Ta-Nehisi Coates

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ikki Haley was standing a few feet in front of me on a warm December night in New Hampshire. She had just finished a town-hall event at a Manchester ski lodge, from which no snow was visible for miles except the manufactured white stuff coating a sad little hill outside.

Presidential candidates often try to conjure a sense of momentum around their campaign, and Haley’s had been accumulating the key elements: rising poll numbers, crowd sizes, and fundraising sums. Her ascendancy began around Thanksgiving, an unofficial benchmark for when voters supposedly tune in to primary campaigns. Among many of them, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador had become a source of intrigue: Could she actually win? Or was she merely the latest contender to lead a post–Donald Trump Republican Party that never arrives?

One evening in 2019, in a windowless building known as the “tomb” in the center of Yale’s campus, the members of Skull and Bones snapped. There they were, having been granted membership to the most elite secret society at one of the most elite universities in the world—part of a rare group that for generations included individuals from the most powerful families on the planet. Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Buckleys have all been in Skull and Bones. Three Bonesmen would go on to become president of the United States. Their traditions (including oaths of secrecy upon admission) and antics (stealing the gravestone of Yale’s founder), and the rumors about them (that the Bones tomb contains several human skulls), are legendary—and an intense source of campus gossip.

Donald Trump was determined to make one more scene in his fraud trial in New York today, and he succeeded.

After a Fox News town hall last night in Iowa, Trump flew to Manhattan, where he rose to speak during closing arguments in the trial—or perhaps more accurately, to rant.

“There wasn’t one witness against us,” Trump said, as The New York Times reported. He called the case a “political witch hunt” and said he was “an innocent man.” He said his financial statements were (naturally) “perfect.” In his I’m-rubber-you’re-glue way, he insisted, “This is a fraud on me,” and demanded that Attorney General Letitia James, who has sought a more than $300 million fine, pay him. He also attacked Justice Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over the case, saying, “You can’t listen for more than one minute.”

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Updated at 2:10 p.m. ET on January 11, 2024.

It was a cold and rainy morning in Washington, D.C., yesterday. Five years ago, Donald Trump said that was enough to deter him from visiting Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, to commemorate the fallen American soldiers—soldiers who died defending the nation whose Constitution he had sought to abrogate but now seeks to invoke. But yesterday, he showed up anyway. Appearing in court was more important to him, because this was about him.

And so at 9:25 a.m., the former president and his entourage strode into Courtroom 31 of the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse on Constitution Avenue, just a few blocks away from the Capitol his supporters had ransacked three years ago Saturday, and took their seats. It took just a few short minutes for their case to come completely apart.

1. The Disappearance

At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator.

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Every day or two for the past seven months, I’ve received a “personalized” email containing a bunch of recent, user-generated questions from the website Quora. Here are some examples:

“I caught my son playing his Xbox at 12:00 in the morning on a school night. As a result, I broke his console and now he won’t talk to me. How can I tell him that it is his fault?”

“My husband accidentally pushed our 4-year-old daughter off the 40th story window out of anger. How do I prevent my husband from being sentenced to jail? He doesn’t need that hassle.”

“Was Hitler actually a nice guy in person?”

If I ever signed up to get these emails, I don’t remember. In fact, I didn’t even know I had a Quora account to begin with. This is apparently a common experience: In 2018, when the site informed users that their personal information may have been compromised in a data breach, a common response was, Wait, I’m a user? Even easier to forget is the fact that Quora, now more than a dozen years old, was once lauded as the future of the internet. Serious people proclaimed that it would be the biggest thing since Facebook and Twitter, that it would eclipse Wikipedia as an online reference source, that it was the modern-day Library of Alexandria. Today, perusing the site feels more like walking through a landfill.

For years now, health experts have been warning that COVID-era politics and the spread of anti-vaxxer lies have brought us to the brink of public-health catastrophe—that a Great Collapse of Vaccination Rates is nigh. This hasn’t come to pass. In spite of deep concerns about a generation of young parents who might soon give up on immunizations altogether—not simply for COVID, but perhaps for all disease—many of the stats we have are looking good. Standard vaccination coverage among babies and toddlers, including the pandemic babies born in 2020, is “high and stable,” the CDC reports. And kindergarteners’ immunization rates, which dipped after the pandemic started, are no longer losing ground.

Earlier this week, the Telegraph reported a curious admission from OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. In a filing submitted to the U.K. Parliament, the company said that “leading AI models” could not exist without unfettered access to copyrighted books and articles, confirming that the generative-AI industry, worth tens of billions of dollars, depends on creative work owned by other people.

We already know, for example, that pirated-book libraries have been used to train the generative-AI products of companies such as Meta and Bloomberg. But AI companies have long claimed that generative AI “reads” or “learns from” these books and articles, as a human would, rather than copying them. Therefore, this approach supposedly constitutes “fair use,” with no compensation owed to authors or publishers. Since courts have not ruled on this question, the tech industry has made a colossal gamble developing products in this way. And the odds may be turning against them.

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One morning a couple of years ago, during the awkward hour between my eldest daughter’s school drop-off and her sister’s swim lesson, I stopped at a coffee shop. There, I ran into the father of a boy in my daughter’s class. He was also schlepping a younger child around, and as we got to talking, I learned that we had a lot in common.

Like me, he had followed his spouse to the United Kingdom for work; she was a physician, learning some new procedure to take back to Australia. He couldn’t wait to move home to his big house down the road from the beach. “Do you think you’ll ever move back to the U.S.?” he asked. Sure, eventually, I said. Or at least that was the plan.

To marvel at the choice and convenience of modern shopping, go visit your grocery-store mustard aisle. My local Whole Foods sells more than 20 different kinds: basic yellow mustard and Grey Poupon, yes, but also “spicy brown mustard” and “banana-pepper mustard” and “no-sugar-added honey mustard” and “organic salt-free mustard.” There is “uniquely sharp mustard”(!), and “sulfite-free original Dijon mustard squeeze”(!?).

Such dizzying choices are made possible by an amazing piece of technology: the barcode. These black-and-white lines are machine-speak for an item’s Universal Product Code, which allows a scanner to tell you exactly what the item is, and draw up its price in any given store. The barcode is why a cashier can quickly scan your stuff, shove it into a bag, and hand you a receipt (and how self-checkout kiosks are able to make you do all the work). And because the barcode allows for incredible efficiency in tracking and managing inventory, it is a large part of why grocery stores now have a paralyzing number of options. Around the time the barcode debuted, in 1974, supermarkets stocked an average of 9,000 products. Today, you will find more than 30,000.