How drones and asymmetric warfare are upending the battlefield and what the U.S. military can do to adapt. The Washington Roundtable's Susan B. Glasser interviews General David Petraeus about where the conflicts in Iran and Ukraine might be headed and what they can tell us about the future of warfare. They discuss the fleets of inexpensive drones that have upended traditional combat, how the impending arrival of A.I.-powered automated systems might "revolutionize" the battlefield, and what institutional overhauls Petraeus believes are urgently needed at the Pentagon in order to respond. "We need to do a lot to catch up," Petraeus says. " After Six Months of War, Trump Is Still Losing to Iran," by Ishaan Tharoor " Is the Smithsonian Really Trying to Destroy America? " Donald Trump Is Still Trying to Make It Harder to Vote," by Amy Davidson Sorkin " Can Head Start Be Deregulated Out of Existence?

Get a Tech Job, Babies! If your idea of a perfect board book for people under the age of three is Sandra Boynton's 1982 classic " Moo, Baa, La La La!," you might be surprised to discover what's passing for toddler literature these days. Forget the silly animal high jinks, the humble slapstick of peekaboo and patty-cake, and the earnest overviews of shapes, colors, and numbers; some of today's baby books have far loftier ambitions. A sampling of titles from the past decade: " Bath Time Physics," " General Relativity for Babies," " Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering! Open the sturdy turquoise cover of Ruth Spiro's " Baby Loves Coding!," illustrated by Irene Chan, and you might be lulled into thinking that this is, indeed, a book for very young children. It's small (about seven inches square), short (only ten spreads), made of chunky cardboard, and full of bright colors. It starts off promisingly, with a smiling toy train rolling toward a bobbleheaded, pink-cheeked baby. This pattern of steps is called an algorithm. The train follows an algorithm, too. A tiny computer tells the train what to do. A programmer writes an algorithm in a language the computer can understand. The language is called code. The computer reads the code and follows the steps in the algorithm. Lately, these tech-oriented books for infants and toddlers seem to be everywhere. The twenty-six books in Spiro's "Baby Loves Science" series are rivalled by Chris Ferrie's extensive "Baby University" collection, with such winning titles as " Electromagnetism for Babies," " Quantum Computing for Babies " (co-authored by William Hurley), and " Robotics for Babies " (co-authored by Sarah Kaiser). And let's not forget the "Big Science for Tiny Tots" series, from MIT Kids Press, featuring " High Chair Chemistry " and " Playtime Engineering ." In a manic burst of science geekery, there are even special holiday versions of Spiro's "Baby Loves Science" books, though you might have trouble getting past the word-salad titles: " Baby Loves Angular Momentum on Hanukkah!

The poem is about how our most worthwhile pursuits--things like art, love, and beauty--often seem to demand a measure of toil. Or, as a woman in the poem wistfully puts it, how "we must labour to be beautiful." The speaker reflects that "I strove / To love you in the old high way of love." He sounds tired from the effort. Then I read my colleague Hanif Abdurraqib's gorgeous essay about our collective longing for inconvenience, in which he discusses a friend who "wants to fall in love," meaning without using a dating app.

Few forces have proved as powerful at tempering A.I. use as public shaming has. Now Anthropic is making it even easier to determine if text was generated by Claude. Last week, announced an unexpected policy change: text created with Claude, the company's large language model, would now contain an invisible watermark. If a person were to copy and paste a chatbot-crafted passage into a separate document, an A.I. detector would be able to determine the likelihood that it had been processed by Claude. A.I.-detection systems aren't new, of course; programs such as Pangram and Turnitin have become entrenched in academic and publishing practices.

Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel for his work on a disease in Papua New Guinea. But his biggest experiment was on the children he took back to the U.S. As a boy, Luwi Ikabala moved with Carleton Gajdusek to the U.S. "I am the son of one of the world's greatest scientists," Luwi said. Luwi uses a yellow cooking-oil cannister for a chair. On a good day, he makes enough money from hemming sleeves and mending torn clothes to buy a bag of rice. As he waits for customers, he reads novels, copying passages that he likes into his journal. His favorite author is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He has kept a journal for the past forty years, giving the entries headings such as "Air of freedom," "As I recall her--'the past,' " "About Weakness," and "Who am I?" Luwi often feels like the "poorest man that ever lived on this planet earth," "a perfect example of a failure." He approaches strangers on the street and asks about their problems, until he sees an opening to "touch them emotionally."

Democrats talk a lot about affordability. Could a message of prosperity be more powerful? The Washington Roundtable's Evan Osnos interviews the former Commerce Secretary and Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo about a problem she's been working on since she left the Biden Administration: how to make sure that the A.I. revolution does not leave American workers behind. Drawing on her father's experience of losing his factory job in the wake of outsourcing to China, Raimondo warns against repeating the mistakes of the past and argues that the U.S. needs a plan to help workers navigate the A.I. transition. "We can't put the toothpaste back in the bottle. A.I. is out there," Raimondo says.

The Vermont senator co-sponsored a bill that calls for a moratorium on building data centers. He discusses the environmental and economic concerns, and what the government can do. Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox. The data centers that power artificial intelligence are being built at a rampant pace, and are spurring resistance all over the country. Apart from public concerns about A.I.'s impact on jobs, privacy, and other aspects of life, data centers consume vast amounts of electricity and water.

The environmental activist has launched a project to document community concerns about the boom in data-center construction across the U.S. Since a famous case against a California utility, the name Erin Brockovich has become synonymous with a fighter taking on big polluters. Earlier this year, Brockovich began receiving e-mails from people worried about the construction of A.I. data centers, which is happening at a frenetic rate all over the country. People expressed concerns about the loss of farmland and natural areas; disruptions to the water table; deleterious noise; and substantial usage of electricity and water, leading to rising utility bills. She speaks with David Remnick about her mapping project to document data-center construction and environmental complaints. "In my thirty years," she tells Remnick, "I've never really seen the people show up like they are at a very local level."

If A.I. Takes the Jobs of Young People, How Will They React? The Democratic electorate is already moving left, but that may be nothing compared with what happens when unemployment really starts to rise. In the first column in this series, I wrote about how the economic reality for young people in this country doesn't exactly match the bleak picture that is sometimes painted of it. In the second, I offered a theory about the discontent that is nonetheless fuelling a new populist economic politics among college-educated Gen Z-ers and millennials. In short, these voters believe, not without reason, that the old-fashioned trappings of middle-class life--homeownership, stability, a sense of purpose--are out of reach.

From branding irons to iris scans, the ancient business of proving who you are has never been stranger--or more lucrative. There are now more bots online than people. The challenge used to be telling who was a person from who was a bot; today, the challenge is telling good bots and bad bots apart--with humanity in the lurch. Three summers ago, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, posted on X a fifteen-second video of dozens of people--mostly young, veiled in face masks, and wearing super-hip, white-soled sneakers--waiting in a long, snaky line in the traffic-light-lit but otherwise dusky dark of an unnamed city that appears to have been Nagoya, Japan. "Crazy lines around the world," Altman wrote. "One person getting verified every 8 seconds now." In the video, the camera pans to the front of the line, where a woman is kneeling on the sidewalk as if in prayer, staring into a gleaming silver orb about the size of a volleyball that has been propped up on a stand about the height of an end table. It looks like the eyeball of a giant robot Cyclops. She is bowing before an artificially intelligent machine, seeking a certification that she is human. That eyeball, which is known as the Orb, was developed by Tools for Humanity, a San Francisco-and Munich-based tech company that Altman founded in 2019 with a twenty-five-year-old German physicist named Alex Blania, who is now its C.E.O.