Weekend Reads

HEADLINES:

• Taking the Long View on Presidential Immunity (Dispatch)

• The Supreme Court Appears Poised to Protect the Presidency—and Donald Trump (New Yorker)

• Pecker tells hush-money jury of running negative Clinton stories to boost Trump (Guardian)

• Trump v United States (Al Jazeera)

• A day all about Trump: Mostly out of sight, but still everywhere (WP)

• Donald Trump’s attorney on Thursday argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that a president could order the assassination of his political rival and stage a military coup without being prosecuted for it. Justice Sonia Sotomayor also pointed out a contradiction in the former president's defense. Meanwhile, conservative justices appeared ready to give Trump what he most wanted: further delaying his federal election interference case past the 2024 race. [HuffPost]

• The Reactionary Justices Won’t Stop Until Abortions Are Illegal Everywhere (The Nation)

• Tennessee Parents Question Whether Arming Teachers Is the Answer (NYT)

• Secret meetings, social chatter: How Columbia students sparked a nationwide revolt (WP)

• Four students on why they’re protesting against war in Gaza: ‘Injustice should not be accepted’ (Guardian)

• Arrests and standoffs multiply as student antiwar rallies spread (WP)

• Biden administration delays proposed ban on menthol cigarettes (CNN)

• Ukraine pulls US-provided Abrams tanks from the front lines over Russian drone threats (AP)

• Russian Forces Advance as Ukraine Awaits Fresh US Weapons (Bloomberg)

• Blinken Tours China to Promote Some Ties, While the U.S. Severs Others (NYT)

• India began voting in the second phase of the world's biggest election, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his rivals raise the pitch of the campaign by focusing on hot-button issues such as religious discrimination, affirmative action and taxes. Rahul Gandhi, the face of the opposition Congress party, was among the 1,200 candidates in the fray. (Reuters)

• Asia’s next war could be triggered by a rusting warship on a disputed reef (WP)

• Inside the sale of The Onion, and what comes next (The Onion)

• This tiny flower teaches us all we need to know about growing old (WP)

• Why code-testing startup Nova AI uses open source LLMs more than OpenAI (TechCrunch)

• Former Pixar Animator Gives One Big Reason AI Video Won't Work in Hollywood (Gizmodo)

• A principal’s racist rant was an AI fake. His colleague was arrested. (WP)

• Heart Transplant Recipient Walks Daughter Of Deceased Donor Pig Down Aisle (The Onion)

 

What's On Trial

We all can agree that Donald Trump has a way of breaking things. But now that he has promised to break our form of government — a constitutional democracy — if he is elected president this November, the stakes to prevent that from happening are higher than ever.

All of that makes Trump’s claim of absolute immunity for his actions on Jan. 6th, 2021, now before the Supreme Court, one of the most momentous legal cases in our country’s history. This is one of two federal cases against Trump brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith.

And it’s moving at a glacial pace.

While we wait for the court to rule on immunity, Trump continues to appear daily at the site of another trial, concerning his election interference in 20 16. That is occurring in New York state court.

Meanwhile, other 2020 election interference cases are proceeding in Arizona, Michigan. Nevada and Georgia. All of these raise disturbing questions about Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of an election he clearly lost to Joe Biden.

The administration of justice moves slowly and never before have we faced an attempt by a former president to overturn our democracy. It will take time but let’s hope justice in these various venues will ultimately prevail.

HEADLINES:

• Supreme Court appears open to some presidential immunity for Trump, risking delays (The Hill)

• Supreme Court seems poised to allow Trump Jan. 6 trial, but not immediately (WP)

• Trump lawyer makes admission under questioning from Justice Coney Barrett (CNN)

• Supreme Court to decide Trump's fate — and its own (Axios)

• Supreme Court Appears Sharply Divided in Emergency Abortion Case (NYT)

• Trump trial live updates: David Pecker resumes testimony in hush money case (AP)

• Campus Protests Over Gaza Intensify Amid Pushback by Universities and Police (NYT)

• How Columbia’s Campus Was Torn Apart Over Gaza (New Yorker)

• GOP lawmakers cheer conservative media slams on Marjorie Taylor Greene (Axios)

• The Inflation Plateau (Atlantic)

• New York court overturns Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction (WP)

• What to Know About the Breakup of Scotland’s Coalition Government (NYT)

• Meta loses $200 billion in value as Zuckerberg focuses earnings call on all the ways company bleeds cash (CNBC)

• Why animals can outrun robots (Science)

• An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary (Technology Review)

• ‘To the Future’: Saudi Arabia Spends Big to Become an A.I. Superpower (NYT)

• AI deepfakes threaten to upend global elections. No one can stop them. (WP)

• Hundreds Of Teenage Shoplifters Run Away With State Of Nebraska (The Onion)

 

The We Generation

One experience common for Baby Boomers when we were kids is that we were subjected to air raid drills at school, where we were taught to dive under our desks and shield our heads — as if that would save us in a nuclear attack.

All serious looks at Bob Dylan’s writing, including Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home” recognizes this as a decisive influence in the poet’s formative years. He uses footage from those drills to drive the point home and Dylan confirms it in interviews.

Even though we were kids, we knew it was absurd at the time, yet the adults piled it on with more stuff like Disney’s “Our Friend the Atom,” a blatant attempt at pro-nuclear-power propaganda in 1957. What a pathetic joke that one was.

Almost as soon as he arrived in Greenwich Village and started singing in nightclubs, Dylan was mixing his recurrent nightmares about World War III into his songs.

These were the early days of the anti-war movement, which — though focused on the Vietnam War — always reflected elements of anti-nuke sentiment as well.

As youngsters, we intuited but were never actually told by our government how close we had repeatedly come to nuclear war until the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. But based on declassified documents, my own youngest son, who just happens to be named Dylan, wrote in a paper while he was earning his Master’s Degree in History that President Eisenhower threatened to drop the bomb on China on more than one occasion in the fifties.

Meanwhile, in Bob D’s main song on the topic the key generational line is “I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.” We all felt like outsiders in a world where the rulers seemed willing to indulge in mutually assured destruction — all that was left for us to do was to comfort each other.

Of course we all had nightmares of ending up, dazed and alone, wandering in a post dystopia. Our solutions — drugs, casual sex, rock ‘n roll, escapism all, or activism, protest music, community organizing, crusading journalism — all blended together as options.

It was somehow assumed that one had to be either a hippie and tune out or a radical and tune in, so of course many of us decided we would instead be both at the same time — hippie-radicals.

That’s when things became dicey and our generation started to spin out violent strike forces like the Weather Underground. Few of us actually supported violence but most of us harbored violent resentment and anger at those Dylan branded as the “Masters of War.”

We also struck out against racial injustice, misogyny, homophobia — hate of all kinds, by advocating love for each other. Other poets besides Dylan spun out their solutions: “Love is All You Need,” etc.

And when it came to love, Dylan seemed somewhat cynical but always ambivalent, with his haunting “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word,” that his once-lover Joan Baez turned into a classic, or the ever-so-tender “Just Like a Woman.”

The truth? Relationships between Baby Boomers have always been complicated. It’s almost as if we can’t be apart but we can’t be together — we tended to have more relationships over our lifespans than previous generations, but our breakups drove divorce rates to record levels as well.

One label older people tagged us with was the“Me Generation.” 

I prefer the “We Generation.” 

I ain't lookin' to compete with you
Beat or cheat or mistreat you
Simplify you, classify you
Deny, defy or crucify you
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you

We ran in a flock. And we’re still hoping to end up in each another’s dreams.

(This one first appeared in 2022.)

HEADLINES:

• Arizona grand jury indicts Meadows, Giuliani, other Trump allies for 2020 election interference (Politico)

• Supreme Court tackles Trump's broad claim of presidential immunity in election interference case (NBC)

• Efforts to tackle student protests in America have backfired badly (Economist)

• New York appeals court overturns Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes conviction and orders a new trial (CNN)

• Inside the Crisis at NPR (NYT)

• Supreme Court appears skeptical that state abortion bans conflict with federal health care law (AP)

• Why is US threatening to ban TikTok and will other countries follow suit? (Guardian)

• TikTok CEO expects to defeat US ban: 'We aren't going anywhere' (Reuters)

• Inside the Week That Shook Columbia University (NYT)

• How antiwar student protests are spreading across U.S. universities (WP)

• RFK Jr.'s baffling position on climate change, explained (MSNBC)

• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) unexpectedly ripped Tucker Carlson, saying the far-right political commentator was responsible for Republicans souring on helping Ukraine. [HuffPost] 

• Housing experts say there just aren't enough homes in the U.S. (NPR)

• Trump’s long, strange history with the tabloids (WP)

• How Do We Know What Animals Are Really Feeling? (NYT Mag)

• Several companies are experimenting with a type of gene therapy called optogenetics. They’re trying to create a bionic eye that can restore sight in visually impaired people. (WP)

• At Moderna, OpenAI’s GPTs Are Changing Almost Everything (WSJ)

• Snowflake releases a flagship generative AI model of its own (TechCrunch)

• AI Report Shows ‘Startlingly Rapid’ Progress—And Ballooning Costs (Scientific American)

• Say hello to Party Robot, the hulking Terminator programmed to kill it on the dance floor (WP)

• Report: Bench Near Piano Secretly Hiding Books About Music (The Onion)

The Conspirators

It’s likely that the election interference (aka the “hush money”) case against Donald Trump currently underway in New York State court will be the only one of the cases against him concluded before the 2024 election.

That gives it an urgency it might otherwise not have.

The other three criminal cases facing the ex-President are all delayed due to legal maneuvers by Trump’s lawyers, so much so that they probably will not go to trial until after this fall’s election, if at all. Should Trump win the presidency, two of the three remaining cases will be dismissed by his choice of attorney general.

The one remaining case, in Georgia state court, has been dogged by controversy that seems to be delaying it endlessly.

That makes it incredibly important that the prosecutors in New York get their case right.

Hearings will resume on Thursday in the trial expected to last six weeks or longer. Any verdict will ultimately hinge on the jury buying the prosecutors’ case that Trump and his associates falsified business records in order to cover up his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels in furtherance of a conspiracy to prevent news of the scandal from losing Trump the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton.

That’s a mouthful.

And now the hope that the former president will ever be held accountable for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election hangs on the outcome.

As does our democracy.

HEADLINES:

• Protests at Columbia and other schools escalate (CNN)

• Pro-Palestinian Protests Force Colleges to Rethink Graduation Plans (WSJ)

• U.S. hawks and Israel want Qatar to oust Hamas militants' political office. But rare interviews conducted by HuffPost's Akbar Shahid Ahmed with Hamas leaders suggest the move could fail to pressure them, undercutting the assumption that forcing a relocation would make the group more amenable to U.S. and Israeli demands. [HuffPost]

• US Senate votes overwhelmingly to advance Ukraine, Israel aid legislation (Reuters)

• The bubble has burst: On the road to a lost Chinese economic decade (The Hill)

• Nestlé adds more sugar to baby food sold in poorer countries, a report said. Products sold in lower-income countries have up to 7.3 grams of added sugar per serving, while the same food sold in Europe often has none. (WP)

• US vs. Russia: Why the Biden strategy in Africa may be failing (Politico)

• Supreme Court Seems Poised to Allow Local Laws That Penalize Homelessness (NYT)

• Email isn’t just annoying to Gen Z workers—it’s stressing them out (CNBC)

• A long, hot U.S. summer is looming, forecasters say (Axios)

• KQED offers buyout packages with layoffs potentially coming to cut costs (SFGate)

• Why is so much of the internet’s infrastructure run by volunteers? (Economist)

• It’s the End of the Web as We Know It (Atlantic)

• How United Airlines uses AI to make flying the friendly skies a bit easier (TechCrunch)

• A National Security Insider Does the Math on the Dangers of AI (Wired)

• "Top secret" is no longer the key to good intel in an AI world: report (Axios)

• Nation’s Therapists Refuse To See You Anymore Because You Scare Them (The Onion)

 

AI: Threat to Writers?

 A sprawling article in The New Republic questions whether the coming of artificial intelligence (AI) spells the end for human writers. (TNR) 

“If a computer can write like a person, what does that say about the nature of our own creativity?” asks Samanth Subramanian.

The answer is, after a long winding trail of considerations, that nobody can yet say for sure, at least according to this author. But he seems to come out on the side of the human writer surviving in the end, and with that I agree.

The key word in this equation is “human.” In our society, human writers do much more than simply write. They invent and provoke and stimulate and define. They give voice to voiceless as well as to the unspeakable. They create the public narratives that help define both our social and private lives.

In fiction and nonfiction alike, they express the inner longings of the human spirit, which machines may emulate but cannot replicate.

Like artists of all kinds, writers’ work can be copied — we call it plagiarism — but as creators they cannot be replaced. AI may take away many of the jobs writers have; if so that will be a tragedy. But the writers will remain.

Writing is so much more than turning a phrase, word-smithing or even telling a story. Fundamentally, it’s about forging authentic human connections one at a time.

That will always be superior to the artificial connections enacted by machines.

And only a human being can tell the difference.

HEADLINES:

• The seismic political fallout from Trump’s criminal trial is only beginning (MSNBC)

• Will a Mountain of Evidence Be Enough to Convict Trump? (NYT)

• Biden’s polls improve as Kennedy and third-party factor shifts (WP)

• Why so many American leaders are advancing a new kind of nihilism (Atlantic)

• Israeli military intelligence chief quits over 7 October attack (Guardian)

• How the Israel-Gaza Protests Could Hurt the Democratic Party (NYT)

• The Supreme Court this week will debate whether states have the power to outlaw lifesaving abortions in hospital emergency rooms. “This case could radically alter how emergency medicine is practiced in this country and make pregnant people second-class citizens in America’s emergency rooms,” the deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project said. [HuffPost

• Europe is warming up faster than any other continent, and the heat is deadly (NPR)

• Trillions of cicadas are about emerge in the Midwest and the South. Two different broods of these extremely loud bugs are set to crawl out of the ground together for the first time since 1803. (WP)

• More than 70% of the global workforce is exposed to risks linked to climate change that cause hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, the International Labour Organization said. (Reuters)

• Ignoring experts, China’s sudden zero-COVID exit cost lives (AP)

• The pandemic cost 7 million lives, but talks to prevent a repeat stall (WP)

• The Most Embarrassing Blunders From Elon Musk’s Attempt at AI-Generated News (Gizmodo)

• Cecil Williams, longtime champion of the poor, co-founder of Glide church, dies at 94 (SFC)

• AI and the End of the Human Writer (TNR)

• AI Detects Mysterious Detail Hidden in Famous Raphael Masterpiece (ScienceAlert)

• The future of AI gadgets is just phones (Verge)

• AI Will Eventually Fade From View, By Design (Forbes)

• ‘Seek Funding’ Step Added To Scientific Method (The Onion)

Day One

Today the first criminal trial of a former president in U.S. history gets underway, with opening arguments and a 12-person jury of his peers in attendance in a New York City courtroom.

Polls have indicated that Trump’s base will stick with him regardless of the outcome of this trial, which is usually called a “hush money” scandal but is really about election interference.

That’s because the reason Trump paid porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016 to stay quiet about their affair was he was afraid it would damage his chances in that year’s election.

Trump beat Hillary Clinton that time around.

But regardless of how the right-wing base feels about the philandering Trump, there is another demographic he has to be mindful of — suburban women, especially in the six or seven swing states that will decide the 2024 election.

As the salacious details emerge during this trial about Trump’s affair with Daniels soon after his wife Melania gave birth to their son, Barron, the former president’s standing with suburban voters, already tenuous, may erode.

That is one of the potential political implications of this trial.

HEADLINES:

• Netanyahu Resists U.S. Plan to Cut Off Aid to Israeli Military Unit — After months of inaction, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is poised to bar U.S. aid to an Israeli unit accused of human rights abuses. (ProPublica)

• Prosecutions of Fake Electors for Trump Gain Ground in Swing States —Georgia, Michigan and Nevada have already brought charges against people who posed as electors for Donald Trump, and Arizona and Wisconsin have active investigations. (NYT)

• The evolution of Mike Johnson on Ukraine (WP)

• US Speaker Mike Johnson may pay political price for Ukraine deal (BBC)

• Bipartisan outrage boils over at threat to Johnson’s speakership (Politico)

• Hakeem Jeffries emerges as Congress' shadow speaker (Axios)

• Ukraine Aid Divides Republicans, After Trump Tones Down His Resistance (NYT)

• Gaza aid flotilla plans to challenge Israeli blockade, organizers say (WP)

• RFK Jr. candidacy hurts Trump more than Biden, NBC News poll finds (NBC)

• How large parts of Trump’s trial are playing out in the shadows (Politico)

• The Real Bias at NPR: Story Selection (TNR)

• California wants Big Tech to pay for news. Google is fighting back. (WP)

• Verified pro-Nazi X accounts flourish under Elon Musk (NBC)

• Most difficult global outlook since 1930s heralds end of US-led world order (Guardian)

• Why Did Cars Get So Expensive? (Atlantic)

• Jared Kushner’s Ambition Threatens One of Europe’s Last Pristine Ecosystems (Mother Jones)

• The First Unintended Consequence Of AI—And It’s Huge (Forbes)

• Officials Urge Americans To Sort Plastics, Glass Into Separate Oceans (The Onion)

 

Like a Leader

There are plenty of things to not like about House Speaker Mike Johnson, including that he’s an election denier, but unlike many Republicans currently in Congress, he seems capable of doing the right thing for the country.

Saturday’s bipartisan votes in the House to pass foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan came roughly two months after they should have, but at least they came.

And that’s because Johnson defied the radical fringe of his caucus to muscle the votes through — with substantial Democratic support. By doing so, he risked losing his job. in the same way his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, lost his.

The crazies are still threatening to oust him, but for now, Johnson holds the gavel.

It’s important to recognize when political figures demonstrate a measure of leadership, regardless of party. As I said, there still is plenty to not like about Johnson, but his actions on Saturday were in the best interest of the country.

HEADLINES:

• House passes Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan aid, potential TikTok ban (CNBC)

• Why Democrats might save GOP House Speaker Johnson (MSNBC)

• Senate passes bill renewing key FISA surveillance power moments after it expires (NBC)

• Six days that didn’t shake the world (Reuters)

• A team of bitter rivals is making Israel’s most crucial war decisions (WP)

• US military strategy tested as Iran-Israel warfare comes out of shadows (Reuters)

• Trump’s New York trial is knocking him off balance (Politico)

• Trump hush money trial tests storied N.Y. courthouse like never before (WP)

• The emotional experience of a Trump rally (Reuters)

• Modi’s Power Keeps Growing, and India Looks Sure to Give Him More (NYT)

• Hindu pride, Narendra Modi and jobs dominate India’s elections (Reuters)

• TikTok fears point to larger problem: Poor media literacy in the social media age (The Conversation)

• Generation Z is unprecedentedly rich (Economist)

• Biden Shields Millions of Acres of Alaskan Wilderness From Drilling and Mining (NYT)

• Next pandemic likely to be caused by flu virus, scientists warn (Guardian)

• The Languages AI Is Leaving Behind (Atlantic)

• Wedding Guest Blissfully Unaware She Barely Made The Cut (The Onion