The Atlantic

The China summit showed, yet again, that dictators can both intimidate and flatter President Trump into taking their side—even against U.S. interests, Tom Nichols argues: https://lnkd.in/egBPuJxA 📸: Brendan Smialowski / Getty

Trump’s proposed D.C. arch represents what American artists have used arches to warn against for centuries, Tyler Green argues.

RFK Jr. may have muted his public anti-vaccine rhetoric—but the U.S. is still quietly undermining vaccination around the world, Katherine J. Wu reports. She spoke with more than a dozen experts about their biggest concern:

The Department of Justice is now actively promoting ideas that are barely connected to reality, Quinta Jurecic argues:

In The Atlantic Memo, we catch you up on the best Atlantic stories about work, business, productivity, creativity, and more. This week: Companies are monitoring workers not just for productivity but for agreeability.

More families who can afford it are hiring a “chief of staff for the home,” Nancy Walecki writes. She spoke with 12 people who have either hired or worked as a house manager to explore the latest way some people are choosing to buy back time: https://lnkd.in/ejPqDjCA 📸: Sjöberg Bildbyrå / Contributor, ullstein bild; Leon Morris / Contributor / Hulton Archive; Rae Russel / Contributor / Archive Photos; Science & Society Picture Library / Contributor / SSPL; NBC / Contributor / NBCUniversal; Fairfax Media Archives / Contributor / Fairfax Media Archive; Archive Photos / Stringer / Moviepix; Hulton Archive / Stringer / Hulton Archive; Mondadori Portfolio / Contributor / Mondadori Portfolio Editorial; Paul Almasy / Contributor / Corbis Historical; H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock / Contributor

Exclusive: The DHS secretary told travel executives that he’s serious about curbing international flights to U.S. airports in cities with “sanctuary” policies, which could force airlines to re-route and inflict economic pain, Nick Miroff reports.

Thomas Massie’s defeat in a Kentucky GOP primary shows that even though Donald Trump is broadly unpopular, he’s still the Republican kingmaker, Russell Berman reports: https://lnkd.in/e-ug_d2X

“Until recently, only spies and criminals had to worry obsessively about their private statements being picked up by electronic equipment,” Ross Andersen writes. But with today’s AI wearables, the average person may need to start deploying their own surveillance countermeasures. https://lnkd.in/eHhbYwbm For decades, crude jammers have been sold to people who hope to avoid being recorded, Andersen writes. Recently, companies have made models that emit a steady stream of sound at inaudible frequencies to create jamming signals. “But even high-tech jammers have a hard time fending off today’s AI wearables,” Andersen argues. These wearables, including pins, pendants, and glasses, use speech-recovery algorithms to isolate sound vibrations and strip away unwanted noise, whether the sound originates from everyday sources or from an ultrasonic jammer. Big companies such as Microsoft are also working on research that can “infer missing syllables in the way that a reader fills in a redacted word from context, allowing them to reconstruct speech that wasn’t cleanly captured in the first place,” Andersen continues. “This sort of research is meant to improve the lives of normal users of technology ... but every advance in de-noising can also be used to help an AI assistant recover speech from a jammed recording.” In March, the tech start-up Deveillance announced the development of Spectre I, a hockey-puck-shaped device that purports to prevent others from recording you, in response to the surge of people wearing AI-enabled recorders. But however effective Spectre I turns out to be, “it won’t be the end of the recording arms race,” Andersen continues. 🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Universities tried to be all things to all people—but that model may not be working anymore. Ian Bogost and Adam Harris sift through the fraught landscape of American higher education on “Radio Atlantic”: