In 2017, soon after Google researchers invented a new kind of neural network called a transformer, a young OpenAI engineer named Alec Radford began experimenting with it. What made the transformer architecture different from that of existing A.I. systems was that it could ingest and make connections among larger volumes of text, and Radford decided to train his model on a database of seven thousand unpublished English-language books--romance, adventure, speculative tales, the full range of human fantasy and invention. Then, instead of asking the network to translate text, as Google's researchers had done, he prompted it to predict the most probable next word in a sentence. The machine responded: one word, then another, and another--each new term inferred from the patterns buried in those seven thousand books. Radford hadn't given it rules of grammar or a copy of Strunk and White.

A couple of months ago, Vice-President J. D. Vance made an appearance in Washington at the American Dynamism summit, an annual event put on by the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Members of Congress, startup founders, investors, and Defense Department officials sat in the audience. They gave Vance a standing ovation as he walked onstage, while Alabama's "Forty Hour Week (For a Livin')" played in the background. "You're here, I hope, because you love your country," Vance told the crowd. "You love its people, the opportunities that it's given you, and you recognize that building things--our capacity to create new innovation in the economy--cannot be a race to the bottom."

The New Yorker staff writer Katy Waldman joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Donald Trump's fondness for A.I.-generated memes and what it tells us about our current political climate. They talk about how Trump uses these images to bend the cultural narrative to his will, why the MAGA aesthetic is tailor-made for the age of A.I., and how the proliferation of A.I. slop is damaging our brains. "Trump Is the Emperor of A.I. Slop," by Katy Waldman "How Is Elon Musk Powering His Supercomputer?," by Bill McKibben "Is This the End of the Separation of Church and State?," by Ruth Marcus "How Russia and Ukraine Are Playing Trump's Blame Game," by Joshua Yaffa

On May 9th, Vladimir Putin will oversee a parade in Moscow's Red Square, commemorating the Soviet Union's victory in the Second World War, an annual display of military bravado that, since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, has taken on more explicit political undertones. The country's triumph over Nazism is presented as proof of its righteousness in the current war--and of it's role as a global power. Last year, as intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads rolled across the square, Putin linked the "radiant memory" of those who gave up their lives in the Second World War with "our brothers-in-arms who have fallen in the struggle against neo-Nazism and in the righteous fight for Russia"--that is, Russian soldiers killed in the current war in Ukraine. The Lede Reporting and commentary on what you need to know today. This year, the celebrations in Moscow serve another purpose: a way for Putin to show that he is not geopolitically isolated--China's Xi Jinping and Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are expected to attend.

Since Elon Musk announced that he'll be stepping back from his daily work with DOGE, perhaps you've been wondering if he has anything else to fill that time now that he's shut down operations at America's humanitarian-aid provider, wrecked much of the nation's scientific-research infrastructure, and disputed the communications systems at the Social Security Administration. One way to find out would be to ask Grok, his entry in the A.I. sweepstakes. "Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, has been making significant moves in Memphis," Grok reports. "But these have sparked controversy." The Lede Reporting and commentary on what you need to know today.

I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately--as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does "illegible" still mean too messy to read? The day after Donald Trump's second Inauguration, my verbal cognition kept glitching: I got an e-mail from the children's-clothing company Hanna Andersson and read the name as "Hamas"; on the street, I thought "hot yoga" was "hot dogs"; on the subway, a theatre poster advertising "Jan. Ticketing" said "Jia Tolentino" to me. Even the words that I might use to more precisely describe the sensation of "losing it" elude me.

A couple of years ago, my wife bought my then four-year-old son a supercool set of wooden ramps, which could be combined with our furniture to create courses through which little balls could run. Building the first course was easy, but, as our ambitions grew, the difficulty level rose. Could we make the balls turn corners? What about generating enough momentum for them to go briefly uphill? Two or three times a month for the next two years, we tweaked our techniques or incorporated new elements into complicated routes.

You can want different things from a university--superlative basketball, an arts center, competent instruction in philosophy or physics, even a cure for cancer. No wonder these institutions struggle to keep everyone happy. The Trump Administration has effectively declared open war on higher education, targeting it with deep cuts to federal grant funding. University presidents are alarmed, as are faculty members, and anyone who cares about the university's broader role. Because I'm a historian of science and technology, part of my terrain is the evolving role of the university--from its medieval, clerical origins to the entrepreneurial R. & D. engines of today.

On February 19th, Donald Trump logged onto Truth Social to congratulate himself on vanquishing congestion pricing in his home state. "CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD," he posted. "Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. The message was amplified by the White House's official X account, which tweeted it with an A.I.-generated image of Trump, golden-haired and golden-crowned, blotting out the New York City skyline. The illustration, which was styled to look like the cover of Time magazine, displayed the President's fondness for crude symbols of power and wealth.

A little over thirty years ago, when he was in his mid-forties, my friend David Howorth lost all hearing in his left ear, a calamity known as single-sided deafness. "It happened literally overnight," he said. "My doctor told me, 'We really don't understand why.' " At the time, he was working as a litigator in the Portland, Oregon, office of a large law firm. His hearing loss had no impact on his job--"In a courtroom, you can get along fine with one ear"--but other parts of his life were upended. The brain pinpoints sound sources in part by analyzing minute differences between left-ear and right-ear arrival times, the same process that helps bats and owls find prey they can't see.