There is a prevailing wisdom that Medicaid is a losing proposition for health facilities. But in Aurora, Colorado, a clinic is making enough money to sustain itself and pay staff well without relying on grants or donations. And it does so through Medicaid, Helen Ouyang reports. theatln.tc/aQoXkiY6
When P. J. Parmer founded Mango House—officially named Ardas Family Medicine—in 2012, “he wanted to reengineer how a clinic could run, designing systems that maximized efficiency and ease of access,” Ouyang writes.
About 70 percent of Mango House’s patients are on Medicaid, and almost all of the rest are seen for free. “The clinic’s ethos—just take care of patients—is both an ethical imperative and a practical tactic to keep the clinic running at full speed,” Ouyang writes. For a practice that relies on Medicaid, survival is ultimately a “volume game,” Parmar said. “That phrase would usually sound ominous,” Ouyang writes. “But the clinic does well on the state’s performance indicators and, from what I observed, is set up so that patients who need extra time get it.”
“When I first heard about Mango House, I was curious whether its model could be duplicated,” Ouyang continues. The fact that “it’s an independent clinic may be an asset: Some studies have found that physician-owned clinics achieve greater cardiovascular outcomes while also being associated with lower burnout for staff.”
Still, replicating clinics can be challenging. Not every state, for instance, allows medical assistants to give injections, which is one way that Mango House cuts costs. “Parmar himself acknowledged that the clinic’s casual, community-like style might not jibe with every population,” Ouyang writes. But for him, the true measure of patient satisfaction is how many return—and “for now, it’s more than enough.”
Demand for cultural commentary is higher than it’s ever been—but now that commentary is coming from unconventional new sources. Spencer Kornhaber spoke with the journalists, fans, and influencers redefining the field. theatln.tc/FRLxpJuW
“This year has been grim for criticism,” Kornhaber argues. The Associated Press stopped reviewing books; Vanity Fair winnowed its critical staff; The New York Times reassigned veteran critics to other jobs; and Chicago—the city of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel—lost its only remaining full-time print-media movie reviewer when the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips took a buyout.
Now “social media, streaming algorithms, and AI are undermining the role that salaried experts once played,” Kornhaber writes. “With the humanities and free speech under threat nationally, critical thinking itself can seem endangered. Pondering the things that entertain us—and what those things say about our world—requires a resource that’s in short supply: attention spans.”
“TikTok, Instagram, Substack, Letterboxd, and podcast apps teem with analyses of movies, books, Labubus—any cultural artifact you can think of,” Kornhaber continues. Yet he’s felt disillusioned with these platforms: “For every second of insight a video essay provided, there were 10 more seconds of filler: platitudes, plot summary, sponsor shout-outs. TikTok’s algorithm started swamping me with humanities grad students of varying cogency.”
Today’s critics and audiences clearly care about art and want to have serious conversations about it, Kornhaber writes. “But excellence and independence are all but impossible to consistently maintain without the steady backing of mentors or salaries, and when the incentives of the internet reward virality no matter how it’s achieved.”
Toward the end of the Biden administration, conservatives, fed up with the supposed imposition of liberal ideas by “woke capital,” tried to create a “parallel economy” in which one could buy “anti-woke” versions of goods such as beer and razors. Now, in Donald Trump’s second administration, “that parallel economy is just the economy,” Adam Serwer argues. “Trumpist culture wars have made almost everything more expensive, effectively forcing all Americans to pay an anti-woke tax.” theatln.tc/b2LB3hgY
Tariffs are the most obvious example, Serwer writes: “Trump has an economic argument for his tariffs, if a rather unconvincing one. But the tariffs make more sense if you look at them as a kind of anti-woke tax.” The administration has presented them as a “a promise—one impossible to fulfill—that America can return to some golden age of plentiful manufacturing jobs, the kind of manly work that soft-handed libs with email jobs took from you.”
But tariffs have actually cost the United States manufacturing jobs, Serwer continues, and hit the trucking industry particularly hard; tariffs on lumber and furniture means construction jobs will hardly fill the gap. “And, of course, the tariffs have driven up the price of food, because some food simply can’t be grown in the United States and must be imported,” Serwer writes. “Maybe bananas and coffee are woke?”
“There was nothing wrong with the idea of an anti-woke economy in which people could, if they chose to, shell out for Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right ‘100% woke-free’ beer. People are allowed to vote with their wallets,” Serwer continues. “The problem is that Trump-era conservatives don’t seem to believe in that kind of freedom. Instead, they are imposing their anti-woke tax on all of America, raising the cost of living for everyone.”
Many young Ukrainians are too isolated and anxious to imagine a future after three years of war, Robert F. Worth writes. That’s why a movement has sprung up to create new forms of social life—many of them literally underground. theatln.tc/E58zGJox
“The plight of Ukraine’s young people is a direct consequence of Russia’s effort to eradicate their national identity,” Worth writes. In a little less than four years, Russia has damaged or destroyed some 3,500 schools. This onslaught has also reduced churches and town halls to rubble, destroying “much of the physical and mental infrastructure of life for the country’s youth.”
When Worth visited the Kharkiv region in Ukraine this summer, he heard from administrators, teachers, and military officers in town after town that the isolation of Ukrainian children presents an existential threat to the country’s future. “To confront it, community members are building new institutions underground and improvising new forms of social life,” Worth writes. “Young people now spend much of their life in a subterranean world of schools, recreation centers, shelters, even malls.” In the region’s largest city, there are seven major subterranean schools, and more are being built. The resources being poured into this effort, Worth writes, “testify to the grim expectation that such facilities will be in use for many years.”
Read more about these underground communities—and what they mean for the Ukrainian adolescents who will soon be needed to defend their country’s fragile civic unity:
Elias Wachtel knows that Gen Zers like him have an attention span that is shot and screen time that is “out of control.” So he switched to a dumbphone and embarked on the road to digital minimalism: theatln.tc/kqlPQhl2
“My friends and I were born in the aughts, the first children of the smartphone age. Recent years have seen a flood of advocacy and warnings about the effects smartphones have on kids, and a scramble for school policies to restrict their use. But they came too late for my generation,” Wachtel writes. “Gone are our childhood years, when schools and family could easily steer our choices. We’re more addicted than anyone, and there’s no one to take our phones away but us.”
There are a slew of apps that promise to help users manage their screen time. But it’s always possible to override these restrictions: “Looking at my phone was ultimately my decision,” Wachtel writes. He wanted to help take away the option, so he decided to do away with his smartphone altogether and start using a dumbphone. He purchased a Light Phone, one of a few modernized alternatives to retro flip phones. It has a camera, an MP3 player, and a maps tool. But the black-and-white, matte screen has no internet browsing, no social media, no news, and no email. In fact, it has no apps at all.
Wachtel says his first day using the Light Phone was “a logistical nightmare.” He couldn’t access an app required to get into his office, nor access Slack to ask a colleague to let him in. That night he had to fill out a lease application as soon as possible. “Just a day before,” he writes, “I would have pulled out my iPhone—the magic box with all my bank accounts and pay stubs—and been done in five minutes. Instead, I made the hour-long commute home, where I powered up my laptop and thought about the convenience I had willingly given up.”
But after months of being smartphone-free, Wachtel has continued to opt for his dumbphone.
Following the “No Kings” rallies on Saturday, Donald Trump, “the successor to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, posted an AI-created video of himself as a fighter pilot, wearing a crown, flying over an American city, and dumping shit onto American protesters,” Anne Applebaum writes. “The point was not subtle: Trump wanted to mock and smear millions of Americans, literally depicting them covered in excrement, precisely so that none of his own supporters would want to join them.” theatln.tc/wxyjxrV9
Trump’s mockery was only one such tool his team has borrowed from autocrats around the world to subvert the protests, Applebaum continues. “For those using the oldest tools in the authoritarian playbook, the nature of the smear is unimportant. What matters is the intention behind it: Don’t answer your critics. Don’t argue with them. Don’t let them win over anyone else. Describe them as dangerous radicals even when they wear frog costumes. Imply, without evidence, that they were bribed to speak.”
“We are just at the very beginning of this familiar, predictable cycle, and we know from the experience of other countries that it can lead in many directions,” Applebaum writes. Protests could fizzle out, dissuaded by propaganda or persecution.
“Alternatively, the people who showed up on Saturday might be inspired to do more,” Applebaum writes.
Apple markets its new AirPods feature as being able to translate other languages directly in your ears. When Matteo Wong tested out the tool, it was barely able to help him buy flowers or tamales. theatln.tc/VnzWdOSK
Stopping for breakfast in the largely Hispanic Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Wong put his AirPods in to try Apple’s new “Live Translation” feature. In his interaction with a Spanish-speaking vendor, his AirPods struggled to capture the woman’s voice because it picked up too much ambient noise. The final translation contained errors—and even a word that doesn’t exist: “Green sauce, slices with cheese, slices with chicken, Molly, juaquillo.”
“That final word is neither translated nor a word, but I took it to mean ‘guajillo,’ a kind of chili pepper,” Wong writes. “The vendor said some other things that were unintelligible because of the overlap between her live speech and the lagging translation. Finally, I assumed that ‘Molly’ was a bad translation of ‘mole,’ the sauce, but I didn’t want to risk a morning dose of MDMA in the off chance that Apple was right. I opted for the ‘salsa verde.’”
Wong found that sound wasn’t the only confounding factor the AirPods had: Live Translation specifically notes that the Spanish it translates is the kind spoken in Spain, not the kind spoken in Mexico or anywhere else in Latin America and the Caribbean. “Although my technical problems could not be chalked up to vocabulary alone, it is true that several of the words that my AirPods stumbled on were those that are specifically rooted in Mexican Spanish: ‘rajas,’ ‘guajillo,’ ‘mole,’ ‘cempasúchil.’”
“Still, even with these limitations in mind, Live Translation could have provided an impressive synthesis of AI software with existing hardware, a sort of science-fiction dream. It does not,” Wong continues.
🎨: @/akshitachandra / Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic
“President Donald Trump’s plan to double the size of the ICE workforce has met a foe more powerful than any activist group. It is decimating new recruits at the agency’s training academy in Georgia,” Nick Miroff reports. “It is the ICE personal-fitness test.”
More than a third have failed so far, four officials told Miroff—impeding the agency’s plan to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers by January. To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes. “It’s pathetic,” one career ICE official told Miroff, adding that before now, a
typical class of 40 recruits had only a couple of candidates fail, because the screening process was more rigorous. The academy’s standards have already been eased to boost recruitment, the officer said.
“He and others, none of whom were authorized to speak with reporters, told me that agency veterans are concerned about the quality of the new recruits being fast-tracked onto the street to meet Trump’s hiring goals,” Miroff continues.
The arms race between job applicants and recruiters has escalated, Ian Bogost reports. Since the spring, some job candidates have used AI assistants to supply them with live material for virtual interviews. theatln.tc/p3sSPMBJ
“AI-job-search anxiety has been growing for some time,” Bogost writes. “In the past few years, employers started using AI to ‘read’ and screen the thousands of résumés they may receive for each job posting; job searchers began to deluge HR departments (or at least their automated filters) with AI-generated applications; and companies began employing AI agents—fake people—to conduct their first-round interviews.”
HR companies have described the AI assistant tools as “interview fraud,” attributing something akin to criminal intent to the job seekers who might pursue it. “But the more I investigated and considered the circumstances, the less that label seemed appropriate,” Bogost writes. “Something weirder is taking place. In the context of a tightening economy, employers have turned a powerful technology against their prospective employees. Who could blame the job seekers for retaliating?”
The political scientist Charles Murray claimed that, by 2025, the genetics of intelligence would be basically understood. We are still far from achieving that goal, the psychologist Eric Turkheimer writes. theatln.tc/avNxlpdi
Murray co-wrote “The Bell Curve” in 1994, when “scientists’ best understanding of how genetics influenced human behavior was based on differences and similarities among family members, especially twins,” Turkheimer writes. The authors took the position that a person’s intelligence is substantially determined by genetics. “Most controversially,” Turkheimer continues, the authors “entertain the possibility that socioeconomic and educational differences among racial groups could be explained by differences in their IQ scores, and that these differences are at least partially attributable to genetic differences among the groups.”
After Murray doubled down on his old arguments in 2017 and Turkheimer opposed them, the two bet on whether we would basically understand IQ genetically by 2025. But today, “we do not remotely understand what Murray hoped we would,” Turkheimer argues.
The genetic or brain mechanisms that cause some people to be more intelligent than others remain unknown. “The more we have learned about the specifics of DNA associated with intelligence, the further away that goal has receded,” Turkheimer writes.
The Atlantic
The Atlantic
There is a prevailing wisdom that Medicaid is a losing proposition for health facilities. But in Aurora, Colorado, a clinic is making enough money to sustain itself and pay staff well without relying on grants or donations. And it does so through Medicaid, Helen Ouyang reports. theatln.tc/aQoXkiY6
When P. J. Parmer founded Mango House—officially named Ardas Family Medicine—in 2012, “he wanted to reengineer how a clinic could run, designing systems that maximized efficiency and ease of access,” Ouyang writes.
About 70 percent of Mango House’s patients are on Medicaid, and almost all of the rest are seen for free. “The clinic’s ethos—just take care of patients—is both an ethical imperative and a practical tactic to keep the clinic running at full speed,” Ouyang writes. For a practice that relies on Medicaid, survival is ultimately a “volume game,” Parmar said. “That phrase would usually sound ominous,” Ouyang writes. “But the clinic does well on the state’s performance indicators and, from what I observed, is set up so that patients who need extra time get it.”
“When I first heard about Mango House, I was curious whether its model could be duplicated,” Ouyang continues. The fact that “it’s an independent clinic may be an asset: Some studies have found that physician-owned clinics achieve greater cardiovascular outcomes while also being associated with lower burnout for staff.”
Still, replicating clinics can be challenging. Not every state, for instance, allows medical assistants to give injections, which is one way that Mango House cuts costs. “Parmar himself acknowledged that the clinic’s casual, community-like style might not jibe with every population,” Ouyang writes. But for him, the true measure of patient satisfaction is how many return—and “for now, it’s more than enough.”
📸: Jimena Peck for The Atlantic
1 day ago | [YT] | 2
View 0 replies
The Atlantic
Demand for cultural commentary is higher than it’s ever been—but now that commentary is coming from unconventional new sources. Spencer Kornhaber spoke with the journalists, fans, and influencers redefining the field. theatln.tc/FRLxpJuW
“This year has been grim for criticism,” Kornhaber argues. The Associated Press stopped reviewing books; Vanity Fair winnowed its critical staff; The New York Times reassigned veteran critics to other jobs; and Chicago—the city of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel—lost its only remaining full-time print-media movie reviewer when the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips took a buyout.
Now “social media, streaming algorithms, and AI are undermining the role that salaried experts once played,” Kornhaber writes. “With the humanities and free speech under threat nationally, critical thinking itself can seem endangered. Pondering the things that entertain us—and what those things say about our world—requires a resource that’s in short supply: attention spans.”
“TikTok, Instagram, Substack, Letterboxd, and podcast apps teem with analyses of movies, books, Labubus—any cultural artifact you can think of,” Kornhaber continues. Yet he’s felt disillusioned with these platforms: “For every second of insight a video essay provided, there were 10 more seconds of filler: platitudes, plot summary, sponsor shout-outs. TikTok’s algorithm started swamping me with humanities grad students of varying cogency.”
Today’s critics and audiences clearly care about art and want to have serious conversations about it, Kornhaber writes. “But excellence and independence are all but impossible to consistently maintain without the steady backing of mentors or salaries, and when the incentives of the internet reward virality no matter how it’s achieved.”
🎨: Pete Gamlen
1 day ago | [YT] | 125
View 14 replies
The Atlantic
Toward the end of the Biden administration, conservatives, fed up with the supposed imposition of liberal ideas by “woke capital,” tried to create a “parallel economy” in which one could buy “anti-woke” versions of goods such as beer and razors. Now, in Donald Trump’s second administration, “that parallel economy is just the economy,” Adam Serwer argues. “Trumpist culture wars have made almost everything more expensive, effectively forcing all Americans to pay an anti-woke tax.” theatln.tc/b2LB3hgY
Tariffs are the most obvious example, Serwer writes: “Trump has an economic argument for his tariffs, if a rather unconvincing one. But the tariffs make more sense if you look at them as a kind of anti-woke tax.” The administration has presented them as a “a promise—one impossible to fulfill—that America can return to some golden age of plentiful manufacturing jobs, the kind of manly work that soft-handed libs with email jobs took from you.”
But tariffs have actually cost the United States manufacturing jobs, Serwer continues, and hit the trucking industry particularly hard; tariffs on lumber and furniture means construction jobs will hardly fill the gap. “And, of course, the tariffs have driven up the price of food, because some food simply can’t be grown in the United States and must be imported,” Serwer writes. “Maybe bananas and coffee are woke?”
“There was nothing wrong with the idea of an anti-woke economy in which people could, if they chose to, shell out for Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right ‘100% woke-free’ beer. People are allowed to vote with their wallets,” Serwer continues. “The problem is that Trump-era conservatives don’t seem to believe in that kind of freedom. Instead, they are imposing their anti-woke tax on all of America, raising the cost of living for everyone.”
🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Shutterstock.
2 days ago | [YT] | 442
View 73 replies
The Atlantic
Many young Ukrainians are too isolated and anxious to imagine a future after three years of war, Robert F. Worth writes. That’s why a movement has sprung up to create new forms of social life—many of them literally underground. theatln.tc/E58zGJox
“The plight of Ukraine’s young people is a direct consequence of Russia’s effort to eradicate their national identity,” Worth writes. In a little less than four years, Russia has damaged or destroyed some 3,500 schools. This onslaught has also reduced churches and town halls to rubble, destroying “much of the physical and mental infrastructure of life for the country’s youth.”
When Worth visited the Kharkiv region in Ukraine this summer, he heard from administrators, teachers, and military officers in town after town that the isolation of Ukrainian children presents an existential threat to the country’s future. “To confront it, community members are building new institutions underground and improvising new forms of social life,” Worth writes. “Young people now spend much of their life in a subterranean world of schools, recreation centers, shelters, even malls.” In the region’s largest city, there are seven major subterranean schools, and more are being built. The resources being poured into this effort, Worth writes, “testify to the grim expectation that such facilities will be in use for many years.”
Read more about these underground communities—and what they mean for the Ukrainian adolescents who will soon be needed to defend their country’s fragile civic unity:
📸: Jedrzej Nowicki
2 days ago | [YT] | 252
View 18 replies
The Atlantic
Elias Wachtel knows that Gen Zers like him have an attention span that is shot and screen time that is “out of control.” So he switched to a dumbphone and embarked on the road to digital minimalism: theatln.tc/kqlPQhl2
“My friends and I were born in the aughts, the first children of the smartphone age. Recent years have seen a flood of advocacy and warnings about the effects smartphones have on kids, and a scramble for school policies to restrict their use. But they came too late for my generation,” Wachtel writes. “Gone are our childhood years, when schools and family could easily steer our choices. We’re more addicted than anyone, and there’s no one to take our phones away but us.”
There are a slew of apps that promise to help users manage their screen time. But it’s always possible to override these restrictions: “Looking at my phone was ultimately my decision,” Wachtel writes. He wanted to help take away the option, so he decided to do away with his smartphone altogether and start using a dumbphone. He purchased a Light Phone, one of a few modernized alternatives to retro flip phones. It has a camera, an MP3 player, and a maps tool. But the black-and-white, matte screen has no internet browsing, no social media, no news, and no email. In fact, it has no apps at all.
Wachtel says his first day using the Light Phone was “a logistical nightmare.” He couldn’t access an app required to get into his office, nor access Slack to ask a colleague to let him in. That night he had to fill out a lease application as soon as possible. “Just a day before,” he writes, “I would have pulled out my iPhone—the magic box with all my bank accounts and pay stubs—and been done in five minutes. Instead, I made the hour-long commute home, where I powered up my laptop and thought about the convenience I had willingly given up.”
But after months of being smartphone-free, Wachtel has continued to opt for his dumbphone.
🎨: Ben Kothe / The Atlantic
3 days ago | [YT] | 65
View 0 replies
The Atlantic
Following the “No Kings” rallies on Saturday, Donald Trump, “the successor to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, posted an AI-created video of himself as a fighter pilot, wearing a crown, flying over an American city, and dumping shit onto American protesters,” Anne Applebaum writes. “The point was not subtle: Trump wanted to mock and smear millions of Americans, literally depicting them covered in excrement, precisely so that none of his own supporters would want to join them.” theatln.tc/wxyjxrV9
Trump’s mockery was only one such tool his team has borrowed from autocrats around the world to subvert the protests, Applebaum continues. “For those using the oldest tools in the authoritarian playbook, the nature of the smear is unimportant. What matters is the intention behind it: Don’t answer your critics. Don’t argue with them. Don’t let them win over anyone else. Describe them as dangerous radicals even when they wear frog costumes. Imply, without evidence, that they were bribed to speak.”
“We are just at the very beginning of this familiar, predictable cycle, and we know from the experience of other countries that it can lead in many directions,” Applebaum writes. Protests could fizzle out, dissuaded by propaganda or persecution.
“Alternatively, the people who showed up on Saturday might be inspired to do more,” Applebaum writes.
📸: Lev Radin / Pacific Press / Getty
3 days ago | [YT] | 908
View 106 replies
The Atlantic
Apple markets its new AirPods feature as being able to translate other languages directly in your ears. When Matteo Wong tested out the tool, it was barely able to help him buy flowers or tamales. theatln.tc/VnzWdOSK
Stopping for breakfast in the largely Hispanic Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Wong put his AirPods in to try Apple’s new “Live Translation” feature. In his interaction with a Spanish-speaking vendor, his AirPods struggled to capture the woman’s voice because it picked up too much ambient noise. The final translation contained errors—and even a word that doesn’t exist: “Green sauce, slices with cheese, slices with chicken, Molly, juaquillo.”
“That final word is neither translated nor a word, but I took it to mean ‘guajillo,’ a kind of chili pepper,” Wong writes. “The vendor said some other things that were unintelligible because of the overlap between her live speech and the lagging translation. Finally, I assumed that ‘Molly’ was a bad translation of ‘mole,’ the sauce, but I didn’t want to risk a morning dose of MDMA in the off chance that Apple was right. I opted for the ‘salsa verde.’”
Wong found that sound wasn’t the only confounding factor the AirPods had: Live Translation specifically notes that the Spanish it translates is the kind spoken in Spain, not the kind spoken in Mexico or anywhere else in Latin America and the Caribbean. “Although my technical problems could not be chalked up to vocabulary alone, it is true that several of the words that my AirPods stumbled on were those that are specifically rooted in Mexican Spanish: ‘rajas,’ ‘guajillo,’ ‘mole,’ ‘cempasúchil.’”
“Still, even with these limitations in mind, Live Translation could have provided an impressive synthesis of AI software with existing hardware, a sort of science-fiction dream. It does not,” Wong continues.
🎨: @/akshitachandra / Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic
3 days ago | [YT] | 70
View 15 replies
The Atlantic
“President Donald Trump’s plan to double the size of the ICE workforce has met a foe more powerful than any activist group. It is decimating new recruits at the agency’s training academy in Georgia,” Nick Miroff reports. “It is the ICE personal-fitness test.”
More than a third have failed so far, four officials told Miroff—impeding the agency’s plan to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers by January. To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes.
“It’s pathetic,” one career ICE official told Miroff, adding that before now, a
typical class of 40 recruits had only a couple of candidates fail, because the screening process was more rigorous. The academy’s standards have already been eased to boost recruitment, the officer said.
“He and others, none of whom were authorized to speak with reporters, told me that agency veterans are concerned about the quality of the new recruits being fast-tracked onto the street to meet Trump’s hiring goals,” Miroff continues.
Read the full article at the link: theatln.tc/Gce6aYCS
📸: Michael M. Santiago / Getty
3 days ago | [YT] | 339
View 65 replies
The Atlantic
The arms race between job applicants and recruiters has escalated, Ian Bogost reports. Since the spring, some job candidates have used AI assistants to supply them with live material for virtual interviews. theatln.tc/p3sSPMBJ
“AI-job-search anxiety has been growing for some time,” Bogost writes. “In the past few years, employers started using AI to ‘read’ and screen the thousands of résumés they may receive for each job posting; job searchers began to deluge HR departments (or at least their automated filters) with AI-generated applications; and companies began employing AI agents—fake people—to conduct their first-round interviews.”
HR companies have described the AI assistant tools as “interview fraud,” attributing something akin to criminal intent to the job seekers who might pursue it. “But the more I investigated and considered the circumstances, the less that label seemed appropriate,” Bogost writes. “Something weirder is taking place. In the context of a tightening economy, employers have turned a powerful technology against their prospective employees. Who could blame the job seekers for retaliating?”
🎨: Ben Kothe / The Atlantic
4 days ago | [YT] | 120
View 11 replies
The Atlantic
The political scientist Charles Murray claimed that, by 2025, the genetics of intelligence would be basically understood. We are still far from achieving that goal, the psychologist Eric Turkheimer writes. theatln.tc/avNxlpdi
Murray co-wrote “The Bell Curve” in 1994, when “scientists’ best understanding of how genetics influenced human behavior was based on differences and similarities among family members, especially twins,” Turkheimer writes. The authors took the position that a person’s intelligence is substantially determined by genetics. “Most controversially,” Turkheimer continues, the authors “entertain the possibility that socioeconomic and educational differences among racial groups could be explained by differences in their IQ scores, and that these differences are at least partially attributable to genetic differences among the groups.”
After Murray doubled down on his old arguments in 2017 and Turkheimer opposed them, the two bet on whether we would basically understand IQ genetically by 2025. But today, “we do not remotely understand what Murray hoped we would,” Turkheimer argues.
The genetic or brain mechanisms that cause some people to be more intelligent than others remain unknown. “The more we have learned about the specifics of DNA associated with intelligence, the further away that goal has receded,” Turkheimer writes.
🎨: Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic
4 days ago | [YT] | 257
View 26 replies
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