The New Yorker

Jennifer Lawrence has been cast in maternal roles since her teens. Now, in her new movie, “Die My Love,” she is playing a mother for the first time since becoming one. Jia Tolentino reflects on the Oscar winner’s evolution since first arriving in Hollywood in the 2010s. Read her Profile of Lawrence: https://lnkd.in/gvsdZifJ

Dario Amodei, the C.E.O. of the A.I. company Anthropic, has been predicting that an artificial intelligence “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner” in such fields as biology, math, engineering, and writing might come online by 2027. In June, Sam Altman, of OpenAI, wrote that the industry was on the cusp of building “digital superintelligence.” “The 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before,” he asserted. Meanwhile, the A.I. tools that most people currently interact with often fall comically short, leading some to conclude that it’s all hype. There is plenty of hype, to be sure. “But it is another kind of wishful thinking to suppose that large language models are just shuffling words around,” James Somers writes, in this week’s issue. Does ChatGPT mindlessly string words together, or does it understand the problem? The answer, Somers posits, could teach us something important about understanding itself. “It can seem unnatural, even repulsive, to imagine that a computer program actually understands, actually thinks,” Somers continues. “We usually conceptualize thinking as something conscious, like a Joycean inner monologue or the flow of sense memories in a Proustian daydream. Or we might mean reasoning: working through a problem step by step. In our conversations about A.I., we often conflate these different kinds of thinking, and it makes our judgments pat. ChatGPT is obviously not thinking, goes one argument, because it is obviously not having a Proustian reverie; ChatGPT clearly is thinking, goes another, because it can work through logic puzzles better than you can.” Which is right, and what does that tell us about the nature of thought itself? Read more: https://lnkd.in/gY9ygsqg

Curtis Sliwa claims to have been offered $10 million, across seven bribes, to drop out of the mayoral race. Instead, he keeps finding increasingly complicated ways to say that he will step aside only if he dies. In June, he said, “I’m not getting out of this race unless they figure out a way to put me in a pine box and bury me six feet under.” Last month, he said he’d leave the ballot if “a Mack truck hits me, and I get turned into a speed bump, and they can’t recover me in the I.C.U.” Two days before the second mayoral debate, on October 22nd, when Sliwa was asked what he’d say to a hypothetical offer to work for Cuomo, he responded, “Impale me.” “I’m not stubborn,” he recently told Naaman Zhou. (Though, a few moments later, he repeated the “Impale me” line.) “I am the Republican candidate, major-party candidate. I never heard of this concept before—‘drop out.’ ” Read about Sliwa’s persistent, disarming mayoral campaign: https://lnkd.in/gMeK7aPG

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Guy Richards Smit. #NewYorkerCartoons Sign up for our humor newsletter to get the Daily Cartoon and other funny stuff right in your inbox: https://lnkd.in/gG4rDB6u

A cartoon by Ali Solomon. #NewYorkerCartoons See more from this week’s issue: https://lnkd.in/gKT2yC-5

In New Yorker Humor, a doctor confesses his devious plans to R.F.K., Jr.: prevent the contraction of communicable diseases and save lives: https://lnkd.in/gqTYFu2V

Last November, 43 rhesus macaques escaped from Alpha Genesis, one of the country’s biggest breeders of primates used in scientific experiments. The monkey jailbreak went viral: it was the day after the election, and the divided nation seemed eager for distraction. Initially, the company’s C.E.O. downplayed the escape as “a little adventure,” but that narrative became difficult to sustain. Two weeks after the monkeys broke out, 22 macaques still in captivity died after a heater malfunctioned. In December, PETA released internal documents that a whistle-blower had shared, including medical records, incident reports, photographs, and e-mails that detailed a litany of gruesome injuries and deaths. And at least 67 other monkeys, in eleven separate incidents, have escaped from their cages at the facility over the past decade. “What made the recent exodus different was not just its scale but its political timing,” Ava Kofman writes. “Groups that oppose animal testing, historically the province of liberals and progressives, were in the process of forging a delicate alliance with the incoming Trump Administration.” As the Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace put it, the issue was bringing together “the QAnon side of the Party and the socialist squad.” Activists have long argued that animal testing is morally indefensible; now Trump supporters have reframed the issue as another example of federal misspending. “We are bullish on the incoming Administration’s ability to stop animal testing,” the policy director of the watchdog organization White Coat Waste said. “It’s the perfect storm of conditions.” Read about how the monkey escape brought about a strange alliance between uncompromising activists and MAGA loyalists: https://lnkd.in/gAQ_55yr

Donald Trump’s blanket tariffs and the rest of his America First agenda have left many economists despairing about the demise of an open trading system that they regard as a key driver of prosperity. But Dani Rodrik, who shot to prominence in the 1990s as a critic of the untrammelled globalization that helped give Trump his start in Presidential politics, is more upbeat. Among the things Rodrik recommends are learning the lessons of China’s remarkable industrial rise, focussing on services rather than manufacturing, and further exploiting the dramatic fall in the cost of green energy. He emphasizes the role that governments need to play in areas such as upgrading workers’ skills, boosting the bargaining power of low-wage workers, channelling resources to strategic industries, and financing socially necessary but risky investments. Rodrik’s optimism is based partly on his conviction that Trump’s policies will fail to restore American manufacturing to its past glory and raise living standards, which will create space for a different approach. That approach, Rodrik argues, should address the three defining economic challenges of our time: restoring the middle class in the U.S. and other Western countries; reducing poverty in countries that are still impoverished; and tackling climate change. “We spend so much time on the global economy and global agreements,” he explained to John Cassidy. “But there is so much that can be done internally.” Read more about one economist’s optimistic vision of the future: https://lnkd.in/gpd_3Yxt

Introducing our new game, Shuffalo: a daily word-scramble challenge. https://lnkd.in/gmk3m_ax

The cover for this week’s issue, “Sudden Shower,” by Sergio García Sánchez. See what’s inside: https://lnkd.in/gEkAi3cr