No, SNAP Benefits Aren't Mostly Used by Immigrants SNAP benefits are set to run out on Saturday. Far-right influencers and extremists are incorrectly claiming that immigrants are the main recipients of food stamps. A shopper carries a basket inside a grocery store in the Bronx borough of New York City on Oct. 24, 2025. As roughly 42 million Americans face the loss of food stamps this weekend, far-right influencers, extremists, and conspiracy theorists are using the crisis to push racist disinformation about who receives these benefits. As a result of the government shutdown, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will not be funded as of November 1, according to a message on the website of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the program.

Google has put a temporary block on its new artificial intelligence model producing images of people after it portrayed German second world war soldiers and Vikings as people of colour. The tech company said it would stop its Gemini model generating images of people after social media users posted examples of images generated by the tool that depicted some historical figures – including popes and the founding fathers of the US – in a variety of ethnicities and genders. "We're already working to address recent issues with Gemini's image generation feature. While we do this, we're going to pause the image generation of people and will rerelease an improved version soon," Google said in a statement. Google did not refer to specific images in its statement, but examples of Gemini image results were widely available on X, accompanied by commentary on AI's issues with accuracy and bias, with one former Google employee saying it was "hard to get Google Gemini to acknowledge that white people exist". Jack Krawczyk, a senior director on Google's Gemini team, had admitted on Wednesday that the model's image generator – which is not available in the UK and Europe – needed adjustment.

On this week's episode of my podcast, I Have to Ask, I spoke to Annie Lowrey, a contributing editor at the Atlantic and the author of the new book Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World. It's about universal basic income--the idea that the government would give all its citizens checks every month. Versions of this proposal have caught on with people on the left as well as tech leaders in Silicon Valley and even some hardcore libertarians. Lowrey has written for many years now about economics, but Give People Money is both a reported work--she travels to Kenya, South Korea, and India to view their economic experiments--and a policy brief on what she believes can help alleviate some of the social and political discontent that has arisen from economic change and dislocation. Below is an edited excerpt from the show. In it, we discuss the benefits and drawbacks of UBI, whether or not we should be skeptical that so many Silicon Valley titans have embraced the idea, and how to make the safety net less vulnerable to political attacks.

Better Life Lab is a partnership of Slate and New America. In an age where every day brings more doomsday forecasts of massive technologicallybdriven unemployment, from driverless cars to A.I. robots as caregivers, journalist Annie Lowrey set out to answer a question: Is it possible to live in a world where we get what she calls "wages for breathing"? This week her findings come out in Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World. We spoke about what the idea of giving every American cash--no strings attached--would mean for work, gender inequality, and American identity, and whether it's actually a policy that could pass in the U.S. given the current climate of tying even the most basic benefits to paid work. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Where did all the jobs go? Well, we're finally starting to find some satisfactory answers to the granddaddy of all economic questions. The share of Americans with jobs dropped 4.5 percentage points from 1999 to 2016 -- amounting to about 11.4 million fewer workers in 2016. At least half of that decline probably was due to an aging population. Explaining the remainder has been the inspiration for much of the economic research published after the Great Recession.

William Gibson wrote that the future is here, just not evenly distributed. The phrase is usually used to point out how the rich have more access to technology, but what happens when the poor are disproportionately subject to it? In Automating Inequality, author Virginia Eubanks argues that the poor are the testing ground for new technology that increases inequality. The book, out this week, starts with a history of American poorhouses, which dotted the landscape starting in the 1660s and were around into the 20th century. From there, Eubanks catalogues how the poor have been treated over the last hundred years, before coming to today's system of social services that increasingly relies on algorithms.

William Gibson wrote that the future is here, just not evenly distributed. The phrase is usually used to point out how the rich have more access to technology, but what happens when the poor are disproportionately subject to it? In Automating Inequality, author Virginia Eubanks argues that the poor are the testing ground for new technology that increases inequality. The book, out this week, starts with a history of American poorhouses, which dotted the landscape starting in the 1660s and were around into the 20th century. From there, Eubanks catalogues how the poor have been treated over the last hundred years, before coming to today's system of social services that increasingly relies on algorithms.

IBM Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty was interviewed on Sept. 13 in New York City by Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Megan Murphy. Following are excerpts from their discussion, which appear in the Sept. 25, 2017, edition of Bloomberg Businessweek. People may not know that IBM doesn't call it AI. They call it " cognitive computing." Tell us why that is. Ginni Rometty: I have actually had to explain this to my husband as well, because he said to me, "Ginni, of all words, why cognitive?" It was really a very thoughtful decision. The world calls it AI.

Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we've believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We've also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we've believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we're pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV. These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they've become ridiculous, because there's not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won't pay the bills – unless of course you've landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.