The Atlantic

The Maasai were stewards of the Serengeti for centuries. Now they’re being evicted—by Dubai royals, wealthy tourists, and conservation groups. Stephanie McCrummen reports in our May cover story on why some of the lightest-living people on the planet are being treated as an enemy to progress and conservation: https://lnkd.in/e2pTueVJ

Artificial intelligence can be “quite thirsty,” relying on data centers that use a tremendous amount of water, Damon Beres writes in Atlantic Intelligence. “It’s still a matter of debate whether the technology is truly worth its immense costs.”

“I loved my mom more than my dog,” Tommy Tomlinson writes. “So why did I cry for him but not for her?” Read more: https://lnkd.in/e2mMUV26

"After writing about how and why Americans are depressed, I thought I'd turn things around for a change. What matters most for happiness—marriage, money, or something else entirely?" Derek Thompson reports:

Examining the Impact and Future of the Landmark Misdemeanor Bail Reforms in Harris County, Texas Reforms enacted in the county around Houston more than three years ago have stabilized recidivism rates, and the number of people charged with low-level crimes continues to decline. But some politicians still argue that they endanger public safety. What does the future hold?  The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein will interview Texas Jail Project’s Krishnaveni Gundu, Harris County Criminal Court Judge Shannon Baldwin, and University of Houston Law Center's Sandra Guerra Thompson.

“As a constitutional scholar and the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, I strongly defend the right to speak one’s mind in public forums,” Erwin Chemerinsky writes. “But the rancorous debate over the Israel-Hamas war seems to be blurring some people’s sense of which settings are public.” https://lnkd.in/eqhNC-WV Chemerinsky and his wife have hosted a dinner at their home for first-year law students for years. Before this year’s dinner, a group at Berkeley called Law Students for Justice in Palestine distributed posters objecting to the event, calling Chemerinsky a “Zionist,” and caricaturing the professor. “The poster attacks me for no apparent reason other than that I am Jewish,” Chemerinsky writes. Others urged Chemerinsky to remove the posters, but he felt that, “though appalling, they were speech protected by the First Amendment.” At the dinner, the leader of the group began to read a speech about the plight of Palestinians using a microphone she had brought. Chemerinsky and his wife asked her repeatedly to leave. Videos of the incident went viral. “The student insisted that she had free-speech rights,” Chemerinsky writes. But “the First Amendment—which constrains the government’s power to encroach on speech on public property—does not apply at all to guests in private backyards … I have taught First Amendment law for 44 years, and as many other experts have confirmed, this is not a close question.” “This experience has … made me realize how anti-Semitism is not taken as seriously as other kinds of prejudice,” Chemerinsky writes, noting that posters that included racist tropes or caricatures of a Black dean or Asian American or LGBTQ people would have caused a justified swell of outrage. “But a plainly anti-Semitic poster received just a handful of complaints from Jewish staff and students.” “As I continue as dean of Berkeley Law, I will endeavor to heal the divisions in our community,” Chemerinsky writes at the link in our bio. “We are not going to solve the problems of the Middle East in our law school, but we must be a place where we treat one another with respect and kindness.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eqhNC-WV

To access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud.

The extraordinary accomplishment and treasure of the web is coming to an end, Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier argue, as “the advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences.” https://lnkd.in/eWJuxmKv Before the internet, human publishers acted as gatekeepers, filtering the content between writers and their audience. On the internet, “anyone could publish anything,” Donath and Schneier, who are fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, write. “But so much was published that finding anything useful grew challenging.” In response, companies such as Google created models that could sort swaths of content––and thus emerged the multibillion-dollar search-engine-optimization industry, catering to Google’s ever-shifting algorithmic promises. Today, generative-AI tools, especially large language models, have introduced another voracious consumer of writing. Synthesizing nearly the entire internet in some cases, LLMs “have begun to disrupt the traditional relationship between writer and reader,” Donath and Schneier write. Unlike the scrolling results of a search engine, LLMs “neatly summarize the various relevant answers to your query.” The convenience of personalized answers comes at a cost: Human creators, “the people who produced all the material that the LLM digested,” are left out, denied both audiences and compensation. “Being paid for one’s work is ... important. But many of the best works—whether a thought-provoking essay, a bizarre TikTok video, or meticulous hiking directions—are motivated by the desire to connect with a human audience,” the writers continue. “Eventually, people may stop writing, stop filming, stop composing—at least for the open, public web. People will still create, but for small, select audiences, walled-off from the content-hoovering AIs. The great public commons of the web will be gone.” “It is too late to stop the emergence of AI,” Donath and Schneier continue. “We need to think about what we want next, how to design and nurture spaces of knowledge creation and communication for a human-centric world.” 🎨: Ben Kothe/The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Twenty decks, seven swimming pools, and one novelist wearing a meatball T-shirt

Corporations and private-equity funds have been rolling up smaller chains and previously independent practices.