The Top 5: Murderball and the Imperial Self
Welcome to the latest edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy these articles, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation!
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The Top 5 articles for your week:
“Joe Biden’s Interrupted Presidency” (NYT)
Because Robert Draper’s profile of Biden’s presidency, and his decision to drop out of the 2024 race, is some of the best political writing this year.
It was as if the Joe Biden of the previous month — pugnacious, defensive, all but stricken blind by his own ambitions — had suddenly given way to an entirely different human being, one defined by selfless accommodation. But those two sides of the same man have always been present, and at times in conflict, throughout Biden’s 52 years in national political life, and the presidency brought out both sides of him: his best and, later, his worst. He reached the office by challenging Donald Trump in a campaign that he would come to call a fight for the soul of the nation; in doing so, he created for himself a kind of self-mythology in which his own fate was entwined with that of the country’s.
“AI Cheating is Getting Worse” (The Atlantic)
Because Ian Bogost explores the use of ChatGPT in schools and universities and no one really has effective responses for ensuring students don’t use ChatGPT for assignments and ensuring teachers aren’t overly relying on ChatGPT for grading.
“Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic So Hard to Cure?” (NYT)
Because Matthew Shaer takes a deep dive efforts to understand and address the loneliness epidemic.
…the idea that the solution to loneliness is only a phone call, or an email, or a text, or a friendly door knock away — that the key to closing the gap between perceived and realized levels of interpersonal relations, on a societal scale, is ultimately a matter of restoring a world that has slipped away from us. But at best, this sort of thinking reflects a misunderstanding of how we live now (and how we’ll live in the future). At worst, it serves as a distraction from the real issues. As research like Weissbourd and Batanova’s demonstrates, when we talk about loneliness, what we’re actually talking about are all the issues that swirl perilously underneath it: alienation and isolation, distrust and disconnection and above all, a sense that many of the institutions and traditions that once held us together are less available to us or no longer of interest. And to address those problems, you can’t just turn back the clock. You have to rethink the problem entirely — and the potential solutions too.
“Over There” (Hedgehog Review)
Because Jonathan Clarke examines the wealth and class implications of American foreign travel experiences.
Cosmopolitan Americans are given to saying that the two years they lived in Cairo or Kyoto changed them forever. I am skeptical of this claim, partly because we are always skeptical of romantic narratives, but also because their narrators rarely put convincing language to their purported transformation—and language is what I trust. At the same time, I think some of them must be telling the truth…In glamorizing foreign travel, we sometimes neglect the near at hand.
“They call it ‘murderball.’ Wheelchair rugby isn’t for the faint of heart.” (WaPo)
Because it’s Paralympics time in Paris and this rundown from Amanda Morris and Hadley Green about wheelchair rugby, i.e. “murderball,” is informative and interesting.
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