If you’ve been following the war between authors and the purveyors of AI chatbots over whether the latter are infringing the copyrights of the former, you might have concluded that comedian and author Sarah Silverman and several fellow authors suffered a crushing blow in their lawsuit against OpenAI, the leading […] Read More
It’s indisputable that the decline of state fiscal management in California began with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. The tax-cutting initiative upended the tax structure that provided most of the revenues needed by localities and school districts, undermining the locals’ control of their own spending. It was sold […] Read More
One of the major issues confronting scientists today — especially those working in the heavily politicized fields of global warming, vaccines and the origin of COVID-19 — is how to deal with the torrents of misinformation and disinformation, some of it personal, pushing back against their work. Climate scientist Michael […] Read More
The turning point in Americans’ perception of the economy — that despite months of doom-colored predictions of a looming recession — may have occurred on Jan. 25. That was the day that Fox Business economic commentator Larry Kudlow, a former official in the Trump White House and consistent dispenser of […] Read More
If the effort to ban medication abortion now before the Supreme Court demonstrates anything, it’s that the damage caused in our society by junk science can be disastrous indeed. That’s the implication of the retraction of two scientific studies, announced Monday by the journal publisher Sage. The studies provided the […] Read More
Few people outside the music industry may know the name Chuck Philips, but few inside the industry will forget it. As the leading music industry investigative reporter of his generation and a mainstay of Times entertainment coverage for more than a decade, Chuck aimed to force a celebrity-driven corner of […] Read More
On the face of it, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis achieved an important victory Wednesday in his two-year battle with Walt Disney Co., as a federal judge tossed Disney’s lawsuit contending that DeSantis moved against the company in retaliation for its criticism of an anti-gay state law. DeSantis certainly thought so. […] Read More
Nikki Haley blocked the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act while she was governor of South Carolina. Her policies on abortion rights are execrable. Her home state has one of the nation’s worse records in the nation on maternal health — indeed, on health generally. Since Haley says […] Read More
Sunday was a tough day for those, like me, who get their entertainment jollies by watching losers try to redeem themselves. I’m not talking only about the Buffalo Bills, the only NFL team I care even two cents for, whose effort to erase their four consecutive Super Bowl losses (1990-1993) […] Read More
It used to be fairly easy to dismiss Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, as a clownish anti-vaccine quack posing a danger mostly to residents of his home state. That has become harder to do as time goes on, as Ladapo has moved from promoting useless treatments for COVID-19, […] Read More
Those of us who diligently follow financial forecasts know that the go-to place for mapping out the course of the economy over the coming 12 months is Davos, Switzerland, the host city of the annual World Economic Forum every January. Rule of thumb: Listen closely to what the gathered business […] Read More
There was a time, I must admit, when the hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman was one of my Wall Street heroes. It started in December 2012. Ackman had decided to take a short position in the shares of the multilevel marketing firm Herbalife. Ackman justified his bet with a heroic […] Read More
The American legal system has a message for women concerned about their abortion rights: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your pharmacist is your friend. Thanks to a gaping loophole in federal healthcare regulations, some of our leading drug store chains turn over customers’ most sensitive private healthcare information […] Read More
Articles asking us to feel sympathy for families barely scraping by on healthy six-figure incomes may be staples of the financial press, but it’s rare that they come packaged as real-world case studies attached to flesh-and-blood individuals. But that’s what happened just before Christmas, when law professor Steven Calabresi defended […] Read More
If you’re a fan of techno-hype, 2023 was the year for you. Believers felt themselves validated by seeing excitement and fear about AI chatbots reach previously untouched heights. Skeptics may have felt initially confounded by the rollout of driverless robotaxis in San Francisco and a few other cities, but ultimately […] Read More
