Sam Altman has a good problem. With 700 million people using ChatGPT on a weekly basis — a number that could hit a billion before the year is out — a backlash ensued when he abruptly changed the product last week.

OpenAI’s innovator’s dilemma, one that has beset the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Apple Inc., is that usage is so ...Read more

By midmorning in the Central Valley, the light turns hard and white, bleaching the sky and flattening every shadow. The rows of melons stretch to the horizon, vines twisted low in cracked soil. Pickers move in the rhythm the crop demands — bend, twist, lift, drop — their long sleeves damp with sweat, caps pulled low, bandanas hiding heat-...Read more

For President Donald Trump, it's all about appearances.

He's busy with so many makeovers: The Versailles-ification of the Oval Office, which seems to sprout more gold leaf and ornamentation every time Trump assembles the media there. The paving of the Rose Garden, now Mar-a-Lago Patio North, crowded with white tables and yellow umbrellas just ...Read more

Any trip to the dark night skies of our Southern California deserts reveals a vista full of wonder and mystery — riddles that astrophysicists like myself spend our days unraveling.

I am fortunate to study how the first galaxies formed and evolved over the vast span of 13 billion years into the beautiful structures that fill those skies. NASA...Read more

The effort in Texas to hastily redraw congressional maps for partisan advantage reveals vulnerabilities in our democratic system, subject to exploitation by bad actors. As this crisis escalates into multiple states, it threatens the notion that voters should determine who wins elections.

Driving the effort to rig these maps is President Donald ...Read more

While the leader of 340 million Americans furiously works to derail climate action, the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics is embracing it.

In May, when Pope Leo XIV succeeded the late Pope Francis, I suggested he could be the kind of climate champion the world needs when President Donald Trump seems determined to turn the U.S. from one of the ...Read more

One thing that can be said about Donald Trump's transactional approach to policy-making is that, as destructive as it might be to our economic health, it gives business leaders clear options to get what they want out of the White House.

The latest case-in-point are the deals struck by chipmakers Nvidia and AMD to secure licenses to export their...Read more

The nakedly partisan congressional redistricting effort that Texas Republicans are pursuing at President Donald Trump’s command shows what the map-making process should not look like. It’s more difficult to say exactly what an appropriate redistricting process should entail.

Reformers typically place the highest priority on avoiding bias ...Read more

The White House has promised swift action on homelessness. It aims to dismantle encampments, force addicts and the mentally ill into treatment, and yank federal funds from cities that refuse to police tents and open-air drug use. For residents exasperated by sidewalk squalor, that sounds like overdue toughness.

In reality, casting the homeless ...Read more

I stepped on my bathroom scale the other morning and could not believe the three digits staring up at me.

And I mean that literally — the scale was rigged.

I know this because I've been dieting my butt off, and I swear I've dropped 20 pounds. So the first thing I did was ask my wife whether she messed with the scale as some kind of prank.

...Read more

President Donald Trump’s demand for a whopping $1 billion payment from UCLA sent shock waves through the UC system. For those of us on the inside, the announcement elicited a range of responses. Some faculty and staff reacted with horror, others voiced increasing fear about the ongoing assault on academic freedom, and some merely muttered in ...Read more

President Donald Trump’s administrations have been notorious for an array of “alternative facts” — ranging from the relatively minor (the size of inaugural crowds) to threats to U.S. democracy, such as who really won the 2020 election.

And over the past six months, the stakes have been life or death: Trump’s health officials have been...Read more

As our raft guide navigated the gentle rapids and rocky canyon walls of Colorado’s Taylor River, Los Angeles felt a world away. The river was quiet, serene. Keep an eye out for bighorn sheep, our guide told us.

But even as I reveled in the soothing scenery, I kept thinking about home.

A few miles downstream, the water would reach the ...Read more

The United Nations admits in a recent report that, over the past three months, 90% of humanitarian aid trucks never made their intended destination in Gaza due to looting. For this, deeply misguided liberal activists blame Israel. In fact, the BBC reported last week that Hamas has used stolen aid to help fund its bloodlust.

It also shouldn’t ...Read more

I. The battle over facts

When Donald Trump fired Dr. Kristine Joy Suh, head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after a disappointing July jobs report, it wasn’t merely a personnel decision—it was a sharp break with precedent.

Suh’s removal upended decades of tradition in which BLS commissioners, regardless of who appointed them, were ...Read more

Showing that his loyalty to his own anti-vax mentality is greater than his loyalty to President Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the dangerous quack atop the Department of Health and Human Services, has announced that he will be rescinding a half billion dollars in grants and contracts for the development of mRNA technology and vaccines.

...Read more

How on earth did Israel get to this point, and how can it escape? These two questions seem unavoidable after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his response to months of criticism and outrage over his conduct of the war in Gaza. It was, in a nutshell, more war.

It’s important to recall that Israel experienced a moment of ...Read more

We live in a world that is being victimized by more than just the misdeeds of its evildoers.

As we watch the shattering of buildings and humanity in Gaza, we cannot help but feel that we are also being done in by the willful do-nothingness of morally deficient leaders.

Today, we’ll be focusing on a full range of world leadership and ...Read more

The poor guy got slapped around pretty badly, for the mistake of having an opinion some of his readers didn’t like. He got it in the comments section and he got it on his Facebook and Twitter pages.

He wrote me a discouraged letter. He wanted to know the trick for dealing with it. Here’s the note I sent him, a little revised, in case anyone...Read more

Early in my foreign affairs career, I mostly avoided working on Israel and Palestine. The issues were fraught with emotion. I didn’t think I understood it well enough to have an informed position.

I believe the same sentiment that led me to avoid the topic before is what shapes many reactions (or nonreactions) to this conflict today.

But we ...Read more