When Sam Altman first told her that he’d never let OpenAI go corporate, that what he and his colleagues were building was too powerful to be driven by investors, Catherine Bracy more or less believed him.  The conversation took place in 2022, when Bracy, CEO and founder of the social mobility-focused nonprofit TechEquity, was interviewing […]

In the early 1800s, in southwestern Germany, outbreaks of a mysterious illness spread throughout the countryside. People who came down with it had terrible symptoms. Their eyelids would droop. Their speech would slur. They’d be gripped by a paralysis that, once it reached their breathing muscles, could be fatal.  A young doctor named Justinus Kerner […]

For the past quarter century, the future of monarch butterflies has looked dire, with these iconic American insects flitting toward extinction. Now, however, there is at least a small reason for hope: New data from WWF Mexico, a large conservation group, offers further evidence that the decline of eastern monarchs — the world’s largest population — has […]

This morning, Joe Kent — the director of the National Counterterrorism Center — resigned in protest over the war in Iran. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war,” he said in a resignation letter addressed to Trump and published on X. You’d think that a war critic like myself should welcome this development. The […]

To its fiercest critics, “populism” is a politics of mindless resentment: The populist’s animating ambition is not to help people in general — or the downtrodden in particular — so much as to hurt some vilified elite. If afflicting the comfortable also requires discomforting the afflicted, so be it.  Personally, I think this is wildly […]