Is Washington Up to the Challenge of A.I.? How anger over artificial intelligence might drive the next wave of populist politics. The Washington Roundtable discusses the growing political backlash to artificial intelligence, especially among young Americans, and asks whether Washington is capable of regulating A.I. companies. They're joined by Nate Soares, the executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of the book " If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies ." The group explores what was behind the White House's sudden reversal on an A.I.-safety executive order this week, the outsized influence of venture capitalists in the A.I. industry, and how A.I. may turbocharge the next populist movement in American politics. "My impression is that a lot of the people protesting data centers can sort of tell that this A.I. stuff is taking the world somewhere they don't want," Soares says.

Sorry that your electricity bill has skyrocketed--your neighbor is in love with her dishwasher. It's nice that she finally found connection, even if it's with a machine. Oh, and the wedding is set for June! Don't worry--we have the most brilliant scientists in the world working to make sure it's not in the Cuisinart mixer's best interest to kill us all. You'll have to ask it.

The Enrollment Cliff Is Here. Which Schools Will Survive It? As the number of new high-school graduates drops, colleges will close, some will merge, and others may change beyond recognition. This series on the future of higher education started with a simple question: Should I still be contributing to my children's college funds? My first attempt to answer that question centered on the growing disillusionment with higher education in general.

In its first week, the seventy-ninth edition of the festival unveiled standout new works by James Gray, Paweł Pawlikowski, and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Attend the Cannes Film Festival long enough, and you will grow wearily accustomed to the reality that some of the best films to première there are routinely overlooked for prizes. Lee Chang-dong magnificently unsettling psychological chiller, "Burning," failed to ignite the excitement of the 2018 jury. The tragicomic glories of Maren Ade's " Toni Erdmann," from 2016, were just as inexplicably unrewarded. Jurors shut out David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence," in 2005; Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Flowers of Shanghai," in 1998; Krzysztof Kieślowski's "Three Colors: Red," in 1994; Martin Scorsese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," in 1975; and--the tradition goes way back--Vittorio De Sica's "Umberto D.," in 1952.

Jill Lepore chronicles the rise of machine-generated writing, from a Hollywood plot-writing grift and Cold War computer poetry to the age of ChatGPT.

"The Audacity" Is a Brutal Silicon Valley Satire with an Agenda The AMC dramedy's skewering of tech bros might feel familiar in 2026--but a focus on oft-overlooked elements of the world they've created gives the series a strange verve. Midway through my watch of the new tech-satire series "The Audacity," I received an e-mail from Google that I had received many times before. My personal data had been found online, it said. This time, it was my phone number; previously, it had been more private information. The most I could do, it seemed, was ask Google to remove the offending pages from its search results, one by one, over months, then years.

The President swept off to Beijing to court Xi Jinping. Back Stateside, it was non-Presidential motorcades, video games, and a languid vibe at the White House. The endless motorcades and wail of sirens in Washington this week made it seem as if the President were travelling non-stop around the city, or receiving a bevy of foreign dignitaries. As it happened, it was National Police Week, and the ceremonial convoys were carrying the families of police officers who had been killed in the line of duty. Donald Trump was leaving for China.

Universities have become generic, one professor and former dean argues. In the A.I. era, students may demand something they can't get elsewhere. Last week, I asked whether, as a forty-six-year-old father of two, I should keep contributing to my children's college funds, or if perhaps some combination of anti-establishment fervor, A.I., and a shifting economy could save me some money. I don't have a particularly good answer yet, at least not one good enough to inspire the purchase of a midlife-crisis car, my son's and daughter's futures be damned. But, after wrestling with that query in Part 1 of what will be a series of articles, I think there may be a better one to ask. The question is not, I think, "How will A.I. change higher education?" I wanted to talk with someone who stood outside the polite consensus which holds that college as we know it will survive, if only because, as I wrote last week, humans will always want to differentiate their children from other people's children.

As slick, machine-generated visuals become ubiquitous, artists and designers are embracing a style of handmade imperfection. Two and a half years ago, Christine Tyler Hill, a designer and artist in Burlington, Vermont, began working as a crossing guard in her neighborhood. The city paid her twenty dollars an hour, but the real draw was the chance to get to know local families and "be more enmeshed with my very immediate, outside-my-door community," she told me recently. She was tired of staring at a screen doing design work, and new clients were getting harder to come by, in part, she surmised, because of the rise of generative artificial intelligence . She began documenting her crossing-guard shifts on Instagram, posting mini comics about the frigid weather, the charming habits of commuting children, and the beauty of an overflowing trash can.

Will A.I. Make College Obsolete? More and more people may decide that its stamp of approval isn't worth the cost. A few weeks ago, while I was dealing with taxes, it occurred to me that the money my wife and I were putting away in a college fund for our children might be better used somewhere else. This wasn't a novel musing, but it felt particularly pressing as I watched my account balance go down, a portion of its resources funnelled into something that can't be touched for at least the next nine years. When my nine-year-old daughter graduates from high school, in 2035, I asked myself, will the landscape of higher education look the way that it does now?