This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age.
Why does ChatGPT refuse to say the name Jonathan Zittrain? Anytime the bot should write those words, it simply shuts down instead, offering a blunt error message: “I’m unable to produce a response.” This has been a mystery for at least a year, and now we’re closer to some answers.
Writing for The Atlantic this week, Zittrain, a Harvard professor and the director of its Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, explores this strange phenomenon—what he calls the “personal-name guillotine.” As he gleaned after reaching out to OpenAI, “There are a tiny number of names that ChatGPT treats this way, which explains why so few have been found. Names may be omitted from ChatGPT either because of privacy requests or to avoid persistent hallucinations by the AI.” Reasonable, but Zittrain never made any such privacy request, and he is unaware of any falsehoods generated by the program in response to queries about himself.
Ultimately, the situation is a reminder that whatever mystique technology companies cultivate around their AI products, suggesting at times that they operate in unpredictable or humanlike ways, firms do have an awful lot of direct control over these programs.
Illustration by The Atlantic
The Words That Stop ChatGPT in Its Tracks
By Jonathan L. Zittrain
Jonathan Zittrain breaks ChatGPT: If you ask it a question for which my name is the answer, the chatbot goes from loquacious companion to something as cryptic as Microsoft Windows’ blue screen of death.
Anytime ChatGPT would normally utter my name in the course of conversation, it halts with a glaring “I’m unable to produce a response,” sometimes mid-sentence or even mid-word. When I asked who the founders of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society are (I’m one of them), it brought up two colleagues but left me out. When pressed, it started up again, and then: zap.
AI may be able to help train service dogs by allowing humans to understand (and evaluate) more about potential candidates. “AI combined with sensors, for example, can look for signs of stress and other indicators” in dogs, my colleague Kristen V. Brown wrote for The Atlantic this week, in a story about fitness trackers for pets. One researcher told her “the story of a colleague whose dog was a beta tester for one such wearable device. The technology had consistently predicted that her dog would be a good service dog, until one day it didn’t—it turned out the dog had a bad staph infection, which can become serious if left untreated.”
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Art-making is not the kind of work that is easily confined between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. An artist needs ample time to spend putting pen to paper, or brush to canvas; they also require unbounded hours or days to let their mind wander in search of inspiration. As Hillary Kelly has written for this magazine, “the dream state, the musing, the meditation” is what “makes space for ideas.”
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
The demands of the creative life can sometimes be at odds with the task of nurturing human relationships. This week, we published Sophia Stewart’s review of Woo Woo, Ella Baxter’s second novel. Its main character, Sabine, is a relatively successful mid-career artist who’s gearing up for an important solo exhibition. But she is also a bit of what some writers have come to call an “art monster.” Jenny Offill coined the term in her 2014 novel, Dept. of Speculation, to refer to a person who neglects domestic convention in order to devote all their energies toward creativity, and Sabine fits the bill: She’s “a bad spouse and a bad friend, simultaneously needy and negligent,” Stewart writes. Sabine seems akin to the ranks of women who read Offill’s book and imagined the self-involved artist “not as a villain, but as an aspiration,” as Willa Paskin wrote in 2018.
Some creative geniuses make the world richer because of their work. Others have used their cultural impact as an excuse not to treat others with basic respect. The latter group brings to mind a truly notorious kind of “art monster”—an artist who is not just neglectful but abusive or even criminal. This figure prompts a moral question: “What ought we to do about great art made by bad men?” as Claire Dederer asked in her 2023 book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. In other words, how do we give a monster’s work its due without rewarding its creator? One answer is to separate the artistic merit of a film, opera, or book entirely from the conduct of its inventor, arguing that some things are too precious, too canonical, to lose.
Even if that logic holds true, what about art monsters who make work that’s simply not very good? This is the wry joke of Baxter’s novel: As it turns out, Sabine doesn’t have much of an aesthetic vision—what is there is driven mostly by vanity. She’s a solipsistic careerist and, even worse, a second-rate one. Sabine doesn’t rise to the level of many of the people Dederer studies in her book; she’s selfish, but probably not abusive. Either way, sacrificing her output doesn’t seem to constitute too big of a loss. Mediocrity, the story reminds us, is far more common than genius—and so is bad behavior.
Illustration by Millie von Platen
A Biting Satire of the Art World’s Monstrousness
By Sophia Stewart
Ella Baxter’s new novel explores why creative genius so often seems to be at odds with being a good person.
Huang’s debut novel is set in the wellness industry, fertile ground for bodily unease. The narrator, a young classical musician, abandons a promising future as a concert pianist to support her parents after an accident. She takes a job at a high-end beauty shop, Holistik, which carries products that are unnaturally effective. As the narrator gets more involved with the family who founded the company, she discovers quintessential hints that something is amiss: evidence of animal experimentation in the laboratory and dramatic physical transformations among the clientele. Still, her financial dependence on the job—and her growing entanglement with the founders—makes it difficult for her to walk away. When the force behind this company’s ethos and practices is finally revealed, it feels at once shocking and foretold from the start. — Tajja Isen
Certain fetish foods have a life cycle: They are hated, and then they are elevated by well-meaning obsessives via the use of premium ingredients and better production techniques, and then liking these foods becomes a symbol of taste and sophistication, of being in on something. “Getting it,” in the figurative sense, becomes as much a prize as having it, in the material sense. “You see the unboxing videos, and it starts this spiral effect of: I need to try this, I need to understand what’s going on here,” the food influencer Katie Zukhovich told me. “I don’t think people can imagine that panettone is so good because it’s always been so fine.”
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Yesterday, a tantrum from the world’s richest person swayed events in Congress. First, Elon Musk launched a blizzard of X posts denouncing a bipartisan spending bill designed to keep the government open. Calling the bill “criminal,” Musk threatened: “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in two years!”
Panic ensued among the notoriously skittish congressional GOP, who quickly bowed to their master’s voice. Musk, of course, is not actually the president-elect. He received approximately zero percent of the votes in last month’s election. But for a few hours this week, Musk didn’t just act as if he, and not Donald Trump, will soon hold the reins of government power; the GOP also responded as if he will.
As Russell Berman noted in The Atlantic earlier today, Republicans were not happy with the proposed version of the spending bill, but House Speaker Mike Johnson “believed that he could get enough Republicans to join most Democrats in passing the bill in time to avert a government shutdown.” It turns out, though, that the person he really needed to persuade was Musk. “I was communicating with Elon last night,” Johnson said yesterday on Fox & Friends. “Elon, Vivek [Ramaswamy], and I are on a text chain together, and I was explaining to them the background of this.” The pleading and lobbying to the unelected billionaires went on for a while. Johnson added, “Vivek and I talked last night [until] about almost midnight … [He and Musk] understand the situation. They said, ‘It’s not directed at you, Mr. Speaker, but we don’t like the spending.’ And I said, ‘Guess what, fellas? I don’t either.’”
Johnson’s attempt at appeasement failed. Within hours, the pseudo president-elect had kneecapped Johnson. Trump and J. D. Vance weighed in yesterday afternoon, releasing a statement denouncing the spending bill. The government was on the edge of a shutdown. As of this writing, Trump has praised a new, slimmed-down version of the spending bill (as has Musk), opening the possibility of averting that outcome. But Musk’s place at the center of this process offered us a preview of the political dynamics of the Musk-Trump-GOP era: razor-thin legislative margins, chaos, governing via social-media rant, and a Game of Thrones–style jockeying for power between Musk and Trump.
Musk’s day of prolific posting was also a reminder of how little he comprehends about the U.S. government. His feverish 100-plus posts were riddled with disinformation and false claims that revealed his lack of understanding of the basics of budgeting. He got details wrong about a congressional pay raise and taxpayer funding of an NFL stadium in Washington, D.C. He pushed misinformation from a January 6 rioter who falsely claimed that the spending bill would block Republican investigation of the January 6 Select Committee. Musk exulted in the prospect of a complete government shutdown, posting that a shutdown “doesn’t actually shut down critical functions.” Although it is true that “essential functions” would continue (and that Social Security checks would still go out), contra Musk, shutdowns are neither painless nor cheap. Large swaths of the government would indeed be forced to shut down, and government employees would see delayed paychecks.
Wherever the spending bill lands, this week may mark another dramatic shift in GOP politics. For years, as a signal of their commitment to fiscal prudence, conservative Republicans have opposed raising the debt limit. Today, though, after Musk had stolen a march on him, Trump called for doing away with the debt ceiling altogether (possibly because he wants to clear the way for massive tax cuts next year). That sort of demand will force members of the Freedom Caucus to—once again—choose between fiscal conservatism and their sycophantic loyalty to the incoming president. The latest version of the spending bill, according to Trump’s social-media posts, would suspend the debt ceiling until January 2027.
Meanwhile, the president-elect has to deal with the specter of Elon Musk. As Politico’s Jonathan Martin noted on X yesterday, Musk’s moment brings with it a few potential downsides for Trump: “The Elon risk here is he’s not just diverting attention from Trump, he’s also threatening to deliver him bad press if the gov’t shuts down.” This week, Musk solidified his influence over the systems of U.S. government, but the clock may be ticking on Trump’s tolerance of that fact.
Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, faces four federal counts, including a charge of using a firearm to commit murder.
Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men were found guilty in a mass-rape and drugging trial in France. Nearly all of them were convicted for rape or attempted rape of Gisèle Pelicot, Dominique’s ex-wife.
On the internet, there exists a $102 loaf of bread that people talk about like it’s a drug. It’s a panettone—the fruitcake-adjacent yeasted bread that is traditional to Italy, and to Christmastime—and it is made by the California chef Roy Shvartzapel.
For many years, Venezuelans understood instinctively what was meant when someone invoked la situación in conversation. The rich started leaving the country because of la situación. One would be crazy to drive at night, given la situación del país. The main features of this “situation of the country,” in the years around President Hugo Chávez’s death in 2013, were an economy in free fall, empty supermarket shelves, and the normalization of new forms of criminality—such as “express kidnappings,” or abductions in which ransoms were paid by speedy bank transfers and the victims released within a couple of hours.
People no longer speak so much about la situación. But they have begun using a word that rhymes: la represión. Since the July 28 election, in which plausibly two-thirds of voters rejected incumbent President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuelans have entered a “silent tunnel,” the historian Edgardo Mondolfi told me. They breathe fear, watch what they say, and mind their own business.
To international observers, the news that things are bad in a country where things have been bad for so long must seem unremarkable. Since Maduro, Chávez’s successor and heir, came to power, one in four Venezuelans has left the country. Why would anyone be shocked that Venezuelans fear the erratic tyrant who rules them?
And yet, for some Venezuelans, the months of mounting repression are painful because they followed a brief period of hope. In the two years leading up to the July election, everyday life in Venezuela seemed to be improving, even if only in illusory, unsustainable ways. Maduro looked aside as businesses skirted some of his most ludicrous regulations, allowing certain segments of the economy to flourish. Foreign currencies remained technically illegal, but Venezuelans could now pay in dollars—cash or Zelle—in place of their own hyperinflationary currency. Maduro seemed to have struck a deal with the citizenry: If you don’t challenge me, life will become more bearable.
On July 28, Venezuelans broke the deal and voted. Maduro had barred the candidacy of Venezuela’s wildly popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado, so the opposition candidate on the ballot wound up being a man no one had heard of; even then, Maduro littered his rival’s path with obstacles. Still, the opposition campaign generated enthusiasm that reached every corner of the country.
By nearly every report except his own official one, Maduro lost the election. Yet he clung to power, refusing entreaties from Washington, Bogotá, and Brasilia to publish detailed vote tallies, and brushing aside the evidence from opposition-affiliated poll watchers that he may have been trounced, earning fewer than half as many votes as his opponent. Now Maduro is determined that the populace that humiliated him on election day must pay.
Venezuela is not new to repression. Before the campaign season even began, Maduro’s government had jailed more than 15,000 politicians, protesters, activists, and journalists, subjecting an unknown number to torture. In the months leading to the election, such arrests became more common, but Venezuelans who weren’t looking to visibly challenge Maduro could take comfort in the fact that most of those arrested had political profiles. As long as I don’t go out looking for trouble, many could tell themselves, I should be fine.
Now the repression feels more pervasive. Protesters aren’t just swept up during protests; since July, the authorities have plucked low-profile demonstrators from their homes days after they were seen on the street. The national guard has established checkpoints where it inspects people’s phones for compromising content; one young man was sent to prison because he’d saved an anti-government meme to his phone gallery. The fear is far-reaching. My aunt in Caracas told me that she has uninstalled her social-media apps for fear of these stops, and she deletes many of her WhatsApp chats before leaving the house.
In the past nine months, the plight of six people in particular has drawn considerable attention. These people are caged—not in their homes, and not in the underground cells of Venezuela’s notorious prisons, but in a gated villa shaded by palm trees. A few months before the election, the authorities had issued arrest warrants for eight of Machado’s closest aides. Two were detained, but six managed to secure asylum in the Argentine embassy. “We feel safe here,” one declared to the press.
They had reason to: Under an international law known, ironically, as the Caracas Convention, when an embassy requests a travel permit for someone to whom it has granted asylum, the host country must grant the request “immediately.” Chávez and Maduro didn’t have the best record of respecting international laws, but they had honored this one in the past. Pedro Carmona, who led an attempted coup d’état against Chávez, took refuge in the Colombian embassy and was permitted to flee. In 2020, the former political prisoner and presidential candidate Leopoldo López landed in Madrid after staying for more than a year in the Spanish embassy.
This time, however, Maduro took his time in granting travel permits. A hundred days after they first sought refuge in the Argentine embassy, the asylees were reportedly told they could leave the country—but only if they agreed to refrain from working for Machado from overseas. They refused. Then, on July 29, the day after the election, Maduro expelled the diplomatic missions of seven Latin American countries whose state officials had used words like fraud or asked for detailed tallies of the results. Argentina was one of them. Brazil agreed to take custody of the Argentine embassy, but President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, once an ally of Chávez, has shown scant interest in playing regional peace broker or advocating for the fates of his six houseguests.
What was once the Argentine embassy has become a kind of prison. The Venezuelan government has surrounded the property with police officers and soldiers; in November, it cut off the villa’s electricity. The asylees are allowed no visits—not even Brazilian diplomatic staffers are allowed to enter. They can receive food packages from outside, but the police intercept these; one asylee told me they have been forced to ration what they receive. Even the water supply to the villa has been curtailed. Drones buzz continually outside. I’ve kept in close touch with one of the six, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Last Saturday, half of the prisoners held a rare press conference via Zoom. “We are six unarmed civilians,” Pedro Urruchurtu, an adviser to Machado and a former professor at Central University of Venezuela, said. “We are just asking for international laws to be respected.” Venezuela’s government responded by trying to leverage the asylees in a sort of hostage deal: On Tuesday, Maduro suggested he’d be open to freeing them in exchange for certain prisoners held in Ecuador and Argentina. Two days later, Fernando Martínez, an asylee who served as a transportation minister in the 1990s, left the embassy. Some reports say he turned himself in to the authorities; others say he made it home with his family. In either case, he lost his right to a travel permit.
La represión, in Venezuela as elsewhere, derives much of its power from unpredictability. And so the Maduro regime has made its redlines and allowances ever harder for ordinary people to tell apart. Last spring, the six people currently in the former Argentine embassy had reason to think that working with Machado was an acceptable risk, because in the worst-case-scenario, they could seek political asylum from an embassy, as others had done before them. But now the rules, if there are any, have changed.
Curiously, the Maduro regime has shown little interest in imprisoning or physically harming Machado herself. The opposition leader remains in an undisclosed location that can’t be too hard for the government to find. But Maduro seems to have concluded that arresting such an internationally high-profile leader isn’t worth the headache. Instead, the government has opted to punish unknown people who work for or support her. La represión will leave her with some press attention but virtually no ability to act, until she is eventually forgotten. Perhaps Machado has nothing to fear for now, but no one else in Venezuela can say the same.
ESA / Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey / DOE / FNAL / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA
Day 20 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: a galactic chain. This Hubble image features an interacting galaxy system known as Arp-Madore 2105-332, that lies about 200 million light-years from Earth. This image also reveals several further galaxies, not associated with this system but fortuitously positioned in such a way that they appear to be forming a line that approaches the leftmost component of Arp-Madore 2105-332.
See the full advent calendar here, where a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.
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After months of negotiation, Congress was close to passing a spending bill on Wednesday to avert a government shutdown. Elon Musk decided he had other ideas. He railed against the bill in more than 150 separate posts on X, complaining about the raises it would have given members of Congress, falsely exaggerating the proposed pay increase, and worrying about billions in government spending that weren’t even in the bill. He told his followers over and over that the bill was “criminal” and “should not pass.” Nothing about Musk’s campaign was subtle: “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” he posted. According to X’s stats, the posts accrued tens of millions of views.
Elected Republicans listened: By the end of the day, they had scrapped the bill. Last night, another attempt to fund the government, this time supported by Musk, also failed. After spending about $277 million to back Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency, Musk has become something of a shadow vice president. But it’s not just Musk’s political donations that are driving his influence forward. As his successful tirade against the spending bill illustrates, Musk also has outsize power to control how information is disseminated. To quote Shoshana Zuboff, an academic who has written about tech overreach and surveillance, Musk is an “information oligarch.”
Since buying Twitter in 2022 and turning it into X, Musk has reportedly used the platform to inflate the reach of his posts (and thereby his own influence on discourse). Since July, his posts on X have received more than 16 times the number of views as all of the accounts of incoming congressional members combined. He also appears to have transformed the platform to boost conservative posts, in accordance with his own political aims. This is how he can start posting about his displeasure over a bill and then have lawmakers capitulate. At least one Republican member of Congress reported that after Musk’s posting spree began, constituents flooded his office with calls telling him to reject the spending bill. “My phone was ringing off the hook,” Representative Andy Barr of Kentucky told CBS News. “The people who elected us are listening to Elon Musk.”
Some in Congress seem to have no problem with this, and actually enjoy it. Yesterday, Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee as well as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that it might be a good idea to simply make Musk the speaker of the House as a way to shatter the establishment, in Greene’s phrasing. Musk doesn’t have the support of the entire right—his calls to scrap the spending bill frustrated some Republican lawmakers and spurred a round of infighting. But the point is that he has the ear of the person the party listens to: Trump. If you have Trump, Musk probably understands, the rest of the right generally falls in line, however reluctantly.
The power that Musk wields through X was clear even before this week, of course. “Our political stability, our ability to know what’s true and what[’s] false, our health and to some degree our sanity, is challenged on a daily basis depending on which decisions Mr. Musk decides to take,” Zuboff said in a 2023 interview with the Financial Times. Musk’s decisions as to what does and doesn’t have a place on X are part of why the platform has become a bastion for white-supremacist content. He has shown that he can now have a disproportionate impact on politics despite the obvious fact that he’s not an elected official. Reportedly, Trump didn’t initially oppose the spending bill; rather, Musk and his posts may have led Trump to eventually come out against it on Wednesday afternoon.
Musk may have to tread delicately, though. Trump does not like to be overshadowed. Yesterday, Democrats in Congress repeatedly referred to “President Musk” in protest of how far Musk’s power has gone. (Trump’s incoming press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement to Fox News that “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”) Musk has tried to hide his sway behind a thin veil. After it became clear that the spending bill was going to fail on Wednesday, he posted, “VOX POPULI, VOX DEI,” which is Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of god,” as though the breakdown was not the direct result of his obstinate prodding.
For now, Musk has the Republican Party, and thus a large chunk of American democracy, sitting neatly in his pocket. Part of what makes Musk’s influence so concerning is that his views are to the right of even many Republicans. Early this morning, Musk posted on X that “only the AfD can save Germany.” The Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, is one of Germany’s furthest-right parties, whose jingoistic desires don’t just stop at mass deportations. AfD politicians have reportedly discussed “remigration,” the process of deporting nonwhite residents, including naturalized citizens and their descendants. These views are presumably not just finding their way to Trump; they are broadcast to millions of people who log on to X.
In many ways, Musk’s decision to purchase Twitter for a staggering $44 billion has not proved to be a shrewd financial move. Advertisers have fled the site, as have users—especially since last month’s election, after which liberals have flocked to Bluesky. A recent estimate suggested that X is now barely worth more than $10 billion. Yesterday, Musk tried to point out the “irony” of how the media have remarked on the influence he wields through X and noted the site’s decline in general relevance. Several things can be true at once, though. X is a large platform that still motivates people to spring into action and put pressure on others, even as its influence slowly erodes. There could come a day when X is too diminished for Musk to exert this kind of power, but that’s not the present.
The $44 billion that Musk spent on X has done wonders for Musk’s ambitions. As far and away the wealthiest man in the world, and the owner of one of the most influential platforms for shaping political discourse, Musk has achieved an advantage that outstrips the standards of normal oligarchs. Thanks to X, he has the ability—perhaps second only to Trump’s—to design America’s political reality.
The past two weeks in South Korean politics have featured enough twists to fill a Netflix K-drama. President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, shocking even some of his own advisers. In a late-night session, the national legislature overturned it. A few days later, the besieged president begged forgiveness from his people, while a corruption scandal engulfed the first lady. Legislators voted to impeach Yoon last weekend and suspend his powers, which have been transferred to a caretaker government run by the prime minister. For now, Yoon remains in office; the country’s highest court will decide whether he can stay.
Korea’s national crisis is far from over. Government dysfunction will likely last well into the new year, entrenching the country’s economic and social problems. The crisis also threatens to undo the substantial progress that Korea has made in strengthening ties with the West, and to leave Seoul woefully unprepared to address Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency, with all the dangers he poses to Korean security.
The proximate seeds of this calamity were planted last spring. The opposition trounced Yoon’s ruling party in national elections in April. Since then, Yoon’s political nemesis, Lee Jae-myung, has helped ensure that the legislature blocks all of the president’s bills, including the national budget. (Lee faces corruption charges, including for allegedly funneling money to North Korea, and an appellate-court decision will determine whether he can run to replace Yoon. He has denied any wrongdoing.) Meanwhile, Yoon’s wife, Kim Keon-hee, became the subject of growing public outrage over allegations of accepting lavish gifts. On December 3, in an apparent attempt to crush his political opposition and silence his wife’s critics, Yoon declared martial law.
But Yoon’s decision also reflected deeper structural issues. The Korean constitution allows presidents to sit for a single five-year term, with no possibility of reelection. As a result, about halfway through their tenure, both their own party and the opposition tend to distance themselves from the president as they begin looking for a successor. This process had already begun for Yoon, who took office in the spring of 2022. Alienated and unpopular in the second half of their term, many Korean presidents have sought to clamp down on opponents and consolidate power, with little regard for how the public will respond. After all, they have no reelection campaign to worry about.
That said, even at the height of their powers, Korean presidents rarely have a popular mandate to govern. That’s because, for more than three decades, one-third of the country’s electorate has identified as conservative, one-third as progressive, and one-third as moderate or undecided. Yoon, for example, is a conservative who won election by less than 1 percent and enjoyed no political honeymoon before his approval ratings plummeted. He was deeply disliked long before declaring martial law and apparently saw no other way to reverse his political fortunes.
Presidents are also vulnerable from the start of their term because of elements in Korean culture that promote a zero-sum view of politics. The country’s deep ideological divides contribute to this problem, but it’s also rooted in a concept called han, which is central to many Koreans’ emotional identity. Loosely translated as “resentment for past injustices,” han compels each side to not just beat the other, but destroy it. For example, opposition forces, led by Lee, have ruthlessly attacked the first lady, stirring mass protests and impugning her character. Government forces, meanwhile, are expected to pursue their corruption case against Lee until he’s at least disqualified from running in the next election, if not imprisoned. And in addition to impeaching Yoon, the opposition has opened a criminal case against him for insurrection. Some of these prosecutions may well be justified, but Korea’s politicians are highly motivated to carry them out past the point of reason.
The next step in resolving the crisis falls to the Constitutional Court, which will have final say on Yoon’s impeachment. It has ruled on presidential ousters before. In 2004, the court overturned the impeachment of President Roh Moo-hyun, allowing him to finish his term. More recently, in 2017, it upheld the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. The court has up to 180 days to render a decision on Yoon. Politics will inevitably play a role, as all parties jockey to fill the court’s three current vacancies with friendly judges. If none of the spots is filled, the dissenting opinion of only one judge will be enough to overturn the impeachment and reinstate Yoon as president.
In Korea’s history of political chaos, these impeachments hardly rank. Four of the country’s 13 presidents (including Park) have been jailed. One committed suicide after leaving office, one was shot in the head by his bodyguard, and one was forced into exile (in Hawaii) until his death. Some years ago, I attended an event where I saw three former U.S. presidents all in the same place, and I thought: This could never happen in Korea.
Government dysfunction has cost South Korea. The Korean stock market plummeted after Yoon’s declaration of martial law, and the national currency quickly depreciated. (The stock market has since recovered.) Those who would invest in South Korea now price in political instability, just as they do the security threat from North Korea. Other stubborn problems—low birth rates, underemployment among the college-educated, a doctors’ strike that has effectively halted elective medical procedures—have gone largely unaddressed. Korea’s power brokers are too busy fighting among themselves.
Domestic concerns may soon be the least of Korea’s worries. Trump’s imminent return to the White House will put the U.S.-Korea alliance to the test at a moment when Seoul has only a caretaker government in place and no election scheduled in the near term. Without a permanent leader making the case on Korea’s behalf, Trump may be more likely to follow through on his promise to impose tariffs. He may demand to renegotiate America’s standing agreements with Seoul that protect free trade and cost-sharing for defense. Perhaps more frightening, Trump could remove the nearly 30,000 U.S. ground troops in Korea—something he tried and failed to do during his first term. He might also rekindle his friendship with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and make a peace deal over Seoul’s head. All of these things could happen very quickly. As one former senior Trump official told me, speaking about the coming administration on the condition of anonymity, “Things will change not just in the first 100 days, but in the first 100 hours.”
With so much on the line, South Korea will need its leaders to establish early contact with Trump. Indeed, that was Yoon’s plan: He was angling for a pre-inauguration Mar-a-Lago meeting last month. But now Korea has no elected leader to advocate for it in the first months of the new U.S. administration.
Yoon did enact some policies that were widely admired, and that linked his country more strongly to the world, particularly to the West. Under Yoon, South Korea improved relations with Japan, advanced trilateral cooperation with Japan and the U.S., joined the Chips 4 Alliance for semiconductor supply chains and export controls, invested in electric-vehicle-battery production in the United States, and supported Ukraine. Now these and other policies will be tainted by his impeachment and subject to partisan attacks, while Seoul likely retrenches on all fronts.
So far, America’s reaction to the political crisis in Seoul has been subdued and cautious; in a statement, it simply emphasized the importance of democratic resilience and rule of law. The European Union was somewhat more forceful, urging a quick and democratic resolution to the crisis, suggesting the importance it places on South Korea’s supply chains and support for Ukraine.
For many Koreans who have known only democracy, Yoon’s declaration of martial law introduced them to the country’s history as a military dictatorship. Instead of a K-drama, the No. 1 Korean title on Netflix earlier this month was a film about the last time martial law was declared, in 1979. Apparently real life—both past and present—supplied more than enough excitement.
Yesterday, America had one of its worst days of bird flu to date. For starters, the CDC confirmed the country’s first severe case of human bird-flu infection. The patient, a Louisiana resident who is over the age of 65 and has underlying medical conditions, is in the hospital with severe respiratory illness and is in critical condition. This is the first time transmission has been traced back to exposure to sick and dead birds in backyard flocks. Meanwhile, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency after weeks of rising infections among dairy herds and people. In Los Angeles, public-health officials confirmed that two cats died after consuming raw milk that had been recalled due to a risk of bird-flu contamination.
Since March, the virus has spread among livestock and to the humans who handle them. The CDC has maintained that the public-health risk is low because no evidence has shown that the virus can spread among people, and illness in humans has mostly been mild. Of the 61 people who have so far fallen ill, the majority have recovered after experiencing eye infections and flu-like symptoms. But severe illness has always been a possibility—indeed, given how widely bird flu has spread among animals, it was arguably an inevitability.
The case in Louisiana reveals little new information about the virus: H5N1 has always had the capacity to make individuals very sick. The more birds, cows, and other animals exposed people to the virus, and the more people got sick, the greater the chance that one of those cases would look like this. That an infected teenager in British Columbia was hospitalized with respiratory distress last month only emphasized that not every human case would be mild. Now here we are, with a severe case in the United States a little over a month later.
Although worrying, the new case doesn’t change much about the predicted trajectory of bird flu. For months, experts have warned that bird flu would continue spreading among livestock and the people who work with them but that transmission among people was unlikely. And the CDC still says the public-health risk is low. “Everyday Americans should not be panicked by this news,” but they need to stay vigilant about bird flu, Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious-diseases expert at UC San Francisco, told me.
There are a few reasons the latest news shouldn’t cause alarm. The virus hasn’t found a way to efficiently infect humans; its receptors prefer animal hosts. This means the virus doesn’t enter the body at high levels. “It’s kind of forcing its entry using a jackhammer right now, so cases have generally been mild,” Chin-Hong told me. Higher levels of virus generally make people sicker. The Louisiana patient was infected with a strain of the virus related to the one that sickened the Canadian teen but different from the one spreading among dairy herds, poultry, and farmworkers. The mutations in this strain “represent the ability of the virus to cause serious disease, but these instances should be isolated in humans for the time being,” Chin-Hong said.
But just because America is in the same place of steady precarity that it has been in for months doesn’t mean that’s a good place to be in. As I wrote in September, we are in an awkward state of in-between, in which experts are on high alert for concerning mutations but the public has no reason to worry—yet. “Right now, I agree that the risk to the general public is low, but we know avian influenza mutates quickly,” Anne Rimoin, an epidemiology professor at UCLA, told me. The more transmissions among animals—in particular from birds to mammals—the more chances the virus has to mutate to become more threatening to the public. The longer the virus persists in the environment, “the greater potential to mutate, resort, and become more infectious and virulent to humans,” Maurice Pitesky, an animal-infectious-diseases expert at UC Davis, told me.
America is giving the virus a lot of chances to infect people. Although efforts to control the virus, such as regular testing of herds and bulk testing of raw milk, are under way, they have clearly not been enough. The spread of the virus geographically and across mammalian species is unprecedented, Pitesky said. He believes that more efforts should be directed toward shifting waterfowl—ducks, geese, and other wild birds responsible for spreading H5N1—away from commercial farms, where the virus is most likely to be transmitted to humans. A shot for bird flu exists, and experts have urged the government to vaccinate farmworkers. “Farmers need help,” Pitesky said. As of this month, the Biden administration has no plans to authorize a human vaccine, making it likely that that choice will fall under the purview of Donald Trump.
Just as a severe case in America was inevitable, continued mutation is a given too. At this rate, the virus will adapt to infect human hosts, cause more serious disease, and result in human-to-human transmission “at some point,” Chin-Hong said. Earlier this month, a study published inScience by researchers at the Scripps Research Institute showed that a single mutation in the virus strain spreading among dairy herds could switch its preference from bird to human receptors. “In nature, the occurrence of this single mutation could be an indicator of human pandemic risk,” the paper’s editor wrote.
Throughout the bird-flu outbreak, the main concern has been its potential to cause the next pandemic. That outcome is unlikely so long as bird flu remains unable to spread among people. Yet even if it does develop that ability, the world is more prepared for it than it was for COVID, which was caused by an unfamiliar virus. The H5N1 virus that causes bird flu has been known for nearly three decades; vaccine candidates, four influenza drugs, and a diagnostic test are already in existence. “We are not starting from scratch,” Chin-Hong said. Still, to not have to start at all would be preferable.
But right now, the future trajectory of bird flu points to the real possibility that the U.S. will have to weather the virus’s spread among people, with leadership that’s shown little interest in addressing it. Trump has not said anything about his plans, but he has picked Robert F. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic and raw-milk enthusiast, to lead the country’s health agencies. In the absence of more stringent controls, the public can take steps to prevent the situation from worsening: avoiding raw milk and dead birds, for starters. Getting a regular flu shot decreases the chances of getting infected simultaneously with human and bird flu, which would create conditions for the viruses to combine into a virus that prefers humans. But what America needs is a plan, Pitesky said. The previous four flu pandemics had their origins in avian influenza. There is still time to prevent the next one.
Early in Mufasa: The Lion King, one shot quickly differentiates the new movie from the other CGI-heavy spins on classic Disney cartoons. Just before a cast of familiar characters begins recounting the titular patriarch’s origin story, his young granddaughter bounds toward the screen. For a moment, the photorealistic cub aims a warm, open look at the audience—and, instantly, we’re reminded that this is a Barry Jenkins production.
The prominence of this archetypal Jenkins image, in which a subject directly returns the viewer’s gaze, neatly captures the tension of the creative pairing that brought the film to life. Mufasa: The Lion King follows the original Lion King’s uncanny 2019 reworking, which had felt like an obvious nostalgia play—the continuation of an ongoingtrend in which studios like Disney remake films from their archive and benefit by placing a familiar piece of intellectual property at the box office. So it was a surprising development when Jenkins, an auteur best known for weighty features such as Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, was announced as the director of a new prequel focused on protagonist Simba’s father.
In its most intriguing moments, Mufasa makes a clear case for how Jenkins has elevated the latest entry in the “Disney live-action-remake assembly line,” as my colleague David Sims called it. The new film follows the young Mufasa (voiced by Aaron Pierre) after an accidental separation from his parents, when a spirited cub named Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) saves the wayward lion’s life. The two come to see each other as brothers, despite Taka being a prince and his father insisting that Mufasa is nothing but an outsider who poses a threat to their family’s royal lineage—a suspicion that is partially justified when Mufasa does come to rule the land. (Eventually, Taka becomes Scar, the campy and conniving villain of The Lion King.)
The new film seems genuinely concerned with the interiority of its characters; the animals are far more believably expressive this time around, CGI and all. And with Jenkins at the helm, Mufasa: The Lion King is also a marked visual improvement from the 2019 Lion King’s pallid, nearly shot-for-shot re-creation of the 1994 animation. The director’s sweeping, dynamic scenes emphasize the drama of the animal showdowns with an eye toward how the natural world shapes their power struggles. Bright, sun-streaked pans across the savanna and idyllic visions of flower-covered fields contrast sharply with foreboding images of unfamiliar terrain.
These images are particularly striking in IMAX. Every unexpected descent into a flooding canyon or grueling trek up an icy mountain emphasizes the lions’ vulnerability to the elements—or the vital importance of their connection to the land, a thread that mirrors Jenkins’s approach in his 2021 TV adaptation of The Underground Railroad. In some quieter scenes, Mufasa speaks about his environment with reverence and insight, and Mufasa draws artful observations about how outsiders can learn from their chosen family.
But still. Even with these high-culture flourishes, Mufasa never transcends its original calling as a glitzy Hollywood product. Consider the dual casting of Beyoncé as the lioness Nala, and Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy Carter as Nala’s daughter Kiara—not so much a creative choice as a promotional opportunity. And unlike many other IP-driven franchise movies that well-regardedfilmmakers have directed for major studios, Mufasa commits to hitting plenty of its narrative and emotional beats through original songs. As with the 2019 remake, nowhere is Mufasa’s hollow artistic center more obvious than during these musical sequences, which highlight the upper limits of CGI storytelling—bluntly, these animals just don’t look like they’re singing—and the fundamental unbelievability of Disney remakes that depend on it.
Mufasa’s singing scenes clearly lack the playfulness that made previous Disney soundtracks so memorable, in part because live-action production is simply less conducive to fantastical, dreamlike imagery than animation is. Without this spirit, the new film’s songs, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, struggle to match the verve and passion of not only the 1994 original, but also a pair of direct-to-video animated sequels released in 1998 and 2004. The 2019 Lion King, at least, offered the allure of Beyoncé’s imperfect but catchy companion album, but the music of Mufasa largely falls flat. It’s one thing to see an animated meerkat and warthog confidently belt a Swahili phrase to a surly cartoon lion cub, and hum along—but there’s nothing fun about watching real-looking animals sing. And three decades after “Hakuna Matata,” the new lyrics still sound ripped from a generic African proverb: “We Go Together,” one of the songs, opens with Rafiki singing, “If you wanna go fast, go alone … But if you wanna go far / We go together.”
In a recent Vulture interview, Jenkins conceded that all-digital filmmaking was a considerable challenge for him and longtime collaborators such as the cinematographer James Laxton, who has been integral to establishing the director’s signature aesthetic. After the grueling, on-location shoot for The Underground Railroad in Georgia, Jenkins said that working on Mufasa offered him the opportunity to realize a massive project within the stable, controlled environment of a virtual production studio. (Of course, it also came with a Disney-sized check.) But such a setting doesn’t lend itself to improvisation—a key feature of Jenkins’s typical filmmaking process, and one that can be at odds with the priorities of a studio interested in efficiency. “I want to work the other way again, where I want to physically get everything there,” the director said about his post-Mufasa plans. “How can these people, this light, this environment, come together to create an image that is moving, that is beautiful, that creates a text that is deep enough, dense enough, rich enough to speak to someone?”
Mufasa does speak, just in more of a whisper than a roar. By demystifying its protagonist, and extending some compassion to the much-maligned Scar, Jenkins accomplishes a fair bit with a film that could otherwise have been even less compelling. And this is a children’s movie, after all—for those old enough to sit through the film’s scarier bits, perhaps the animals’ expressiveness may help imbue some valuable takeaways about family and forgiveness. For the rest of us, though, the main lesson of Mufasa is a far less generative one: Even the most talented director can’t make someone else’s unoriginal idea shine.
A Christmas fair in Romania, an enormous indoor ice rink in Paris, a surfing Santa Claus in Australia, a sunset camel safari in India, a cyclo-cross race in Belgium, holiday lights in Japan and France, and much more
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