I really hate to play the “age card,” folks, but back in my day (2023 and 2024), I distinctly recall that a president with apparent mental infirmities was nigh unto scandalous. For a press so dedicated to sanewashing the Trump administration’s open sewer of corruption, the kid gloves treatment still seems the order of the day. This week, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire published a lengthy exegesis of the “President Trump is increasingly isolated” variety, titled “The Bubble-Wrapped President.” In the piece, Lemire reports that Trump has “dramatically scaled back speeches, public events, and domestic travel compared with the first year of his initial term.” He is described therein as “distracted,” “out of touch,” focused on matters not “high on voters’ minds,” and showing “little willingness to acknowledge” problems gripping the country.    The piece treats this mostly as some kind of inscrutable mystery, a tale told by the thinking-face emoji. The real story is moving between the lines: The president is fully checked out because he’s old, enfeebled, and his brain is slowly turning into pasta e fagioli.  The president moldering in a narcoleptic haze as Marco Rubio yammers away at his side is the same guy who doesn’t seem to remember why he pardoned former Honduran president and celebrated drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, or what part of his body was recently subjected to an MRI.  There is plenty of room for the discourse to shift, however —and some evidence that it might.  The New York Times treats the matter with somewhat less puzzlement than The Atlantic, noting Trump’s advanced age and planting a few red flags about his health; its piece garnered an outraged Truth Social post from Trump after publication. In one of the few articles to actually take on the matter of Trump’s obvious infirmity frontally,  The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt seems exasperated that a president who has obvious trouble “completing a thought” has “largely been saved the same examination” so regularly foisted on Biden. If The Atlantic limits that examination to a single aside, in which Trump’s lack of acuity is likened to “the same low energy move for which [he] used to mock Joe Biden,” the latter half of the piece does at least present a compelling reason why more attention to a fully noped-out chief executive might be a matter of some alarm: The vacuum Trump is leaving in the White House needs to be filled, and it’s being filled by “enablers” rather than people who might “[moderate] some of his more extreme impulses.” Or, as someone less committed to euphemism euthanasia might put it, it’s being filled by utter ghouls: a Pentagon head who’s in over his head and spiraling out as he commits war crimes, a Health and Human Services secretary who’s bringing Lysenkoism back, an FBI director crashing out because no one brought him a cool jacket to wear —and all the rest hopped up on völkisch nationalism, pulling Black people out of their cars in Minneapolis and warring with Sabrina Carpenter. In the days leading up to the 2024 presidential election, The New Republic’s Matt Ford tuned in to watch Trump’s campaign event at Madison Square Garden —a gritty reboot of the 1939 German-American Bund rally for fascism —and sounded an alarm about what the next Trump White House was going to look like. “The Madison Square Garden rally,” Ford wrote, “showed how much of Trumpism is about satisfying the basest, crudest, and most hateful impulses in American life —and how much his acolytes can’t wait to wield the federal government to do it.” The issue at hand is no longer one in which we worry there aren’t enough moderating figures in Trump’s life —it’s that all of the monsters Trump brought into his administration now have a free hand to run the country.

Hey, Does Anyone Want to Talk About Donald Trump’s Infirmities? | The New Republic

A New York subway rider has accused a woman of breaking his Meta smart glasses. “She just broke my Meta glasses,” said the TikTok user, who goes by eth8n, in a video that has since garnered millions of views. “She was the only person annoyed. I never spoke to her, I even let her sit down when she got on the train at 42nd street, and I continued to stand.” But instead of coming to his support, the internet wholeheartedly rallied behind the alleged perpetrator, celebrating the woman as a folk hero — and perfectly highlighting how the public feels about gadgets like Meta’s smart glasses. “Good, people are tired of being filmed by strangers,” one user commented

Futurism

Woman Hailed as Hero for Smashing Man's Meta Smart Glasses on Subway

A New York subway rider has accused a woman of breaking his Meta smart glasses. She was later hailed as a hero.

A single person claims to have authored 113 academic papers on artificial intelligence this year, 89 of which will be presented this week at one of the world’s leading conference on AI and machine learning, which has raised questions among computer scientists about the state of AI research. The author, Kevin Zhu, recently finished a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and now runs Algoverse, an AI research and mentoring company for high schoolers – many of whom are his co-authors on the papers. Zhu himself graduated from high school in 2018

the Guardian

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’

AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’

Judge Charles Breyer, the judge presiding over California’s lawsuit against the Trump administration, challenged the federal government’s authority and rationale for continuing to maintain command over the national guard troops it deployed to Los Angeles earlier this year. The Trump administration federalized the state’s national guard in June, dispatching about 4,000 troops in response to protests in the city over immigration raids, despite opposition from the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom. The state quickly filed a lawsuit, with Newsom calling the move unprecedented and illegal, and the case has been unfolding in the courts for months. During a hearing in San Francisco on Friday, Judge Charles Breyer appeared skeptical of the federal government’s case, according to a report from the Associated Press. He argued the situation in Los Angeles had changed since the troops were first deployed, and questioned whether the administration could command the state’s national guard indefinitely. “No crisis lasts forever,” he said. “I think experience teaches us that crises come and crises go. That’s the way it works.” He pressed an attorney for the government for any evidence that state authorities were either unable or unwilling to help keep federal personnel and property in the area safe and noted Donald Trump had access to tens of thousands of active-duty troops in California.

the Guardian

Judge challenges rationale for Trump’s control over national guard in California

Judge seems skeptical of administration’s case and whether any crisis justifying deployment still exists in Los Angeles

US immigration authorities arrested a visiting professor at Harvard law school after he was charged with discharging a pellet gun outside a Massachusetts synagogue the day before Yom Kippur, – and he agreed to leave the country. Carlos Portugal Gouvea, a Brazilian citizen, was arrested on Wednesday by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after his temporary nonimmigrant visa was revoked by the state department following what the Trump administration labeled an “anti-semitic shooting incident” – a description at odds with how local authorities have described the case. Despite the Trump administration’s claims, the Temple Beth Zion has previously told its community members that the incident did not appear to have been fueled by antisemitism, a view shared by the Brookline police department, which investigated the matter. The temple has said that police informed it that Gouvea was “unaware that he lived next to, and was shooting his BB gun next to, a synagogue or that it was a religious holiday”. Gouvea, an associate professor at the University of São Paulo law school who had taught at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the fall semester, had agreed to leave the country, the DHS said.

the Guardian

Professor visiting Harvard arrested by ICE agrees to leave country

Carlos Portugal Gouvea, charged with firing a pellet gun on eve of Yom Kippur outside a synagogue, has said he was not aware of the holiday or that...