Saturday 11th May 2024

The Tight Line Trump Has a Judge Walking

A conversation with David A. Graham about the bizarre nature of the former president’s criminal trialThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.


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Who Really Has Brain Worms?

Earlier today, The New York Times broke some startling news about a presidential candidate. According to a 2012 deposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once suffered from, in his own words, “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” The vague yet alarming description could apply to any number of parasitic ailments, among them angiostrongyliasis, baylisascariasis, toxocariasis, strongyloidiasis, and trichinosis. But some experts immediately suspected a condition called neurocysticercosis (NCC), in which the larvae of the pork tapeworm Taenia solium post up in the brain.The condition might sound terrifying—and, to some observers, darkly hilarious. Literal brain worms! But it does not actually involve any brain-munching, or even your standard-issue worm. The brain-invading culprit is instead a tapeworm (a kind of helminth) that typically makes its home in pigs. As far as parasitic infections go, this is “the most common one in the brain,” Laila Woc-Colburn, an infectious-disease physician at Emory University, told me. And globally, it’s one of the most common causes of epilepsy in adults.


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What You Need to Know About Making a Good Impression

We evolved to form snap judgments about who’s friend and who’s foe, but we need to be more evolved now.Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.


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What Happened When I Cloned My Own Voice

Recently my colleague Charlie Warzel, who covers technology, introduced me to the most sophisticated voice-cloning software available. It had already been used to clone President Joe Biden’s voice to create a fake robocall discouraging people from voting in the New Hampshire primary. I signed up and fed it a few hours of me speaking on various podcasts, and waited for the Hanna Rosin clone to be born. The way it works is you type a sentence into a box. For example, Please give me your Social Security number, or Jojo Siwa has such great fashion!, and then your manufactured voice, created from samples of your actual voice, says the sentence back to you. You can make yourself say anything, and shift the intensity of the intonation until it sounds uncannily like you.Warzel visited the small company that made the software, and what he found was a familiar Silicon Valley story. The people at this company are dreamers, inspired by the Babel fish, a fictional translation device, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They imagine a world where people can speak to one another across languages and still sound like themselves. Warzel spoke to them about the less dreamy possibilities of voice cloning software: scams, misinformation, and election interference. And he came away with the impression that they were aware of the dangers. But once the technology is out, nobody can quite predict every variety of world-altering chaos, particularly in a year when over half the world’s population will undergo an election.


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Trump Flaunts His Corruption

The former president’s shakedown of oil executives may not have been illegal, but it is undeniably scandalous.One of the few ways in which Donald Trump has improved American politics is in making explicit what was once veiled in implication or euphemism. During the 2016 election, for example, he said what everyone knew but no politicians would acknowledge: That wealthy donors bought access and fealty with their contributions.


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The Biggest Way That Elections Have Consequences

Presidents have surprisingly little influence over the economy—except in a single, vital respect: their agencies that issue regulations.Late last month, the Federal Trade Commission issued what’s called a final rule—a new regulation—banning noncompete clauses in contracts for nearly all American workers. Once the rule goes into effect, it will have a dramatic impact on the U.S. labor market. Workers will have an easier time starting new companies and bringing new products to market. And businesses that want to keep their employees from leaving to work for a competitor will likely have to pay them more; the FTC estimates that the ban could increase earnings for workers by more than $500 a year on average.


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The Limits of Utopia

Fifty years ago, the architect Peter Blake questioned everything he thought he knew about modern building.This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.


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The End of the ‘Photoshop Fail’

In 2017, Rihanna posted a photo of herself on Instagram in which she appeared to have an extra thumb. It was, in retrospect, the thumb-shaped canary in the coal mine. Although far from the first celebrity “Photoshop fail,” it just so happened to predict the era of faux-finger drama we now live in: AI image generators are universally, horrifically bad at rendering human hands. Today, an extra finger is a telltale sign of digital manipulation.Flaws aside, faking it has never been easier. Advances in generative AI mean that anyone can spin up a faux picture of the pope wearing a chic white puffer, no design skills required. New AI image creators such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion use sophisticated technology to let users conjure entire worlds from just a few words. Instagram is rolling out AI-editing features; with a couple of taps, an everyday user can place their dog at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. We are living in the world Adobe Photoshop first teased 34 years ago—but it is no longer defined by the enterprise software.


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Did Something Happen to Our Necks?

It used to be that whenever someone on TV or in a movie fell off the roof or had a skiing mishap or got into any sort of auto accident, the odds were pretty good that they’d end up in a neck brace. You know what I mean: a circlet of beige foam, or else a rigid ring of plastic, spanning from an actor’s chin down to their sternum. Jack Lemmon wore a neck brace for a part. So did Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Roberts, and Bill Murray. For many decades, this was pop culture’s universal symbol for I’ve hurt myself.Now it’s not. People on TV and in the movies no longer seem to suffer like they used to, which is to say they no longer suffer cervically. Plastic braces do still crop up from time to time on-screen, but their use in sight gags is as good as dead. In the meantime, the soft-foam collar—which has always been the brace’s most recognizable form—has been retired. I don’t just mean that it’s been evicted from the props department; the collar has been set aside in clinics too. At some point in the past few decades, a device that once stood in for trauma and recovery was added to a list of bygone treatments, alongside leeches and the iron lung. Simply put, the collar vanished. Where’d it go?


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The Book You’re Reading Might Be Wrong

Most nonfiction isn’t fact-checked. The Kristi Noem saga could change that—but it probably won’t.This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.


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