Big Banks Set Aside Billions as They Brace for a Downturn The country’s largest lenders increased their reserves to protect against deteriorating economic conditions this year, after reporting resilient profits for the end of last year. ......... The bank anticipates a drop in demand for auto loans, home equity lines and other consumer credit because “people are reading the same headlines we’re all reading, about a recession is coming and they should be careful” .
The Trouble With Paradise Within hours, midwinter gloom had been transformed, as if by magic, into tropical sunshine. I was paying two dollars a night for a cottage of my own with a golden beach 45 seconds away, down a fragrant, palm-shaded lane. ........ In Sri Lanka I’d realized that the island has so often been taken to be Arcadia — Arabs saw it as “contiguous with the Garden of Eden,” and an Italian papal legate announced that the waters of paradise could be there — that the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and millions of us tourists have all scrambled to grab a piece of it. ......... In Jerusalem, like every other visitor, I’d been vividly reminded that the city of faith has always been a city of conflict. .......... In Kashmir, I’d sat on a houseboat in the sun — nothing to be heard but the sound of kingfishers’ wings above a lotus pond — as locals in little boats paddled past, offering aromatic spices and exquisitely carved small boxes. I was truly in Heaven — so long as I forgot that, minutes across the water, army roadblocks and encampments spoke for the more than half a million soldiers trying to maintain peace in a bitterly contested territory claimed for more than 70 years now by both India and Pakistan. ........... In Ladakh, the kind of pristine Himalayan region that might have inspired the notion of Shangri-La, I discovered more peace and beauty than I dared to dream of — along with local kids who reminded me that the real paradise was that place called California. ........... Besides, if I really did come upon a calm and self-contained Eden, what would it have to gain from me? I, like any visitor, could only be the serpent in the garden. .......... Naked ascetics, smeared in ash, were expressing their contempt for simple notions of right and wrong by living in graveyards and drinking from skulls. The holy waters the faithful were gratefully imbibing contained hundreds of times the maximum level of coliform bacteria the World Health Organization has deemed safe for drinking. .
Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It. OpenAI’s new chatbot is raising fears of cheating on homework, but its potential as an educational tool outweighs its risks....... ChatGPT, the buzzy chatbot developed by OpenAI that is capable of writing cogent essays, solving science and math problems and producing working computer code. ........ Students are using it to write their assignments, passing off A.I.-generated essays and problem sets as their own. .......... One high school teacher told me that he used ChatGPT to evaluate a few of his students’ papers, and that the app had provided more detailed and useful feedback on them than he would have, in a tiny fraction of the time. ......... “Am I even necessary now?” he asked me, only half joking. .......... (Tim Robinson, a spokesman for Seattle Public Schools, told me that ChatGPT was blocked on school devices in December, “along with five other cheating tools.”) .......... ChatGPT is a freakishly capable tool that landed in their midst with no warning, and it performs reasonably well across a wide variety of tasks and academic subjects. ........
banning ChatGPT from the classroom is the wrong move.
......... schools should thoughtfully embrace ChatGPT as a teaching aid — one that could unlock student creativity, offer personalized tutoring, and better prepare students to work alongside A.I. systems as adults. ........ Right now, ChatGPT is the only free, easy-to-use chatbot of its caliber. ........... while they found the idea of ChatGPT-assisted cheating annoying, policing it sounded even worse. ......... schools should treat ChatGPT the way they treat calculators — allowing it for some assignments, but not others, and assuming that unless students are being supervised in person with their devices stashed away, they’re probably using one. ........ with the right approach, it can be an effective teaching tool. ......... It could serve as an after-hours tutor (“explain the Doppler effect, using language an eighth grader could understand”) or a debate sparring partner (“convince me that animal testing should be banned”). ......... ChatGPT wasn’t a threat to student learning as long as teachers paired it with substantive, in-class discussions. .......... today’s students will graduate into a world full of generative A.I. programs. .How Western Goods Reach Russia: A Long Line of Trucks Through Georgia With Western sanctions barring many imports, a lot of what Russia needs now travels a slow, crowded truck route through the Caucasus Mountains from Georgia. ........ The trucks wait for days with their cargo — car parts, industrial materials, chemicals, even the paper for tea bags — to cross the frontier on a journey that usually starts in Turkey and ends in Russian towns and cities where Western goods are in high demand. ........ While growth prospects remain dim, the outright collapse that some economists had predicted in the face of Western sanctions did not come about. ......... The lines sometimes stretch all the way to Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, about 100 miles from the border, with special parking lots along its bypass road where truckers can rest, and sleep, while they wait. ........ “Georgia is performing a balancing act between its official pro-Western orientation and its economic dependence on Russia” .......... Since May, Russia has received more than $20 billion worth of goods, through the so-called parallel imports process — when something is brought to a country without the consent of the company that owns the trademark ........ Overall, by the end of 2022, Russia had almost restored its prewar level of imports, according to the country’s Central Bank — while also adding to a major source of income: the customs duties it collects on goods entering the country. ........... the boost to Georgia’s economy could just be too much for businesses and the government to resist. .
She Witnessed Mao’s Worst Excesses. Now She Has a Warning for the World. At 93, the memoirist Yuan-tsung Chen hopes that her recollections of China’s tumultuous past will help the country confront its historical wrongs — and avoid repeating them. .......... the story of the man so hungry that he ate himself. ......... “When you do things in the spirit of Mao, that scares me,” she says, referring to China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. ...... Under Mr. Xi, China enforced a sweeping crackdown on Hong Kong that included an all-encompassing national security law put in place in 2020. Since then, the city has fallen under a cloak of silence that Ms. Chen says she recognizes. “My current situation looks uncannily like the one I found myself in more than 60 years ago.” .
African and Invisible: The Other New York Migrant Crisis Like many who have crossed the border from Latin America, they arrived in New York after a desperate journey. But these men have few options in the city, often relying on one man in the Bronx. ......... there is a Little Senegal in Harlem, and more recent immigrants from Gambia have established themselves in the Bronx. ........ About two million African immigrants arrived in the United States in 2019, up from 600,000 in 2000....... Imam Omar comes from a long line of imams in Senegal — his father, grandfather, uncles and now his 21-year-old son are imams — and manages the migrants like one gigantic congregation. .
Microsoft Bets Big on the Creator of ChatGPT in Race to Dominate A.I. As a new chatbot wows the world with its conversational talents, a resurgent tech giant is poised to reap the benefits while doubling down on a relationship with the start-up OpenAI. ........ But at Microsoft, it was a cause for celebration. For several years, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, had been putting the pieces in place for this moment. ....... In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, the tiny San Francisco company that designed ChatGPT. And in the years since, it has quietly invested another $2 billion .......... The $3 billion paid for the huge amounts of computing power that OpenAI needed to build the chatbot. And it meant that Microsoft could rapidly build and deploy new products based on the technology. ......... Microsoft is now poised to challenge Big Tech competitors like Google, Amazon and Apple with a technological advantage the company has not possessed for more than two decades. Microsoft is in talks to invest another $10 billion in OpenAI as it seeks to push its technology even further ......... The potential $10 billion deal — which would mainly provide OpenAI with even larger amounts of computing power .........
what has become the hottest technology in the tech industry.
......... ChatGPT answers questions, writes poetry and riffs on almost any topic tossed its way. ...... generative artificial intelligence, the term for a system that can generate text, images, sounds and other media in response to short prompts. ....... The new generative A.I. technologies could reinvent everything from online search engines like Google to digital assistants like Alexa and Siri. ........... OpenAI is working on an even more powerful system called GPT-4 ........ OpenAI is led by Sam Altman, who became well known in Silicon Valley as the head the start-up builder Y Combinator. Mr. Altman, 37, and his co-founders created OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit. But he soon remade the venture as a for-profit company that could more aggressively pursue financing. ......... With backing from Microsoft, OpenAI went on to build a milestone technology called GPT-3. Known as a “large language model,” it could generate text on its own, including tweets, blog posts, news articles and even computer code. ......... GitHub, a popular online service for programmers owned by Microsoft, began offering a programming tool called Copilot. As programmers built smartphone apps and other software, Copilot suggested the next line of code as they typed, much the way autocomplete tools suggest the next word as you type texts or emails. ......... Google, Meta and other companies have spent years building models similar to ChatGPT. The A.I. systems develop their skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital text, including books, Wikipedia articles, computer programs and chat logs. ............. most of Microsoft’s $1 billion investment came in the form of the computing power OpenAI needs — and that Microsoft would eventually become the lab’s sole source of computing power. ............ as much as 10 percent of all data could be A.I.-generated in just three years, which could lead to as much as $7 billion in revenue for Azure .Prince Harry’s Memoir Has Record Breaking Sales The steady drumbeat of revelations that preceded the book’s release helped push early orders and initial sales, making “Spare,” on its first day, one of the best-selling hardcover books in recent memory........ Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” has become a record-breaking success, with first-day sales that exceed some of publishing’s biggest hits, including blockbusters by Barack and Michelle Obama. ........ the largest first-day sales for any nonfiction book ever published by Penguin Random House, the world’s largest publisher. ....... the velocity of sales throughout the day was gigantic.” ......... In Britain, “Spare” set a record for first-day sales of a nonfiction book, selling 400,000 copies ........ “The only books that have sold faster in a day have been about the other Harry, Harry Potter” ....... and the last section of his tell-all degenerates into a tiresome back-and-forth about who’s leaking what and why ........ “if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style.” ........ The Guardian ran an article that detailed a physical confrontation between Prince William and Prince Harry; as Harry describes it in the book, William knocked him to the floor. That same week, copies of “Spare” accidentally went on sale early in Spain and were snatched up by news outlets. Dozens of stories followed from around the world: Prince Harry said in the book that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan. Prince Harry wrote that his brother encouraged him to dress as a Nazi for a costume party. Prince Harry lost his virginity to an older woman in a field behind a bar. .......... the news media frenzy that followed each new release appeared to help the book sell. .......... pre-orders jumped after the article in The Guardian detailing the scuffle between the brothers ....... Barnes & Noble expects the book to be one of the biggest releases of 2023. .........
the “expertise and talent” of the book’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer
......... “Spare” was sold for a rumored sum of $20 million as part of a multi-book deal .......... His answer was that by publishing a memoir, he was trying to put many of the rumors to rest by speaking up. .When the Writing Demands Talent and Discretion, Call the Ghostwriter Ghostwriters write books in someone else’s voice — without leaving fingerprints. Doing it well requires great technical skill and a flexible ego........ Perhaps the most exalted practitioner of a little-understood craft, Moehringer aims, ultimately, to disappear. ......... Doing it well requires a tremendous amount of technical skill ......... “The lion’s share of my job is about getting out of the way, vanishing so the voice of my client can come through as clearly as possible.” ....... they provide the raw materials to build a house and she puts it together, brick by brick. “You own the bricks,” she said she tells them. “But you — and there should be no shame in this — don’t have the skill set to actually erect the building.” ........ Fees can range from about $50,000 to many times that, into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. ......... “Authors run the gamut from someone who is a complete control freak and has to approve every semicolon to those who barely phone it in,” said Madeleine Morel, an agent who specializes in matchmaking book projects with ghostwriters. “And when you start working with someone, you don’t know where they’re going to fall on that curve.” ........... Often, a writer will meet the subject only a few times, then follow up with phone calls, emails and texts. Others say that in order to get enough of a sense of the person to capture on the page, they need at least a few dozen hours in the presence of a client, sitting together in a room or shadowing the daily routines of the subject’s public and private lives. ......... To write Andre Agassi’s memoir, “Open,” Moehringer moved to Las Vegas, where Agassi lived. Agassi said he bought a house a mile away from his own, and Moehringer occupied it for two years while he worked on the book. All the writer requested was a long table where he could lay out the scenes he’d piece together “like a necklace,” Agassi recalled. They’d meet in the morning, fueled by breakfast burritos from Whole Foods. .......... “I’d spend a couple of hours with him over breakfast and a tape recorder,” Agassi said. ......... A former newspaper reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, Moehringer has a reputation for intense work habits — he rarely sleeps when finishing a book ......... Prince Harry’s book is his third ghostwriting project. Maybe. ........ by pushing their subjects, ghostwriters can make books more authentic than if they were written by the public figures themselves ........ “He’s half psychiatrist,” Phil Knight, a founder of Nike, said of Moehringer, who was the collaborator on his memoir, “Shoe Dog.” “He gets you to say things you really didn’t think you would.” ....... She doesn’t interview them, she said, but tries to have normal conversations. She broaches delicate subjects in phone calls late at night ............. some of his books are more merchandise than literature, meant to capitalize on someone’s 15 minutes of fame. ....... most people don’t have the time, or the ability, to write a good book .......... “Writing is a technical skill” ........ in the old days, nobody would ever admit to internet dating, and now everybody talks about it .
Lisa Marie Presley, a Life in Pictures The daughter of Elvis was famous from the moment she was born. .
Could Black Flight Change a Model of Integration? American suburbs have long faced the issue of white families leaving as more residents of color move in. But in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Black families, upset about changes in the schools, are trickling to nearby suburbs........ American suburbs have long faced the issue of white flight, where white families pack up in large numbers as demographics shift and more residents of color move in. But in Shaker Heights, it’s Black families who are leaving. Many of them point to initiatives rolled out over the past decade meant to combat systemic racism in the classroom — good intentions that they feel have done more harm than good when it comes to their children’s academic achievement. ......... Home values and school rankings exist as two sides of the same real estate coin. About 90 percent of American children attend public school, and higher school spending produces higher property values. Stronger school rankings, in turn, are often offered as justification for higher property taxes. And Shaker Heights, which is governed by the motto “A community is known by the schools it keeps,” has one of the highest tax rates in Ohio. ........... Siobhan Aaron, 42, who in 2020 switched her 16-year-old son Kareem to private school and then moved out of the district to Twinsburg, a community 15 miles south of Shaker Heights, where the property taxes are significantly lower. ............ Kareem was often stereotyped by administrators, who presumed that because he was Black, he needed extra help ....... “Curriculum and instruction that works for gifted students is usually good for all students.” ........ Shaker Heights appears integrated, but within its schools, where gifted and honors classes have long skewed overwhelmingly white, it is anything but. ......... In the 1950s, a handful of Black and white couples formed the Ludlow Community Association — a group that encouraged Black families to move in while also imploring white families to stay. The result was the first successfully integrated community in Cleveland, and one of the first in the nation. And for many years, it was considered something of a utopia. .......... Like Black students in districts across the country, they also receive a disproportionate share of discipline, which ricochets into higher suspensions and lower grades ........ Parents I interviewed said they are not elitist or classist; they just want the best for their children. .
