From dancing laptops to some lost soul in a fridge, IFA 2024 had its fair share of impressive tech and incredibly wacky booths.

Look, I get it. People aren’t buying phones like they used to, so Apple’s really gotta put the squeeze on us every upgrade cycle. And recently, that has meant pushing more people toward the Pro iPhone, rather than the regular one. Every year for the past few years, Apple has withheld more and more features for its Pro phones, bring them down to the standard iPhone at a drip. But that might be changing this year, if the rumors are true, and to that I say: it’s about damn time. In the past couple of cycles only the “Pro” models have gotten the latest Bionic chipset. That doesn’t just mean that the Pro models are more powerful — it also means that the regular iPhone won’t be eligible for the same feature updates that the Pro models get...

After a quarter of a century, the disease has returned to Gaza, prompting a campaign to immunize all of the territory's children against the virus.

In life, there are certain inevitabilities. In the United States, those inevitabilities include death, taxes, and hearing about the Kennedys. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. making a splash in the 2024 presidential race (and now endorsing Trump), Caroline Kennedy’s son Jack Schlossberg covering said race for Vogue, and rumors of the post-J. Lo Ben Affleck dating Kick Kennedy, it feels as though the media spotlight is circling back once again to America’s royal family.  For generations of Americans, especially those in the Northeast, a fascination with the Kennedys is nothing new. The ambition and glamour, public service and philanthropic triumphs, tragic deaths and scandals are all part of this family’s legacy, and so many people have watched and lived through each one with them. The American Kennedy obsession was a parasocial relationship before we even had a name for it. What might be harder to explain is that even as younger generations of Americans are further and further removed from the most famous and politically significant Kennedys, there’s still a fascination.  Why are so many people invested in Jack Schlossberg, perhaps best known for making goofy little lip-sync TikToks, reasserting his family’s legacy? Why, in the case of Kick, are they still rubbing elbows with movie stars and entertainment moguls — or at least being rumored to? And what are we to make of the RFK Jr. of it all: the brain worm and the separate bear and whale carcasses? Is having a parasite in your cranium and playing around with animal bones somehow more or less embarrassing when you’re a Kennedy? What does the family name mean in 2024? For a better understanding of the Kennedys and this current moment, we turned to Barbara Perry, a Kennedy expert and professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, an organization that specializes in presidential scholarship. I got to speak with Perry about why the Kennedys occupy such a special place in the American psyche, what Camelot means to politics, why some people are so desperate to see Schlossberg shed his silly goose era and run for office, and why RFK Jr. is so weird. She had answers for most of these burning questions.  This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. Barbara, I’m here to ask you about Kennedys in the news. RFK Jr. is a Kennedy. Jack Schlossberg is a Kennedy. Taylor Swift dated a Kennedy. Ben Affleck might be dating a Kennedy. The Kennedys are everywhere again.   Well there’s just so many of them and there’s so many to date. Every American could probably date one, and maybe even marry one at this point!  That’s the dream, isn’t it? We’re into something like the third generation of, or Kennedy family 3.0, at this point.  Kennedy 3.0 is a really good way to describe it, but this goes all the way back probably to Jack Schlossberg’s third great-grandfather. President Kennedy’s grandfather, for whom he was named — John Fitzgerald — was the mayor of Boston and was in Congress in the 1890s. President Kennedy was only about three generations removed from abject poverty. So that would actually put us somewhere at 5.0 or 6.0 today. This is also a family that, for generation after generation, has pursued or been involved in public service. And that’s why many people think of them as “America’s Royal family.” Being in public service and being in the public eye go hand in hand. Generation after generation of people are drawn to this family.  I personally know a thing or two about that magnetism — my mother took me to see John F. Kennedy. I was a little thing, a wee thing. My mother was a homemaker, very smart, voted, and kept up with the news, but she hated down-and-dirty politics. And the one and only campaign rally she ever went to was then-Senator John F. Kennedy, at a rally one month before he was elected. She piled my two older brothers and me into the car. She drove from the suburbs, and she didn’t particularly like driving downtown, but she did. We got there early so we could stand right in front of the podium. And I’d say that I can’t remember the speech, but I do remember the crowd and the excitement.  I believe my mother feels the same as yours. Regardless of her own individual politics or how she feels about the current state of politics in the US, she adores the Kennedys.   I bring that up because that’s part and parcel of the broad reach of this family, and something I was thinking about before you even called. I can name all sorts of factors that I think draw people to them, but one is, they’re the first completely modern media political family.  What do you mean? Is it that the Kennedys begin to understand the value of media or that the Kennedys are made for the media? TV didn’t exist for any [previous] presidential families — the Roosevelts or the Adamses. But it comes on strong for President Kennedy, his young and beautiful wife, and their two beguiling children.  I always cite this [stat]: When Eisenhower was elected, the first time in ’52, only 20 percent of American homes had television sets. By the time Kennedy was elected eight years later, 80 percent of American homes had a television set. And that’s how people came to know him as this very young, handsome, active president, again, along with his stylish and beautiful wife, who took Washington by storm and then took the world by storm.  And there’s the fact that his dad, Joe Senior, was a movie mogul. He was a producer of Hollywood movies in the ’20s, and that’s in part how they made their fortune. That’s another thing about this family. They’re a rags-to-riches story.  Life magazine had also just come on the scene. Teddy Kennedy used to say, “Oh yeah, Life magazine was kind of like our family photo album.” And people reading Life would say, “Oh my gosh, this family has nine children.” The women were beautiful and the boys were handsome, and they were active and sporting and witty and well-educated at Harvard.  It sounds like a perfect storm: the rise of new media and a family so photogenically perfect and stylish to take advantage of it. It’s the combination of a made-for-television family and the rise of television itself.     I have to add this as well, but it’s also the horrors of his assassination in 1963.  For this young man dead at 46, his wife 12 years younger becomes a widow, and then these two beautiful little children are now fatherless — I just don’t think anybody who lived through that [wouldn’t be sympathetic].  Obviously there were Republicans and people who hated the Kennedys, and still do and hate Jack Kennedy. I’m not saying 100 percent of Americans were upset and grief-struck, but interestingly enough, he had just barely slipped by Richard Nixon in 1960 and I’m not sure he even got 50 percent of the popular vote. But after he died, people were asked if they voted for him and well over 50 percent of Americans said yes, which says to me that they were drawn to him even more in his death.  It seems like the Kennedys are equal parts a mixture of tragedy and aspiration. You mentioned your mother being drawn to JFK despite not particularly being fond of politics. I think, for a lot of people, the Kennedys made political ambition seem glamorous — which, like you said, is very closely tied to Hollywood.  There’s this Hollywood theme that runs through the Kennedys, and if you sort of theoretically add that to a much better-looking royal family, it’s sort of like Diana — although she was attractive, most of the others are not. But if you add movies and beauty and charm and charisma and wit and athleticism to all of this, they just are very compelling.  Plus, like Diana or James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, these people flash across the sky like a shooting star and then are taken, usually with some kind of tragedy. It just somehow pulls people even closer to them, or they want to know even more about them, I think. And they’re frozen in time.  It was Mrs. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, who named her husband’s presidency Camelot, and to this day it sticks. That’s got a Hollywood air to it and a Broadway air. If you go and look at the lyrics to the main song from musical Camelot, “Don’t let it be forgotten. Once there was a spot for one brief shining moment known as Camelot.”  I think your mention of Marilyn, Diana, and James Dean is interesting in that they’re not political figures. Monroe and Dean are tragic Hollywood figures — that whole live fast, die young curse. Diana is and has become more of a pop culture icon than she was a monarch. And those three figures are continuously mythologized and eulogized.  JFK Jr., I think, is often a part of that same conversation when it comes to American pop culture, since he never ran for office, but died in a plane crash when he was only 38.   He was going to be the one to restore Camelot. He got the best of the looks of his father and his mother, and he was a handsome devil. He married the Calvin Klein woman [Carolyn Bessette], and they were on their way to the White House.  Well, that idea of promise seems to be the thing that keeps us all watching or keeps people interested. People are still curious if there’s a Kennedy who sort of absorbs the political fantasy that we project onto this family. I can’t help but think that’s sort of what’s happening with the media attention on Jack Schlossberg. Of course, he seems to play into the joke and sort of subvert his family name by being a silly goose.  My question to you is, I think what I’m hearing is that you actually find that appealing, that he’s kind of a goofy comedian?  I’m not sure! But I think it’s not that different from what you said about the Kennedys being the first family with television. He’s sort of the first Kennedy that’s become a social media star.  I got to meet him two summers ago on Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t want to say he was overly serious, but he was mature and kind. And he seemed to get all the best characteristics of everybody in the family, physically, mentally, and in terms of his personality, he had a nice wit about him. He was charming, charismatic, cute, handsome, just lovely. And I thought, oh, and what a cute girlfriend. And I thought, oh, I hope they get married and they’ll have beautiful children. Barbara, you are sounding like your mother at the rally!   Or your mother too! I maintain that I didn’t do anything that would embarrass me or the Miller Center or the JFK Library.  But I think that it’s probably good for him if he wants a public life because he clearly has been chosen by his mother. He goes on TV with her. They speak on video during the 2020 election — he’s clearly the designated son and restorer of Camelot because he’s the only male heir to John Kennedy. He’s the only grandson of John Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy.  Plus, as you say, he’s smart, and I guess for a newer generation, he’s got the right stuff, as far as knowing how to use social media and being witty and funny and serious when he needs to be, but approachable when not.  On the other side of that, can I ask you your thoughts on RFK Jr.? Do you think the obsession with him comes from him representing a weird and bizarre side of the Kennedys — like everything they’re not supposed to be?  Yes, people are drawn to him I think in large part because he has the same exact name of his father and people still feel sad about that — maybe even more so in some way than Jack because with Bobby, he is, I think, more tied to our current politics and social policy of caring for the poor and minorities, and being anti-war.  Going back to my mother —  she and my grandmother talked about the President and the family as if they were our family, and my grandparents hung a picture from a magazine of President Kennedy in their living room when he died. So that’s all part and parcel of this, and I think that does still attach in part to Robert Kennedy Jr.  Is he genuinely weird or just weird for a Kennedy? Like, his scandals aren’t that far removed from the usual scandals — drugs and women — that have followed the Kennedy men around? I can remember seeing interviews of Robert Kennedy senior, where he’d say, “Oh, my son, Bobby loves animals, and he has falcons.” And that always seemed to me to be rather odd, unless you’re in the Middle Ages in England. Falconry was not a big thing here, and even in the ’60s.  That home, Hickory Hill, where they lived out in northern Virginia, was a menagerie. They had a Newfoundland that would slobber all over everybody, and they had goats and rabbits and falcons and these raucous touch football games.  This was written about, but Bobby and Ethel had some big party at their home with a pool, and they started pushing people, fully clothed people, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian who was the White House historian during Kennedy’s presidency. That made the news, and Rose Kennedy was embarrassed, being the Victorian, and she’s writing to the family members to say, please don’t do that, it doesn’t make our family look very good. Your brother is the president of the United States, but even the parents were wild.  So we shouldn’t be that surprised.  If he weren’t crazy, people would still be interested in him, and maybe more so! And you can make all these alternative histories about him, but he made all the wrong decisions from the time he was a teenager and started doing heavy drugs. Even with the crazy stuff, up until the bear story and up until Kamala Harris came on the scene as the nominee, he was polling 10 percent in some states.  The power of being a Kennedy! They’ve had great, great joys and great ecstasies and great triumphs, and then they’ve had just the worst tragedies. It is fascinating, I must say. Since we don’t have a royal family to watch and follow, we have the Kennedys. And they do keep producing interesting if sometimes bizarre figures.

The UN Secretary-General is marking ‘Clean Air Day’ with a call for global investment in solutions that tackle climate change and the increasing public health, environmental, and economic harm caused by air pollution. 

Plus: Kaspersky’s US business sold, Nigerian sextortion scammers jailed, and Europe’s controversial encryption plans return.

Power lines are cast in silhouette as the Creek Fire creeps up on on the Shaver Springs community off of Tollhouse Road on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2020, in Auberry, California. This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.  Most people are “very” or “extremely” concerned about the state of the natural world, a new global public opinion survey shows. Roughly 70 percent of 22,000 people polled online earlier this year agreed that human activities were pushing the Earth past “tipping points,” thresholds beyond which nature cannot recover, like loss of the Amazon rainforest or collapse of the Atlantic Ocean’s currents. The same number of respondents said the world needs to reduce carbon emissions within the next decade.

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft after landing Friday night at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico. until next year after agency officials determined it was too risky for the astronauts to return to the ground on Boeing's spaceship. Instead of coming home on Starliner, Wilmore and Williams will fly back to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in February. NASA has incorporated the Starliner duo into the space station's long-term crew.

The First Combat of Gav and Talhand', Folio from a Shahnama (Book of Kings), ca. 1330–40, Attributed to Iran, probably Isfahan, Ink, opaque watercolor, gold, and silver on paper, Page: 8 1/16 x 5 1/4 in. (20.5 x 13.3 cm), Codices, Three battles between two Indian princes - half brothers contending for the throne - resulted in the invention of the game of chess, to explain the death of one of them to their grieving mother. The Persian word shah mat, or checkmate, indicating a position of no escape, describes the plight of Talhand at the end of the third battle. (Photo by: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) The three princes of Sarandib—an ancient Persian name for Sri Lanka—get exiled by their father the king. They are good boys, but he wants them to experience the wider world and its peoples and be tested by them before they take over the kingdom. They meet a cameleer who has lost his camel and tell him they’ve seen it—though they have not—and prove it by describing three noteworthy characteristics of the animal: it is blind in one eye, it has a tooth missing, and it has a lame leg. After some hijinks the camel is found, and the princes are correct. How could they have known? They used their keen observational skills to notice unusual things, and their wit to interpret those observations to reveal a truth that was not immediately apparent. It is a very old tale, sometimes involving an elephant or a horse instead of a camel. But this is the version written by Amir Khusrau in Delhi in 1301 in his poem The Eight Tales of Paradise, and this is the version that one Christopher the Armenian clumsily translated into the Venetian novel The Three Princes of Serendip, published in 1557; a publication that, in a roundabout way, brought the word “serendipity” into the English language.

Eastern equine encephalitis, which has a high mortality rate, is becoming more common in North America as climate changes expands the habitats of insects.

It’s the start of the school year, and thus the start of a fresh round of discourse on generative AI’s new role in schools. In the space of about three years, essays have gone from a mainstay of classroom education everywhere to a much less useful tool, for one reason: ChatGPT. Estimates of how many students use ChatGPT for essays vary, but it’s commonplace enough to force teachers to adapt. While generative AI has many limitations, student essays fall into the category of services that they’re very good at: There are lots of examples of essays on the assigned topics in their training data, there’s demand for an enormous volume of such essays, and the standards for prose quality and original research in student essays are not all that high. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Right now, cheating on essays via the use of AI tools is hard to catch. A number of tools advertise they can verify that text is AI-generated, but they’re not very reliable. Since falsely accusing students of plagiarism is a big deal, these tools would have to be extremely accurate to work at all — and they simply aren’t.  But there is a technical solution here. Back in 2022, a team at OpenAI, led by quantum computing researcher Scott Aaronson, developed a “watermarking” solution that makes AI text virtually unmistakable — even if the end user changes a few words here and there or rearranges text. The solution is a bit technically complicated, but bear with me, because it’s also very interesting.  At its core, the way that AI text generation works is that the AI “guesses” a bunch of possible next tokens given what appears in a text so far. In order not to be overly predictable and produce the same repetitive output constantly, AI models don’t just guess the most probable token — instead, they include an element of randomization, favoring “more likely” completions but sometimes selecting a less likely one.  The watermarking works at this stage. Instead of having the AI generate the next token according to random selection, it has the AI use a nonrandom process: favoring next tokens that get a high score in an internal “scoring” function OpenAI invented. It might, for example, favor words with the letter V just slightly, so that text generated with this scoring rule will have 20 percent more Vs than normal human text (though the actual scoring functions are more complicated than this). Readers wouldn’t normally notice this — in fact, I edited this newsletter to increase the number of Vs in it, and I doubt this variation in my normal writing stood out.  Similarly, the watermarked text will not, at a glance, be different from normal AI output. But it would be straightforward for OpenAI, which knows the secret scoring rule, to evaluate whether a given body of text gets a much higher score on that hidden scoring rule than human-generated text ever would. If, for example, the scoring rule were my above example about the letter V, you could run this newsletter through a verification program and see that it has about 90 Vs in 1,200 words, more than you’d expect based on how often V is used in English. It’s a clever, technically sophisticated solution to a hard problem, and OpenAI has had a working prototype for two years. So if we wanted to solve the problem of AI text masquerading as human-written text, it’s very much solvable. But OpenAI hasn’t released their watermarking system, nor has anyone else in the industry. Why not? If OpenAI — and only OpenAI — released a watermarking system for ChatGPT, making it easy to tell when generative AI had produced a text, this wouldn’t affect student essay plagiarism in the slightest. Word would get out fast, and everyone would just switch over to one of the many AI options available today: Meta’s Llama, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini. Plagiarism would continue unabated, and OpenAI would lose a lot of its user base. So it’s not shocking that they would keep their watermarking system under wraps.  In a situation like this, it might seem appropriate for regulators to step in. If every generative AI system is required to have watermarking, then it’s not a competitive disadvantage. This is the logic behind a bill introduced this year in the California state Assembly, known as the California Digital Content Provenance Standards, which would require generative AI providers to make their AI-generated content detectable, along with requiring providers to label generative AI and remove deceptive content. OpenAI is in favor of the bill — not surprisingly, as they’re the only generative AI provider known to have a system that does this. Their rivals are mostly opposed. I’m broadly in favor of some kind of watermarking requirements for generative AI content. AI can be incredibly useful, but its productive uses don’t require it to pretend to be human-created. And while I don’t think it’s the place of government to ban newspapers from replacing us journalists with AI, I certainly don’t want outlets to misinform readers about whether the content they’re reading was created by real humans.  Though I’d like some kind of watermarking obligation, I am not sure it’s possible to implement. The best of the “open” AI models that have been released (like the latest Llama), models that you can run yourself on your own computer, are very high quality — certainly good enough for student essays. They’re already out there, and there’s no way to go back and add watermarking to them because anyone can run the current versions, whatever updates are applied in future versions. (This is among the many ways I have complicated feelings about open models. They enable an enormous amount of creativity, research, and discovery — and they also make it impossible to do all kinds of common-sense anti-impersonation or anti-child sexual abuse material measures that we otherwise might really like to have.) So even though watermarking is possible, I don’t think we can count on it, which means we’ll have to figure out how to address the ubiquity of easy, AI-generated content as a society. Teachers are already switching to in-class essay requirements and other approaches to cut down on student cheating. We’re likely to see a switch away from college admissions essays as well — and, honestly, it’ll be good riddance, as those were probably never a good way to select students.  But while I won’t mourn much over the college admissions essay, and while I think teachers are very much capable of finding better ways to assess students, I do notice some troubling trends in the whole saga. There was a simple way to let us harness the benefits of AI without obvious downsides like impersonation and plagiarism, yet AI development happened so fast that society more or less just let the opportunity pass us by. Individual labs could do it, but they won’t because it’d put them at a competitive disadvantage — and there isn’t likely to be a good way to make everyone do it.  In the school plagiarism debate, the stakes are low. But the same dynamic reflected in the AI watermarking debate — where commercial incentives stop companies from self-regulating and the pace of change stops external regulators from stepping in until it’s too late — seems likely to remain as the stakes get higher.

No wear after 100 billion cycles.

Despite the mission going horribly wrong, a new documentary finds hope for our planet in the failed Moon mission.

The all-electric sibling of Volvo has a new CEO, new models landing, and a new plant in South Carolina—but will this be enough to stop the EV brand's decline?