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.
