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In today’s edition:
- France is low on A/C. The United States is low on nuclear energy.
- Recruiting the people who will build AI deterrence
- Is the Supreme Court coming for same-sex marriage?
Paris is burning (well, sort of)
There’s a great viral tweet from last year of French diners leisurely enjoying a meal while flames lick at the restaurant’s exterior windows.
france becomes the epitome of the ‘this is fine’ meme:pic.twitter.com/v36KZpj9O4
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) March 21, 2023
This, in essence, has been Paris’s approach to building housing for the imminent influx of athletes for the Summer Games, Lee Hockstader writes from the city, which has not equipped its Olympic Village with A/C.
“Even as temperatures have climbed in recent summers — the mercury hit 108 five years ago,” Lee says, “plenty of Parisians remain stoic, regarding air conditioning as a climate-crushing indulgence favored mainly by whiny Americans.” This from the people who don’t like ice in their water!
Lee writes that the designers of the housing “insist that their ‘natural’ air-conditioning system will keep the mercury from rising much above 80 in most apartments, most of the time,” an assertion that contains more qualifiers than the Chinese gymnastics delegation.
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Naturally, the Americans, Australians and others are bringing their own window units. Add in officials’ ill-fated attempt to reclaim the Seine for aquatic events, and the whole “green Games” thing starts to feel a little futile.
But at least Paris is trying. The city’s mayor, Lee reports, chastened naysayers in an exceedingly French way: “I have a lot of respect for the comfort of the athletes, but I’m thinking even more about the survival of humanity.”
France also has long been a leader in clean energy derived from nuclear power. Rob Gebelhoff is pleased to see the United States taking some small steps to catch up.
He writes that the recently passed Advance Act ought to help “liberate the nuclear industry from its decades-long malaise” marked by the aging and shuttering of reactors as well as an insufficient commitment to building more. Right now, U.S. nuclear energy production is expected to drop for the next 15 years.
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Rob explains the important things the Advance Act does but writes that it’s just a start. The country is going to need a lot more investment to shore up its greatest source of non-carbon-based energy.
The future of deterrence
Speaking of nuclear, Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska of Palantir Technologies open their op-ed with a refresher on the world’s nuclear peace — the broad decline in violence brought about by the terrifying specter of mutually assured destruction. Like Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, they find this to be the thing weapons are actually good for.
But “the atomic age could soon be coming to a close,” Karp and Zamiska write. “This is the software century; wars of the future will be driven by artificial intelligence, whose development is proceeding far faster than that of conventional weapons.” So, will AI weapons be developed and managed by the (generally) responsible stewards who held the world’s nuclear stockpile? Or not?
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The writers worry that Silicon Valley’s aversion to working with or for the military puts the world in danger of the latter possibility. There, “engineers have turned their backs, unwilling to engage with the mess and moral complexity of geopolitics,” they contend. “Yet the peace that those … who are opposed to working with the military enjoy is made possible by that same military’s credible threat of force.”
Karp and Zamiska write that the newest generation of STEM kids needs to be inspired and invigorated to help develop world-leading autonomous weapons with AI — not for war, but for peace.
Chaser: They better get moving fast, too. The Editorial Board writes that egregious delays at the Pentagon reflect a problem the military is only beginning to solve.
More politics
“The Court fails at the first pass.” So warns Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent from a (conservative) majority opinion issued on Friday in what ought to have been an obscure immigration case. Rather, the court seems to have gone out of its way to undermine protections for marriage — exactly what it promised not to do when it overturned Roe v. Wade.
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Writes Ruth Marcus: “This reads like the first salvo in the battle over the scope of unenumerated constitutional rights unleashed by Dobbs.”
Ruth doubts that even a Supreme Court this cavalier would eliminate the right to same-sex marriage. At the same time, she admits there’s cause for worry, especially considering that this opinion could have easily sidestepped the issue entirely.
Chaser: Should President Biden campaign on reforming the court? Alexi McCammond analyzes the pros and cons in the latest edition of her Prompt 2024 newsletter.
Smartest, fastest
- Leana Wen writes that the surgeon general’s proposal to require warning labels on social media platforms is an excellent idea that could do a lot to address teens’ mental health crisis.
- For the thin-skinned, every week is Shark Week, Gene Robinson writes in an analysis of the gaffe Donald Trump couldn’t let go of.
- Max Boot writes that he has scarcely seen Israelis gloomier than they are now, under threat of war with Hezbollah.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Carbo-load bonbons
Less a pleasure to eat in
Your own petit four
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
