Well, that was a nice idea in theory. Paris held the first-ever Olympics opening ceremony to take place outside a stadium—and on one of the loveliest settings in the world, the Seine. Athletes paraded not by foot but by boat, waving flags from sleek cruising pontoons, as pageantry unfolded on bridges and riverbanks. The aquatic format promised to do more than just showcase the architectural beauty of Paris or convey the magic of strolling across the Pont Neuf with fresh bread in hand. It promised to offer the world—our ever more jaded, content-drowned world—something new to look at.
Unfortunately, that new thing was a mess. Some will blame the rain, which soaked the festivities for hours, adding an air of tragedy as athletes waved flags from within their ponchos. But even on a sunnier day, the ceremony would have served as an example of how not to stage a spectacle for live TV. The energy was low, the pacing bizarre, and the execution patchy. Paris tried to project itself as a modern, inclusive hub of excitement—but it mostly just seemed exhausted.
Olympics opening ceremonies are inevitably ridiculous affairs, usually in a fun way. The host nation must welcome the global community while cobbling all of the signifiers of its own identity into some sort of romping medley that also, ideally, expands that country’s image in helpful ways. London offered the Queen and James Bond, and also a tribute to the National Health Service. Rio hosted a rumbling dance party as well as a briefing on Brazil’s Indigenous history. Most important, both of those cities gave us good TV.
Beforehand, the event’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, announced his intentions to play with Gallic clichés. Key words—liberté, synchronicité, and so on—announced thematic chapters, but a narrative hardly cohered. Congratulations if you had the following on your bingo card: mimes, Louis Vuitton, parkour, Les Misérables, the cancan, lasers shooting out of the Eiffel Tower
, allusions to ménages à trois. But credit where it’s due—I really did not foresee the Minions stealing the Mona Lisa and bringing it aboard a Jules Verne–style submarine. On reflection, that was the most educational part of the show: learning that a Frenchman co-directed Despicable Me.
Dan Mullan / Reuters
One problem with this French fever dream is that much of it was prerecorded. Every few minutes, the telecast would cut to slick cinematography of a masked, hooded individual—that’s what the NBC broadcasters kept calling her, “the Individual”—sneaking the Olympic torch around. She went to the Louvre, where the paintings came to life. She went to a movie screening, where a Lumière-brothers film … came to life. These segments hit with all the force of a cruise-ship commercial, while distracting from the novelty of having a ceremony on water in the first place.
The live components of the show weren’t much more vibrant. A bridge was converted into a runway on which fashion models and drag queens strutted with the gusto and precision of a forced march. Platforms over the river itself featured extreme-sports performers doing tricks that the TV cameras seemed suspiciously afraid of showing in close-up. Lady Gaga put on a feather-laden cabaret performance that was perfectly fine, save for the fact that “perfectly fine” shouldn’t be anywhere near the name Lady Gaga.(As it turns out, that performance was prerecorded too.)
One of the only showstopping moments made clear that the weird vibes of the ceremony could largely be blamed on the detail work. At one point, the camera cut to a woman dressed as Marie Antoinette and holding her own babbling, chopped-off head. The heavy-metal band Gojira broke into riffage, and flames fired. This was righteous. But then, not much happened. Viewers were left to grow bored with static, wide shots of the performance. Eventually, a fake boat wheeled into view, looking quite a bit like a prop from a high-school play.
The best bits took place firmly on land. The pop star Aya Nakamura danced with the French Republican Guard in a flashy meeting of old and new cultural regimes. Once the sun set, “the Individual” emerged in real life to ride a cool-looking mechanical horse down the Seine. (It must be said that this journey was interminable.) The Olympic cauldron was cool too: It resembled a hot-air balloon, and it rose into the air when lit. To finish things off, Celine Dion made her seemingly unlikely
return to singing, heaving with emotion from a deck of the Eiffel.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that carefully composed, largely stable images were the highlights of a show that tried to reinvent the Olympic ceremony in fluid directions. My favorite moment was when the pianist Alexandre Kantorow played Maurice Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau from a bridge as rain puddled on his instrument. He looked sad and soaked but also unbothered, lost in music. He made me remember the word I’d been trying to think of, for one of those ineffable French feelings: malaise.
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The current political climate is suffused with nostalgia for supposedly better times. I remember my own childhood, and those days weren’t better—but they had their sugary moments.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
So much of our current national strife is predicated on how much better things were Back Then. For younger people, “back then” is the time they can barely remember, before Donald Trump began polluting our politics. For some people, it’s the years just before 9/11. Others have fond childhood memories of their first game system, in the 1990s, or their narrow ties and big hair from the ’80s. My generation—call us Gen Jones
, wedged between the Boomers and the Xers—grew up in the late ’60s, a nice time to be a child but a period of frightening turmoil for anyone older than us.
(I have left out the ’70s. I graduated from high school in 1979; for me, the ’70s couldn’t end soon enough, and I doubt whether anyone is really nostalgic for them.)
I was thinking about the prevalence of nostalgia recently while looking at a framed collection of some of my most treasured childhood possessions: the 1966 Batman trading cards issued by Topps
. These were not scenes from the campy TV show, but comic-book art, and they are beautiful, whimsical, and just a little bit scary. (The Caped Crusaders fighting giant rats? The Boy Wonder screaming as the Riddler is about to saw him in half? Holy Inappropriate for Kids, Batman!)
Sports cards have always been big business, but starting in the 1950s, more trading cards based on TV shows, bands, fads, and big historical events began to appear. They usually sold for a nickel a pack, and they came with a stick of bubble gum. Well, I say “a stick of gum,” but in reality, it was more like a piece of thin plaster covered in powdered sugar, dusty stuff that made the cards smell sweet for years. Even “plaster” might not be a good description: Plaster, if made properly and chewed enough, is digestible.
Anyway, you chucked the stick and the wrapper and then waited to see which five cards you’d drawn. You prayed that you didn’t end up with dreaded “doubles,” because most of the cards had a piece of a puzzle on the back, and you needed to collect them all to see the finished picture.
Buying these cards was a cherished ritual of my childhood in Chicopee, Massachusetts. In my neighborhood, we had four possible places to go: three small stores and a pharmacy. Each week or so, new cards would arrive in the shops, and we would take our hard-earned money (sometimes from scavenging bottles for refunds) and make the rounds.
A man named Art Lapite ran one of these stores. He called all the boys “Butch,” and for as long as I knew him, he wore a kind of 1950s pharmacy smock. My dad used to go to Lapite’s to pay the utilities—as one could do back then—because he enjoyed the walk and liked to shoot the breeze for a moment or two. (I once tried to steal some stuff from there; Art quietly let me know that he was onto me and gave me a chance to put everything back and walk out. I did.)
We might also check the Red Store. (We didn’t know what its name was. It was red. Close enough.) But the mother lode was at Knightly’s Pharmacy, the local drugstore run by Mr. Knightly and his sisters. His candy rack, to my small eyes, was a majestic wall of God’s generous bounty. Finally, we’d arrive at Kane’s, a small market down by the riverbank. (That wasn’t its name, but again, that’s what we called it, and I can’t remember why.)
This odyssey would take us along a route
that was classic small-town America. Chicopee Street included multiple gas stations: At the one owned by Mr. Ludwin, my family could just sign for gas. We would pass the American Legion post where my parents, both veterans, were members, and where my mom would sing on St. Patrick’s Day. You had your choice of three barbers; Dad and I went to the immigrant French Canadian guy. Our bicycles would zip past the local credit union (where I got my first bank account after starting a paper route). I did my homework at a branch library. Our little main drag also had at least three bars, some that would open early for the shift workers.
Mostly, our search for cards was a boy thing. The girls in our neighborhood weren’t big into Batman or the other TV shows and movies that showed up on the candy racks. (I still have a few cards from The Rat Patrol, a World War II drama; it was a hit on the Greek side of my family because it featured Christopher George
, a Greek American actor).
One series, however, caught fire and united my neighborhood in an explosion of sugary pink smoke: Dark Shadows
.
Dark Shadows was a boring Gothic soap opera until some genius at the ABC TV network said: Hey, what if one of the leads is a vampire? No, not the emotional kind, but a real, bloodsucking chieftain of the undead? A Canadian actor named Jonathan Frid
was cast as the urbane and scary Barnabas Collins, and the show took off. Kids raced home from school to spend their afternoons getting weirded out. Soon, Dark Shadows trading cards were like child bearer bonds, gold in the hands of anyone who had them.
Things change. Now people apparently buy cards by the box just for the sake of owning them. At Walmart, you can snag a full set of basketball cards—14 boxes, seven packs a box, eight cards a pack, or 784 cards—for about $100. We couldn’t spend that kind of money, but why would we? We were scouring the town, pooling pennies, taking our chances, and then trading, which is why they were called “trading” cards. That’s what made them fun.
These are kind and gentle memories. But my collection also includes the cards issued by the Philadelphia Chewing Gum Corporation in 1968 after Robert F. Kennedy was shot.
You might think that an “assassinated politician” bubble-gum card is in bad taste, but strangely, I think it helped kids grasp what was going on. I lived in Massachusetts, and I knew that Bobby was Jack’s brother, but that was about it. I didn’t know who Martin Luther King was, but I knew he’d been murdered, and when I got the bubble-gum card that pictured RFK and MLK
, I started to understand that good men were getting killed. I threw away a lot of cards, but I kept the one of Bobby and Martin
.
Courtesy of Tom Nichols
When I look at those old cards, of course I feel a flood of nostalgia. Most of the landmarks of my childhood have crumbled or closed. A highway overpass destroyed the center of Chicopee Street. Lapite’s and Knightly’s are long gone. Kane’s is a check-cashing store. Most of the other businesses have disappeared (a few are now storefront churches), although the bars have held out longer—one of my high-school friends was stabbed to death
in one of them, right next to my house, shortly after our class reunion almost 15 years ago.
When people look back and feel loss, I understand
. But I am old enough now to know that these were not good days, and that the nostalgia is mostly a lie.
I remember Batman and Barnabas and Bobby. I also remember the alcoholism and drug abuse that plagued our neighborhood (and my family). I remember rampant domestic violence, although as children we didn’t know what to call it. I remember hospitals and nursing homes that now seem medieval to me. I remember air-conditioning being a luxury.
I remember the kids who were drafted; I remember others who I later learned were living miserable lives in the sexual closet. I remember people trudging to decrepit factories most Americans wouldn’t set foot in now. I remember being shooed away from fights between white kids from Chicopee and Hispanic kids from Holyoke, usually near the bridge over the Connecticut River that was like Checkpoint Charlie
between our neighborhoods. (My church was only a short distance across that bridge; at 10 years old, I was held up next to it at knifepoint.)
We can cherish our memories, but we should be clear-eyed about the past. I do not want those days back, and I will not support the vengeful authoritarians who sell such nostalgic rotgut. Nevertheless, I still smile at some of those favorite acquisitions of my childhood, including the cards I proudly bought in 1969 after the moon landing
. I particularly like a card of Micky Dolenz of the Monkees, because I remember the crisp fall day I bought it from Art Lapite nearly six decades ago.
And when I posted a picture of the card on Twitter some years ago, Micky Dolenz thought it was cool
too.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Donald Trump
for the first time since Trump left the White House, in 2021.
Arsonists set fire
to parts of France’s high-speed-rail network this morning, ahead of the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics, hosted in Paris.
Barack Obama and Michelle Obama endorsed
Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination in the presidential race.
The Weekly Planet: Monday was characterized as the hottest day in 125,000 years
, Zoë Schlanger writes. We’re just sticking a toe into the climatic realm of the previous interglacial period, not living in it—yet.
Times change, corporate acquisitions happen
, and now we have Deadpool & Wolverine, in which Deadpool not only knows he’s in a cinematic universe but also wants to go to a better one. It’s an almost entirely metatextual movie—a series of Variety articles given life, crammed in a Lycra suit and encouraged to curse with impunity. Shawn Levy’s film exists to properly usher Deadpool into Disney’s squeaky-clean Marvel Cinematic Universe, helped along by the wearily professional Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), dragged out of retirement (and death) for one last rodeo.
Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.
Read. These seven books
will change how you watch and understand the Olympics.
Watch.How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer (A Cautionary Tale), a documentary that offers a model for reassessing the lives of monstrous men
, Gal Beckerman writes.
A few years ago, I wrote a book titled Our Own Worst Enemy
, in which I talked about the various threats to democracy that come from within democratic societies (and from within ourselves, if we are honest enough to admit it). In the summer of 2021, I took a drive back home to Chicopee with my daughter, Hope, a college student and budding videographer. I suggested, as a project, that she make an ad for the book.
My daughter had been back home with me only a few times as a small child, to see my father before he passed away. But she instinctively understood the sense of loss that I felt and that I was writing about, and she produced a video called Things Change, which my publisher was glad to use to promote the book. The video was shot mostly on Chicopee Street and near the riverbank where I played as a boy. You might find it interesting; you can watch it here
.
— Tom
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Following the Parade of Nations on the Seine River, athletes and spectators watch as lasers light up the sky around the Eiffel Tower, at the Trocadero venue, during the Opening Ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 26, 2024.
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Yesterday OpenAI made what should have been a triumphant entry into the AI-search wars: The start-up announced SearchGPT, a prototype tool that can use the internet to answer questions of all kinds. But there was a problem, as I reported
: Even the demo got something wrong.
In a video accompanying the announcement, a user searches for music festivals in boone north carolina in august. SearchGPT’s top suggestion was a fair that ends in July. The dates that the AI tool gave, July 29 to August 16, are not the dates for the festival but the dates for which its box office is closed.
AI tools are supposed to refashion the web, the physical world, and our lives—in the context of internet search, by providing instant, straightforward, personalized answers to the most complex queries. In contrast with a traditional Google search, which surfaces a list of links, a searchbot will directly answer your question for you. For that reason, websites and media publishers are afraid that AI searchbots will eat away at their traffic. But first, these programs need to work. SearchGPT is only the latest in a longlineofAIsearchtools
that exhibit all sorts of errors: inventing things whole cloth, misattributing information, mixing up key details, apparent plagiarism. As I wrote, today’s AI “can’t properly copy-paste from a music festival’s website.”
Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani
OopsGPT
By Matteo Wong
Whenever AI companies present a vision for the role of artificial intelligence in the future of searching the internet, they tend to underscore the same points: instantaneous summaries of relevant information; ready-made lists tailored to a searcher’s needs. They tend not to point out that generative-AI models are prone to providing incorrect, and at times fully made-up, information—and yet it keeps happening. Early this afternoon, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced a prototype AI tool that can search the web and answer questions, fittingly called SearchGPT
. The launch is designed to hint at how AI will transform the ways in which people navigate the internet—except that, before users have had a chance to test the new program, it already appears error prone.
In a prerecorded demonstration video accompanying the announcement, a mock user types music festivals in boone north carolina in august into the SearchGPT interface. The tool then pulls up a list of festivals that it states are taking place in Boone this August, the first being An Appalachian Summer Festival, which according to the tool is hosting a series of arts events from July 29 to August 16 of this year. Someone in Boone hoping to buy tickets to one of those concerts, however, would run into trouble. In fact, the festival started
on June 29 and will have its final concert
on July 27. Instead, July 29–August 16 are the dates for which the festival’s box office will be officially closed
. (I confirmed these dates with the festival’s box office.)
AI’s real hallucination problem
: “Audacity can quickly turn into a liability when builders become untethered from reality,” Charlie Warzel wrote this week, “or when their hubris leads them to believe that it is their right to impose their values on the rest of us, in return for building God.”
Generative AI can’t cite its sources
: “It is unclear whether OpenAI, Perplexity, or any other generative-AI company will be able to create products that consistently and accurately cite their sources,” I wrote earlier this year, “let alone drive any audiences to original sources such as news outlets. Currently, they struggle to do so with any consistency.”
P.S.
You may have seen the viral clip of the Republican vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance suggesting that liberals think Diet Mountain Dew is racist. It sounded absurd—but the soft drink “retains a deep connection to Appalachia,” Ian Bogost wrote in a fascinating article
on why Vance just might have had a point.
Yesterday, NASA announced that one of its Mars rovers had sampled a very, very intriguing rock. At first glance, the rock looks much like the rest of the red planet—rugged, sepia-toned, dry. But it’s arguably the most exciting one that robotic space explorers have ever come across. The rock, NASA said in a press release, “possesses qualities that fit the definition of a possible indicator of ancient life.”
Of course it would happen like this. In the midst of a historically eventful summer—an attempted assassination of a former president, the abrupt campaign exit of a sitting one, possibly the worst IT failure in history—scientists might have an alien discovery on their hands.
To be clear, the rock, which scientists are calling Cheyava Falls, bears only potential evidence of fossilized life. There are other plausible explanations for its appearance and composition, mundane ones that have nothing to do with biological processes. Still, scientists are thrilled. “This is the exact type of rock that we came to Mars to find,” Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University who led the selection of the mission’s destination, told me. But to really investigate whether Cheyava Falls contains marvelous, existential proof of another genesis in our very own solar system, NASA needs to bring the sample home—a prospect that might take more than 15 years.
According to NASA, the rover, called Perseverance, has detected in Cheyava Falls organic compounds, which are necessary for life as we know it. The rock bears dozens of leopard spots: tiny, irregularly shaped off-white splotches, ringed with black material that NASA scientists say contains iron and phosphate. Such features can arise from chemical reactions that could provide life-giving energy for microbes. If you encountered these leopard spots in an ancient rock formation on Earth, you would assume that some microscopic organisms once dwelled there.
The Cheyava Falls rock was found in a region of Mars’s Jezero Crater that many scientists believe flowed with water
several billion years ago. Perhaps, before the planet froze over, there might have been enough time—and the right ingredients—for tiny life forms to emerge; if so, Jezero Crater could have been among the liveliest spots on the red planet. Cheyava Falls supports that theory because it is marked with streaks of calcium sulfate, which suggests that water once flowed through its sediments. Crucially, sulfate is good for preserving organic material, Horgan said.
Scientists inside and outside NASA know that the discovery comes with caveats. Carol Stoker, a NASA planetary scientist who is not involved in the mission, told me in an email that although “this is the most interesting rock that Perseverance has sampled,” she would like to see more evidence for the claim that the rover’s instruments detected organic materials. Entirely abiotic processes can produce organic compounds. And just because certain chemical components could serve as energy sources, that doesn’t mean that something once used them. “That’s like saying that a field of corn is evidence for the presence of cows,” Darby Dyar, a planetary geologist at Mount Holyoke College who has studied interactions between minerals and microbes, told me in an email.
More evidence isn’t likely to come anytime soon. NASA says that the Perseverance has studied the Cheyava Falls rock “from just about every angle imaginable,” with every instrument it’s got. But the rover alone can’t tell scientists if the discovery signals a true breakthrough. “The only way to be sure is to get that sample into a lab on Earth,” Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me in an email.
The good news is that NASA has spent years working on an ambitious mission, called Mars Sample Return, to do just that. The bad news is that the mission is currently in limbo
. NASA officials put development on pause earlier this year, saying that the program had become too expensive and was taking too long. The working timeline meant that the samples that Perseverance has been collecting wouldn’t return to Earth until 2040, and even before the Cheyava Falls discovery, NASA wanted them back sooner. The agency is now considering alternative mission concepts, including bringing home fewer samples than planned. That possibility has worried scientists, and they’re no doubt hoping that the tantalizing finding persuades NASA not to give up on the mission. If nothing else, the timing of this discovery is convenient for proponents of sample return, an extra point of data in favor of bringing as many samples home as soon as possible.
Scientists are used to ambiguity in this line of work. Back in September 2020, in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, scientists announced
that they had found evidence of phosphine in the clouds of Venus—a gas that, on Earth, is associated with life. (Apparently there’s never a nice, quiet time to announce the discovery of maybe-aliens.) Almost four years later, scientists remain unsure about whether the phosphine is a product of living creatures, ordinary geological activity, or something else. To our knowledge, Venus remains lifeless.
Even if Cheyava Falls is brought to Earth, scientists might not come to any meaningful conclusions. They might not find anything because, as intriguing as Cheyava Falls looks now, Perseverance’s drill might have struck just to the left or the right of fossilized life, and none of it would have made it into the sample tube. Martian life might even be hidden in another part of the planet altogether, at its frigid poles or in underground caves. Or scientists could find nothing because they don’t know what to look for; their search is guided by the structure of life as we know it on Earth, and they may not recognize what our planetary neighbor has managed to create.
Short of the arrival of giant spaceships from an extraterrestrial civilization
eager to bestow on us a new language, uncovering maybe-aliens in the form of teeny, long-dead microbes won’t change the course of most people’s daily lives. But the finding would still be a source of wonder, even comfort. It would mean that the history of life on Earth is just one story, perhaps one of countless others in the universe. A pale red dot, suspended in the same sunbeam as our blue one
, with its own rich tale of movement and community. But until scientists can actually examine Cheyava Falls and other samples like it, we don’t have a hope of understanding how those stories might have begun.
Monday was likely the hottest day on Earth since modern recordkeeping began. On that day, the planet was 17.16 degrees Celsius, or 62.89 degrees Fahrenheit, on average, according to the European climate service Copernicus
, narrowly beating out the previous record, set just the day before, by about 0.1 degrees. That news, like previous records of its kind, was quickly characterized
as the hottest day in millennia—since the peak of the last interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago. That claim is true, in a way: Ice cores and sediment cores can tell us with remarkable precision what the world was like back then—a very hot and radically different place. Hippos lived in the British Isles
, and the seas were 20 to 30 feet higher than they are today.
Comparing July 22, 2024, to the peak of a prehistoric hot era isn’t quite fair: Those ancient temperatures, deciphered through sampling layers of ancient ice or soil, are at best one-year averages, not one-day averages, like that of the record-breaking days this week. But average annual temperatures are rising fast too, and are approaching, if not yet surpassing, those ancient highs. For example, the world was about 2.45 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in 2023
than the average of the late 19th century, which is used as a benchmark for the preindustrial climate. The long-term average temperature during the last interglacial period was something like
2.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 19th-century benchmark. We are not yet living in the world of 125,000 years ago. We have simply, ominously, visited it.
Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecology professor at the University of Maine, thinks of these visits as “dipping your toe” into that ancient climate. If temperatures held at this level for a week or two each year, we’d be ankle-deep. But we could be fully immersed in that climate soon. If the long-term temperature averages—say, over decades—begin to resemble the current short-term ones, we’ll have succeeded in traveling back to the interglacial period from a climate perspective. “We have a couple of degrees to go,” Gill told me. “But we’re certainly on track. That’s where we’re headed by the end of the century.”
Gill specializes in that precise time period, the warm era between the last two glacial periods when the seas rose by some estimates an average of eight feet a century
, submerging large areas of land. Studying that time is a useful window into what may lie ahead for us. Arctic summers were probably ice-free
, and were four to five degrees Celsius warmer than they are today. There’s evidence that although some ice likely persisted year-round in Antarctica, the rapid melting of the Antarctic ice sheet likely played a major or even starring role
in the oceans’ rise at the time. This detail is especially worrying, given that the Copernicus analysis pointed to an unusually warm Antarctic winter as one of the main factors that pushed the global temperature into record-breaking territory earlier this week. Antarctic temperatures have been as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit
warmer than normal this winter. Scientists still don’t fully understand
Antarctic sea-ice dynamics, making insights about how ice sheets reacted the last time the world warmed this much particularly useful.
The climate 125,000 years ago was very unstable, Gill said. The hotter air temperatures may have fueled stronger storms, including hurricanes, a parallel to the rapidly intensifying hurricanes
the planet is experiencing now. Some models of that ancient period
suggest that, because warmer air holds more moisture, the Asian monsoon was more intense, echoing the rainfall increase projected for the modern monsoon season
in the nearer future. (Other studies of that period suggest a weakened interglacial monsoon
, which goes to show how hard it can be to look back that far.) But by all accounts, in our modern climate, the relationship between heat and rain is clear: As the world warms, wet places will get wetter, possibly as they did the last time the world warmed like this.
Forests at the time extended well into the Arctic circle. As the tree line moved northward, so did animal species, according to the fossil record. The Neanderthals, our closely related human relatives, followed. They “started going further north than they had been hanging out previously, tracking resources up,” Gill said. Northward migration of both humans and other species is already a foregone conclusion of climate change today. But every organism living now is dealing with temperature change that’s likely happening far faster
than creatures alive back then experienced. Whereas the world warmed over thousands of years in the last interglacial period, human activity has warmed the planet rapidly in just the past 150 years or so. Many species simply cannot move toward newly more habitable places fast enough
to survive.
One might look at the last interglacial period as an indication of the naturalness of climate change. Indeed, the planet is no stranger to major temperature swings. “The Earth’s history is full of these shake-ups, these abrupt events,” Gill said. Yet our current period of rapid change is distinctly unnatural. “We’re taking over as the dominant force in Earth’s climate system,” Gill said.
While Neanderthals certainly had no say in the chaotic and overheated climate they contended with, modern humans are in no such bind. If humanity ceased to burn fossil fuels and emit greenhouse gases, the planet would, within a few years or decades
, likely begin to cool. “We get to decide how much time travel we’re doing,” Gill said. “I don’t want to go to the interglacial. It’s fun to visit in my mind, but it’s not the planet I want to live on.”
For most people, from a climate perspective, Monday was just a typical day. None of us can feel the slippage of a global average into record-breaking territory, and even if we could, a fraction of a degree would not likely faze anyone. And yet, all the same, we are hurtling remarkably fast toward a world distinct from the one our societies developed in. Paleoclimatic data exist precisely for this moment: to show us what might be ahead, should history be allowed to repeat itself.
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J. D.Vance’s veteran status could be an advantage for the GOP—unless he trumpets his years of service too much and annoys his fellow vets in the process.
Breaking the Code
J. D. Vance is a U.S. Marine, and he wants you to know it. In the days since he was selected as the GOP vice-presidential nominee, Vance and the Republican Party have touted his service credentials with little discretion. At a rally
on Monday, he said, “Well, I don’t know, Kamala, I served in the United States Marine Corps, and I built a business. What the hell have you done other than collect a government check?”
Vance hasn’t always grandstanded when it comes to his time in uniform: During his Senate campaign against Tim Ryan two years ago, he spoke of the need for modesty, telling Greg Kelly of Newsmax, “I hate these guys who talk about their military service not because it’s an important part of their identity, but to use it to deflect against any criticism of their record.” And at the Republican National Convention this year, Vance told the crowd, with tact, that after 9/11, he “did what thousands of other young men my age did in that time of soaring patriotism and love of country: I enlisted in the United States Marines.”
But if his tone at the rally earlier this week is any indication, Vance may be embracing a newfound lack of modesty when it comes to his service. It’s a paradox: Vance seems to have been picked, in part, because of his veteran status. Donald Trump has shown a pattern of mixing ostentatious patriotism
with disdain for American service members—he has described those who died in combat as “suckers” and “losers,”
as first reported by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg—and he may hope that having a vet on the ticket will deflect from criticism of that history. But if Vance trumpets his years of service too much, he risks squandering the advantage that Republicans have tried to build with veterans and the military.
Vance wasn’t a Marine who saw combat. His specialty while he was deployed to Iraq was public affairs, which means he wrote stories and took photos. That in itself is no reason to question him. He served honorably in uniform, which the majority of Americans don’t even consider doing. Among veterans, there’s a mutual understanding that everyone is part of the military family—no matter what their job was. I’m a veteran myself, and I understand that there’s a code: Anyone who volunteered to wear the uniform deserves respect.
But few things anger veterans like someone who goes beyond talking about their service and starts bragging about it. When veterans bring undue attention to their service, they invite deep scrutiny of their record that they might not actually want. And when they use their military service as a political cudgel, that veteran code of respect is voided.
The GOP is clearly trying to court the veteran vote with Vance,and to paint him as a military hero whom civilian patriots should want to vote for. Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska—a Marine himself—went on Fox Business to talk about how Vance will be good for the country and for veterans because of his Marine background. Right-wing pundits and others on social media have been treating Vance like a Prussian field marshal: The venture capitalist David Sacks posted
, “When the Twin Towers came down, JD Vance enlisted in the Marine Corps, gung-ho to exact justice on America’s enemies.” In a Washington Post op-ed, the conservative political commentator Hugh Hewitt called
Vance a “warrior” and a “grunt” who can speak directly to veterans and blue-collar voters.
In 2016, the GOP focused heavily on America’s veteran voting bloc; today, more than 18 million living Americans have served, or some 6 percent of the adult population. (There are many more, of course, who are related to veterans or who care about defense issues for other reasons.) The GOP’s focus paid off: The New York Times exit polling
showed that veterans turned out heavily for Trump, an advantage that slipped in 2020.
Vance’s Marine credentials could, if leveraged properly, help the GOP gain back some of that support. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan I have spoken with are glad to have one of their own on a top ticket. But they understand that just because someone has worn the uniform doesn’t mean that they are a strong candidate or a good person.
“People are excited … It’s past time for us to have some veterans on these tickets,” Joe Chenelly, the national executive director of the veteran-service organization American Veterans (AMVETS), told me. But Chenelly noted that any veteran can overplay their hand when it comes to their record, Vance included. “I personally don’t like when veterans run and their No. 1 qualification for office is being a veteran. And he’s come close to that,” Chenelly said. “There’s a lot of room for backlash from the veterans community when that happens. He has a responsibility to be very mindful of the way he frames his service.”
Vance hasn’t totally broken with the veterancode yet.But his behavior so far shows that he might continue to reject the kind of mindfulness Chenelly is talking about. Over the past few years, Vance has changed his wardrobe
to more closely resemble that of Donald Trump, and in the days since his VP nomination, he’s changed his rhetorical approach to sound more like his running mate too. At the RNC, he lauded unity, but in his subsequent solo rallies, he’s claimed
, falsely, that Kamala Harris wants to “totally decriminalize” illegal immigration, and that Democrats believe it is “racist to do anything”—including drink Diet Mountain Dew
.
Even taking Vance out of the equation, up until last week, Trump had a clear advantage with veteran voters and those who care about foreign policy and defense: the fact that Biden fumbled the end of the “forever war.” Trump had been able to thread the rhetorical needle, taking credit for signing the deal to leave Afghanistan but blaming Biden for the way it was done. Voters of both parties disapproved of the way America pulled out of Afghanistan
, and Trump could use that fact to go on the offensive (as he did
in last month’s debate), because he knew that Biden would always be tied to the images of Afghans falling from a cargo plane as they tried to escape Kabul
, and of U.S. Marines killed while standing guard during the chaos.
But now the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, can distance herself from Biden’s Afghanistan policy, which Republicans have largely managed to tie to the president himself rather than to his administration more broadly. (When I speak with veterans and those involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal, they invariably complain about Biden, not Harris.) Pollsters pay little attention to the veteran vote, which makes it difficult to track, and we don’t yet know how Trump and Vance will square against a Harris-led ticket. But the fact that Harris can break free of the Afghanistan legacy could give her an advantage with the veteran vote. Chenelly, of AMVETS, said that many of the veterans in his organization don’t know all that much about Harris. But they have been angry with Biden for Afghanistan and even blame some of the current military-recruiting crisis on him.
What we do know is that if the Trump campaign wants to properly court veterans and their families, Vance ought to stay humble about his military service—an unlikely feat in a campaign where humility is not the guiding principle.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met
with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington, D.C.
California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order calling for state officials to begin dismantling homeless encampments
after the recent Supreme Court decision upholding a ban on public sleeping.
Officials arrested and charged
a man who allegedly pushed a burning car into a gully in Butte County, California, starting a wildfire that is the largest one in the state this season.
Dispatches
Work in Progress: “The yawning gap between the mobility of white children and Black children growing up in low-income families has narrowed sharply,” Annie Lowrey writes
.
Time-Travel Thursdays: Lyndon B. Johnson and Joe Biden both “faced a badly divided nation, and both seemed to understand that they could not be the instrument to heal those divisions,” Cullen Murphy writes
.
Illustration by Danielle Del Plato. Source: Getty.
Inside U.S. Cricket’s Shocking Victory
By Chris Heath
When the players on the U.S. men’s cricket team showed up at a stadium outside Dallas on the morning of June 6, they were well aware that few people who knew anything about the sport gave them a chance of winning. That the match was even taking place was curiosity enough. Their opponent was Pakistan, one of the great cricketing powers. In Pakistan, cricket is the nation’s most popular sport, whereas in the U.S. many are surprised that America even has a cricket team of its own. The two teams had never faced off before.
Listen. In the latest episode
of Radio Atlantic, Atlantic contributing writer Jemele Hill joins guest host Adam Harris to discuss the cost of sports betting for athletes and fans.
Whenever AI companies present a vision for the role of artificial intelligence in the future of searching the internet, they tend to underscore the same points: instantaneous summaries of relevant information; ready-made lists tailored to a searcher’s needs. They tend not to point out that generative-AI models are prone to providing incorrect, and at times fully made-up, information—and yet it keeps happening. Early this afternoon, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced a prototype AI tool that can search the web and answer questions, fittingly called SearchGPT
. The launch is designed to hint at how AI will transform the ways in which people navigate the internet—except that, before users have had a chance to test the new program, it already appears error prone.
In a prerecorded demonstration video accompanying the announcement, a mock user types music festivals in boone north carolina in august into the SearchGPT interface. The tool then pulls up a list of festivals that it states are taking place in Boone this August, the first being An Appalachian Summer Festival, which according to the tool is hosting a series of arts events from July 29 to August 16 of this year. Someone in Boone hoping to buy tickets to one of those concerts, however, would run into trouble. In fact, the festival started
on June 29 and will have its final concert
on July 27. Instead, July 29–August 16 are the dates for which the festival’s box office will be officially closed
. (I confirmed these dates with the festival’s box office.)
Other results to the festival query that appear in the demo—a short video of about 30 seconds—seem to be correct. (The chatbot does list one festival that takes place in Asheville, which is a two-hour drive away from Boone.) Kayla Wood, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told me, “This is an initial prototype, and we’ll keep improving it.” SearchGPT is not yet publicly available, but as of today anybody can join a waitlist to try the tool, from which thousands of initial test users will be approved. OpenAI said in its announcement that search responses will include in-line citations and that users can open a sidebar to view links to external sources.The long-term goal is to then incorporate search features into ChatGPT, the company’s flagship AI product.
On its own, the festival mix-up is minor. Sure, it’s embarrassing for a company that claims to be building superintelligence, but it would be innocuous if it were an anomaly in an otherwise proven product. AI-powered search, however, is anything but. The demo is reminiscent of any other number of AI self-owns that have happened in recent years. Within days of OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT, which kicked off the generative-AI boom in November 2022, the chatbot spewedsexist
and racist bile. In February of 2023, Google Bard, the search giant’s answer to ChatGPT, made an error in its debut that caused the company’s shares to plummet by as much as 9 percent
that day. More than a year later, when Google rolled out AI-generated answers to the search bar, the model told people that eating rocks is healthy
and that Barack Obama is Muslim.
Herein lies one of the biggest problems with tech companies’ prophecies about an AI change: Chatbots are supposed to revolutionize first the internet and then the physical world. For now they can’t properly copy-paste from a music festival’s website.
Searching the internet should be one of the most obvious, and profound, uses of generative-AI models like ChatGPT. These programs are designed to synthesize large amounts of information into fluent text, meaning that in a search bar, they might be able to provide succinct answers to simple and complex queries alike. And chatbots do show glimmers of remarkable capabilities—at least theoretically. Search engines are one of the key ways people learn and answer questions in the internet age, and the ad revenue they bring is also lucrative. In turn, companies including Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, and others have all rushed to bring AI to search
. This may be in part because AI companies don’t yet have a business model for the products they’re trying to build, and search is an easy target. OpenAI is, if anything, late to the game.
Despite the excitement around searchbots, seemingly every time a company tries to make an AI-based search engine, it stumbles
. At their core, these language models work by predicting what word is most likely to follow in a sentence. They don’t really understand what they are writing the way you or I do—when August is on the calendar, where North Carolina is on a map. In turn, their predictions are frequently flawed, producing answers that contain “hallucinations,” meaning false information. This is not a wrinkle to iron out, but woven into the fabric of how these prediction-based models function.
Meanwhile, these models raise a number of concerns about the very nature of the web and everyone who depends on it. One of the biggest fears is from the websites and publishers that AI tools such as SearchGPT and Google AI Overviews are pulling from: If an AI model can read and summarize your website, people will have less incentive to visit the original source of information, lowering traffic and thus lowering revenue. OpenAI has partnered with several media publishers, including The Atlantic—deals that some in journalism have justified by claiming that OpenAI will drive traffic to external sites, instead of taking it away. But so far, models from OpenAI and elsewhere have proved terrible at providing sources
: They routinely pull up the wrong links, cite news aggregators over original reporting, and misattribute information. AI companies say the products will improve, but for now, all the public can do is trust them. (The editorial division of The Atlantic operates independently from the business division, which announced its corporate partnership with OpenAI in May. In its announcement of SearchGPT, OpenAI quotes The Atlantic’s CEO, Nick Thompson, speaking approvingly about OpenAI’s entry into search.)
This is really the core dynamic of the AI boom: A tech company releases a dazzling product, and the public finds errors. The company claims to incorporate that feedback into the next dazzling product, which upon its release a few months later exhibits similar flaws. The cycle repeats. At some point, awe will need to give way to evidence.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
“I shall not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
Those are the words not of President Joe Biden, who announced his withdrawal from the 2024 campaign on Sunday, but of a previous president who took himself out of the running: Lyndon B. Johnson, speaking from the Oval Office on March 31, 1968.
I was in high school at the time, and remember watching the speech with my parents on an old black-and-white TV with semi-functional rabbit ears. All through the 1960s, major events collided with a chaotic intensity that in retrospect is hard to disentangle—a pattern that may seem all too familiar today.
Of all those years, 1968 was the most fraught. It began with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam—ultimately a military defeat for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, but a psychological blow from which the U.S. did not recover. In March, the strong showing in the New Hampshire primary by the anti-war candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy against the incumbent Johnson was perceived as tantamount to a win. In April came the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; in June, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; in August, the demonstrations and ferocious police response outside of the Democratic convention, in Chicago.
Johnson’s withdrawal from the presidential race took America completely by surprise—more than Biden’s exit did—and overshadowed his announcement, in the same speech, of a bombing pause in Vietnam and a renewed push for negotiations. I’ve always wondered what kind of moment it was for him. Earlier this year, The Atlanticpublished excerpts
from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s memoir based on more than 300 boxes of archival materials that her husband, Richard “Dick” Goodwin, had saved from his time as a prominent speechwriter and presidential adviser. Johnson had been an important figure in both of their lives. Dick Goodwin wrote some of Johnson’s landmark speeches, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, a historian and a former special assistant to Johnson, published her first book
in 1976 about LBJ, with whom she had worked closely as he wrote his memoirs.
“The first thing to recognize,” she told me when we chatted earlier this week, is that by March 1968 “he was facing a precarious political situation. He had been battered in New Hampshire, and he was expected to lose, big, in Wisconsin. More importantly, he had been told by his generals that he had to send 200,000 more troops to Vietnam, but that even then the most that could be expected was a stalemate.” There was also the issue of his health. Johnson had suffered a major heart attack in 1955, and the men in his family had a history of early deaths. In 1967, he initiated a secret actuarial study on his life expectancy, and was told he would die at 64—a prediction that came to pass. As Goodwin noted, “he would have died in that next term, if he’d had a second term.”
“What he talked to me about later was more personal,” Goodwin went on. “He knew he couldn’t go out on the streets without being bombarded by people carrying signs. How many kids did you kill today? There was no pleasure any longer in the part of politics he had always loved: being out with people. He told me that he had this nightmare regularly—that he was in a river, and he was trying to get to shore, and he went toward the shore on one side, and then he couldn’t reach the shore, so he turned around, figuring he was going the wrong way, and he couldn’t reach the shore on the other side either. He was just caught in the middle.”
Goodwin recalled that, up to the last moment on March 31, 1968, the people closest to Johnson weren’t sure he would deliver the final part of his speech—the withdrawal passage. In 1964, he had thought about not running for a full term as president; his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, had helped change his mind. In this case, withdrawing from the race was essential to his credibility on Vietnam: He believed that he would not be seen as acting in good faith to end the war if he were still a candidate.
“That night, I think, he was relieved and knew that he had done the right thing,” Goodwin said, going on to re-create the moment in time. “All the editorials are superlative. He has put principle above politics. It’s a personal sacrifice. He goes to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and gets a standing ovation. In the polls he goes from a 57 percent disapproval rating to a 57 percent approval rating. Most importantly, on April 3, he gets a message that North Vietnam is willing to come to the table. His aide Horace Busby said that, for Johnson, it was one of the happiest days of his presidency.”
Shortly after Johnson’s speech, Tom Wicker of The New York Times, one of the preeminent political writers of his day, described in these pages how Johnson had been drawn inexorably into Vietnam
. The background of intractable war—more than half a million American soldiers fighting on foreign soil—is one of several differences between Johnson’s decision not to run and Biden’s. Johnson was not in (obvious) physical decline, as Biden seems to be. However imperfect, political and civic institutions were stronger back then. An authoritarian demagogue did not appear to be waiting in the wings, and the future of American democracy did not seem to be at stake (though Richard Nixon’s disregard for the law would ultimately drive the country to crisis). But both presidents faced a badly divided nation, and both seemed to understand that they could not be the instrument to heal those divisions.
Biden’s short speech to the nation yesterday evening was freighted with sadness. Like Johnson, Biden has never not been a politician. Biden was in his final year of law school when Johnson gave his withdrawal speech. He was elected to the New Castle County Council roughly two years later, and to the U.S. Senate two years after that. Politics helped give him purpose in the face of personal tragedy—the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident, in 1972; the death of his son Beau, from brain cancer, in 2015.
Will Biden experience the sense of release that Johnson did? For Johnson, it was momentary. On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. The rest of 1968 unspooled in anger, protest, violence. The Vietnam peace talks bogged down. And retirement, when it came, did not prove easy. Leo Janos, a former White House speechwriter, contributed a haunting account
to The Atlantic of Johnson’s postpresidential life on the LBJ Ranch, in Texas, where Johnson faced more health issues and struggled to come to terms with his exile from politics. “He wanted so much for what he had done to be remembered,” Goodwin recalled.
Biden has a lot to be remembered for, too. But legacies are slippery. It can take decades to appreciate their value, and the country may squander them anyway. One thing can be said for sure: Whatever Joe Biden does when he leaves office, he will not be driving around a 350-acre spread in Delaware checking on his cattle.
