Kansas Senate candidate Adam Hamilton (D) on Sunday responded to Vice President Vance’s attacks on his religious beliefs, calling the attacks “really sad” and “pathetic.” ABC’s Jonathan Karl sat down to interview Hamilton in the Sunflower State and asked the moderate pastor about Vance, who has been outspoken about his religious beliefs since before entering… Source link
Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters says the GOP midterm election “convention” will be a “Trumpapalooza.” It’d be better if everyone called it that. American political conventions are one of the best examples — among way too many — of American institutional decay. In the 19th century and much of the 20th century, the quadrennial party conventions were indispensable pieces of political technology. I mean that literally. Traditionally, conventions were where party stakeholders — elected officials, party bosses, etc. — chose the nominee. Factions representing regions, interests, even ideas (how quaint!) would debate and horse-trade with each other, sometimes over days of voting, to name someone the party could get behind. That system started to atrophy in the 1930s, as Michael Barone, the great political analyst, has argued, because of the telephone. The kind of negotiating required for a nominee to win support was impossible to do by letter. It took too long, and besides, putting things in writing risked exposing deals and other favor-trading for which savvy politicians would never want a paper trail. …
We are taking part in a global social experiment, largely without signing up. Every day, drivers request directions for routes they once knew. Writers open a chat window before facing a blank page. Hospitals, courts, and employers lean further on model-generated scores. Each choice appears minor. Together, they alter where knowledge resides, who exercises judgment, and what happens when the system fails. Tools may empower us to do more, faster at lower cost. But what are the costs? The consequences of generative artificial intelligence (AI) go far beyond the convenience once offered by elevators or calculators. AI has entered the thought process itself. It is increasingly woven into the chain through which we formulate questions, interpret evidence, and decide what deserves attention. But AI-powered empowerment is an oxymoron. When individuals and institutions continuously transfer creation, judgment, execution, and information to a system, they gradually lose the ability to create, grasp, and master the processes that the tool was only meant to make better. Ergo, the tool is empowered at the expense of those who deploy …
Anton Du Beke has said he’s “devastated” by the death of his former Strictly Come Dancing partner Ann Widdecombe, who he was partnered with on the eighth series in 2010. The professional dancer, 59, called Widdecombe’s death “the saddest of news” and said he would “remember her fondly and miss her” as police investigate the case as a murder. “I had the most brilliant time with Ann on Strictly Come Dancing, she became a real friend,” Du Beke said in a video shared to social media shortly before the murder probe was announced. “She was fun, she was upbeat, she was positive, she was supportive and she was game; wanted to enter into the spirit of the whole thing.” Detectives launched a murder investigation into the 78-year-old’s death after she was found with serious injuries at her home in Haytor on Dartmoor. Devon and Cornwall police assistant chief constable Matt Longman said the inquiry into the “tragic incident” was in its early stages, but moving at a “significant pace”. The former Tory minister’s body was …
Actress Dame Penelope Keith, best known for her roles in sitcoms The Good Life and To the Manor Born, has died at the age of 86. An acclaimed theatrical performer as well, Keith won an Olivier Award for her role in Donkey’s Years, as well as two BAFTA TV Awards. Below, we revisit an interview with Keith which was first published in Radio Times magazine in November 2011, in which she reflects on history, the value of experience and the decline of sitcoms. Penelope Keith and the National Trust were made for each other. Striding around Wiltshire’s Avebury Manor, scattering superlatives like small change – “Marvellous! Extraordinary!” – she is a living icon of country-house manners (Home Counties, circa mid-20th century). Entering a room where eight women kneel around a table, embroidering peacocks’ “eyes” onto a flaxen bedcover, Keith turns her hand deftly to the task. “When I went to school one was taught these things,” she points out. She could with ease, one imagines, pluck a pheasant or persuade bishops to waltz at a …
One fine spring day when I was a child of about six, I discovered a newborn kitten under the bushes in our yard. The kitten was nearly bald. Its eyes were squeezed shut, and there was something terribly wrong with the shape of its head. I ran to find a blanket to wrap it and carry the struggling newborn into our house, but my mother stood in the doorway, forbidding me to enter. “Something is wrong with it, and that’s why its mother left it to die,” she said. My mother’s words struck a chord of terror. How could a mother abandon its sickly offspring? Too young to understand Darwinian theory—the survival of the fittest—I absorbed the cat’s abandonment of its kitten as an epic lesson in the cruelties of nature—and of my helplessness to provide protection. This is my first memory of a core human fear: abandonment. Fears of abandonment ignite our most primal horror of being alone in a hostile world without the means to survive and thrive. Compared to other mammalian species, …
We’re losing words. More than 300 a day in spoken word, or 120,000 a year, according to recent research. Tech is the main reason — we’re texting over phone calls, using the self-check out lane, and ordering sugar off Instacart rather than asking a neighbor for a cup. In an effort to understand the implications of this decades-long loss of words, I decided to stop talking for a day. I am a yapper. Women speak an average of 10,000+ daily words, but between my chats with neighbors, check in with friends, and daily calls with my mother, I suspect my average is even higher. Sudden silence was going to be a struggle. Would friends and strangers think I was rude? Would they not talk to me again? Unlike a monastic vow of silence, I was able to text, email, Slack, use apps and social media messaging. And it was still a lot tougher than I thought it would be. Julia Musto, The Independent’s U.S. Science and Climate Correspondent, sits on a green couch. She spent …
In my experience, the yogurt parfait is often more elegant in name than in execution. “Parfait” suggests precision: a glass vessel, a long spoon, something architectural and composed. It sounds like restraint. It sounds like Europe. But conjure one in your mind’s eye and I suspect we’re seeing the same thing: slumped berries bleeding into pale yogurt. Yogurt that was too sweet to begin with and has since gone watery, pooling at the bottom like regret. Granola that’s either stale — thin-sliced cardstock masquerading as crunch — or so aggressively hard it feels like a dare to your dental work. The promise is layered pleasure: creamy against crisp, bright against rich. The reality is often beige. Damp. One-note. A breakfast that feels more like penance than possibility. And yet — the idea persists for a reason. At its best, a parfait is a study in contrast. Cool and tangy yogurt, fruit that tastes unmistakably like itself, crunch that shatters and then yields. Sweetness balanced by salt. Softness interrupted by texture. It should feel deliberate. Alive. …
