your office your family? No. Are your co-workers your friends? Not necessarily. Are you all still expected at the holiday party in the break room at 5:30? Yes. For some, sipping complimentary eggnog and listening to Mariah Carey with co-workers is a delight. For others, the office holiday party is a form of personal purgatory. These gatherings can be polarizing, but even through the profound cultural shifts of the past few years, the tradition of the white-collar holiday party endures. The office holiday party is a vestige of a time when …

Biden’s Economic Formula to Win 2024

Biden’s Economic Formula to Win 2024

Published by skeptic

President Joe Biden and Democrats cannot win the debate over the economy without fundamentally reframing the terms of the choice they are offering voters, an extensive new research study by one of the party’s prominent electoral-strategy groups has concluded. The study, scheduled to be released today, seeks to mitigate one of the party’s most glaring vulnerabilities heading into the 2024 election: the consistent finding in surveys that when it comes to managing the national economy or addressing inflation, significantly more voters express confidence in Republicans than in Democrats. To close that gap, the study argues, Biden and Democrats must shift the debate from which party is best equipped to grow the overall economy to which side can help families achieve what the report calls a “better life.” The study argues that Democrats can win that argument with a three-pronged message centered on: delivering tangible kitchen-table economic benefits (such as increased federal subsidies for buying health insurance), confronting powerful special interests (such as major corporations), and pledging to protect key personal liberties and freedoms, led by …

AI Astrology Is Getting a Little Too Personal

AI Astrology Is Getting a Little Too Personal

Published by skeptic

The first thing I ask Banu Guler, the founder of the astrology app Co–Star, is whether she can read my chart. We swap phones to look at each other’s profile. After we put our devices aside, she scrawls my astrological chart from memory into her notebook, a circle bisected by various lines like an erratically cut pie. It’s not looking good. There’s a 90-degree square between my sun and my Mars, which is, she lowers her voice and chuckles, “rough.” Apparently, it’s the shape that represents “sad and temporary.” Since its launch in 2017, Co–Star has contributed to a resurgence of Western astrology. The company claims that it’s home to 30 million registered accounts; a third-party analysis from data.ai shows that nearly 800,000 people use the app in a given month. Co–Star offers daily predictions about your life, arbitrary “Do” and “Don’t” lists that dictate how you should go about your day, and charts that tell you how compatible you are with your friends. Its language fluctuates between direct and vague, much of it coated …

Is Andy Beshear Kentucky’s Last Democratic Governor?

Is Andy Beshear Kentucky’s Last Democratic Governor?

Published by skeptic

The GOP controls nearly everything in Kentucky, a state that Donald Trump carried by 26 points in 2020. Republicans hold both U.S. Senate seats and five of Kentucky’s six House seats; they dominate both chambers of the state legislature. What Republicans don’t occupy is Kentucky’s most powerful post. The state’s governor is Andy Beshear, a Democrat elected in 2019 who is hoping to win a second term tomorrow. Operatives in both parties think he might, but the governor’s in a close race with his Republican opponent, Daniel Cameron, the state’s 37-year-old attorney general. Whether Beshear can stave him off will determine if Democrats maintain one of their most surprising footholds in southern politics. Beshear, 45, owes his success in a deep-red state to a combination of competent governance, political good fortune, and family lineage. His father, Steve, was a popular two-term governor who governed as a moderate and won the admiration of fellow Democrats for implementing the Affordable Care Act in the face of conservative opposition. The Republican governor whom Andy Beshear defeated in 2019, …

What Israel Can Learn From America’s 9/11 Response

What Israel Can Learn From America’s 9/11 Response

Published by skeptic

“I hope Israel looks hard at what the U.S. does when provoked and does better,” one reader argues. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Stringer / Reuters October 25, 2023, 3:45 PM ET Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Last week, as observers characterized the recent attack on Israel as that country’s 9/11, I asked, “What did you learn from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and America’s responses to them?” Replies have been edited for length and clarity. R. writes: I learned that Al Qaeda was a horrifically evil group in a part of the world where evil is all too common. But I also learned that separating the world into good and evil is not a good way to conduct foreign policy. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, and our war in Iraq did more harm than good. My advice to Israel is to proceed …

Trump Is Not a Moderate on Abortion

Trump Is Not a Moderate on Abortion

Published by skeptic

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion striking down Roe v. Wade triggered the emergence of an invasive system of surveillance and control targeting women as a class. In Nebraska, a mother and daughter pleaded guilty to charges related to the daughter having an abortion after their Facebook messages about acquiring abortion pills were handed over to authorities. In Texas—where the law grants those who snitch on acquaintances, friends, or loved ones who end a pregnancy financial remuneration—legislators want to outlaw searching for information about the procedure on the internet, and make traveling to get an abortion illegal. Aiming to extend their command over people’s lives into states that Republicans do not control, conservative judges have revived archaic federal laws seeking to ban the delivery of abortion medication all over the country. Every day, the conservative legal movement seeks to discover new ways to extend state domination over people’s private lives in order to prevent women from deciding for themselves whether to have a child. Alito, despite drawing a road map for repealing the 20th century, is not …

Washington Can Stop the AI Free-for-All

Washington Can Stop the AI Free-for-All

Published by skeptic

In April, lawyers for the airline Avianca noticed something strange. A passenger, Robert Mata, had sued the airline, alleging that a serving cart on a flight had struck and severely injured his left knee, but several cases cited in Mata’s lawsuit didn’t appear to exist. The judge couldn’t verify them, either. It turned out that ChatGPT had made them all up, fabricating names and decisions. One of Mata’s lawyers, Steven A. Schwartz, had used the chatbot as an assistant—his first time using the program for legal research—and, as Schwartz wrote in an affidavit, “was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.” The incident was only one in a litany of instances of generative AI spreading falsehoods, not to mention financial scams, nonconsensual porn, and more. Tech companies are marketing their AI products and potentially reaping enormous profits, with little accountability or legal oversight for the real-world damage those products can cause. The federal government is now trying to catch up. Late last month, the Biden administration announced that seven tech companies at …

Life Has Always Been a Performance

Life Has Always Been a Performance

Published by skeptic

Copies can be so much more appealing than their originals: Think of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened prints of Elizabeth Taylor and Mao Zedong and Jacqueline Kennedy, his hand-painted reproductions of Campbell’s soup cans. The title of Nothing Special, the Irish writer Nicole Flattery’s new novel, is itself a copy, derived, as Flattery has said, from an idea that Warhol once dreamed up for an unproduced talk show called The Nothing Special, which he envisioned to be about, well, nothing in particular. One can imagine an editor coolly slicing off the the of the original title from Flattery’s manuscript, imbuing it with that kind of muted disaffection that has become something of a trend among recent books by young Irish women writers, such as Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times. Unlike those works, though, Flattery’s novel—her first, following her 2019 short-story collection, Show Them a Good Time—looks to the past, taking place in the New York City of the 1960s and, later, the early 2010s. We follow Mae, the working-class daughter of a waitress, …