James Fallows

In his 40s, a Dutch man researchers call MAH suffered a stroke that fortunately left no lingering consequences. Still, he balked whenever doctors giving him the standard battery of cognitive tests asked about colors. It was nothing to do with the stroke, he told them. For his entire life, he had lived without a sense of color.

What did he mean? He had no problem seeing color, his doctors concluded. He easily passed the test for red-green color blindness, finding the numbers hidden in colored dots. He could put very similar hues in the right order. But he could not sort tokens into distinct colors such as red, green, blue, yellow, and orange. He could not identify the colors of the tokens. He could not imagine the color of his car. He could not even understand, when presented with a drawing of garishly blue strawberries, that the picture was odd at all.

The last time we saw Happy Valley’s Catherine Cawood, she was trying—and quite magnificently failing—to capture one of her police-force colleagues, the nebbishy John Wadsworth, who’d finally been implicated in the murder of his lover. The pursuit is a bleak comedy of errors: Directed by her superiors not to pursue John down train tracks, Catherine mutters “bollocks” and follows him anyway. The pair end up on a bridge in relentless rain. Catherine, who says that she’s never trained in negotiation, asks John—who’s successfully talked down 17 people from various ledges—what to say to compel him not to jump. She has to keep him talking, John says. “You’ve got to be assertive. Reassuring. Empathetic and kind. And you’ve got to listen.” Catherine tells John to take his time, that she’ll be there. His face discernibly changes. “I love my kids,” he tells her; he propels himself backward.

If you want to really hurt someone’s feelings in the year 2023, just call them an AI.

An all-star cast of celebrities and public figures have recently been the victim of such jokes: the NBA player Jordan Poole (“AI Steph Curry”), Raquel Leviss from the reality-TV show Vanderpump Rules (“what would happen if you asked chat GBT [sic] to create an American girl”), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (“our first A.I. cabinet member?”). That these slights span the three pillars of American life—sports, politics, Bravo—suggests that no one, or rather nothing, is safe. Such digs have popped up all over social media; on Twitter alone, insults like these have been levied against TV shows, songs, sports uniforms, commencement speeches, White House press releases, proposed legislation, and lots of news articles.

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The first time I heard of “manifestation” was in 2019, as I coasted up California’s Highway 5, listening to a podcast with Lacy Phillips, an actor turned manifestation coach. Manifestation, she explained, is the intentional practice of bringing our desires into existence. According to Phillips, the universe collaborates with us to make good things happen. “There’s a road map to have whatever story I want, and to create whatever story I want,” she said. “I have the autonomy, the power.”

As a United Methodist minister, I immediately heard alarm bells in my head. Phillips promised access to a world where people could make their dreams come true, for just $27 a month. The idea that people could obtain what they wanted most through sheer power of thought cut against both my theology and my own experience. I knew that our lives are rarely so predictable, determined by simple formulas. I also knew that the world is full of schemers eager to make money off people’s hopes and dreams.

After four decades of training and studying dogs, Marjie Alonso has lost track of the number of pets she’s seen because their humans felt they weren’t acting as they “should.” There were the golden retrievers who weren’t “friendly” or “good enough with kids,” and the German shepherds who were more timid scaredy-cats than vigilant guard dogs. There was the Newfoundland (who later turned out not to be a Newfoundland) who had been adopted to fulfill a Peter Pan–esque fantasy of a devoted dog nanny, but acted so aloof that his owners put him on meds. And then there was the horde of Shih Tzus, acquired by a woman who was “super pissed,” Alonso told me, to find the little dogs regularly escaping her home and terrorizing her neighbors’ yards—nothing, she complained, like the regal pooches whose “idea of fun is sitting in your lap acting adorable as you try to watch TV,” as advertised by the American Kennel Club.

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“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote in her final collection of essays. In 2021, the poet Leila Chatti took up Oliver’s words, reflecting on the challenge of them: “All day, the world makes its demands. There’s so much of it, world / begging to be noticed.”

For those of us working to slow down, to smell the roses, to look one another in the eyes rather than in the iMessage bubbles, Oliver is a perfect guide. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2019, “It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s hard to imagine she even owned a flip phone—but her poetry captures its spiritual costs.”

Yesterday, on a farm near Gloucester, England, crowds gathered once again for the annual Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake, continuing a tradition that dates back at least 200 years. Participants chase a nine-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down an extremely steep and uneven hill—with no police or paramedics on site this year. The winner of the race gets to take home the cheese.

In October 2019, just a few months before a novel coronavirus sparked a deadly pandemic, a group of government officials, business leaders, and academics convened in New York City to role-play a scenario in which a novel coronavirus sparked a deadly pandemic. Their imagined virus leaped from livestock to farmers in Brazil, then spread to Portugal, the United States, and China. Soon, it was everywhere. Eighteen months later, 65 million people were dead.

This simulation, known as Event 201, was one of dozens of so-called pandemic war games run in the two decades leading up to the outbreak of COVID-19. In mid-2020, as the world came to terms with its new pandemic reality, media outlets published a flood of articles about these simulations. Some highlighted their prescience, others their blind spots. But the real-world crisis that occasioned this review was only a few months old. Whatever hindsight it provided wasn’t yet in focus, because many of the greatest challenges of the pandemic—new variants, vaccine hesitancy, the hyper-politicization of public health—were still to come.

The White House and Congress have not made much progress in their talks to avert an unprecedented, and potentially calamitous, national default that could occur as soon as early June. But on the most fundamental point of dispute, President Joe Biden has already caved: He’s negotiating with Republicans over the debt ceiling.

For months, the president’s ironclad position has been that the debt ceiling is not a bargaining chip. No longer would Democrats allow Republicans to hold hostage the nation’s creditworthiness and economic prestige. Paying the government’s bills by raising the U.S.’s statutory borrowing limit would be nonnegotiable. As recently as Friday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared without equivocation, “We are not going to negotiate over the debt limit.”

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Over the weekend, President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed on a bill to raise the debt ceiling. If the bill passes the House Rules Committee vote today, then House Republicans will vote on it later this week. As we wait to find out the future of the legislation ahead of next week’s default deadline, we’re spending today’s newsletter thinking about how these negotiations fit into the larger cultural battles being waged across the country.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: