For your safety
Why do we need a $400 million White House ballroom? Why must the United States stop the construction of offshore wind turbines? Why did President Trump strip hundreds and thousands of federal workers of union protections last year?
In each case, the Trump administration has said it’s a matter of national security, report my colleagues Maxine Joselow and Devlin Barrett.
Experts say some of the arguments strain credulity. The ballroom will have a bunker underneath (but there was already one under the East Wing that Trump demolished). The windmills supposedly interfere with radar off the Northeast coast (military analysts say that’s not true). Collective bargaining is said to hamper the work of government employees focused on national security issues.
Judges have raised their eyebrows at some of these claims, though the law gives the president wide latitude on national security matters. (Adam Kushner, my editor, wrote about what happens when judges don’t believe the president.)
One legal test will pit Trump’s national security arguments against the Endangered Species Act. The government last month exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from federal protections for endangered whales, saying the rules had hindered oil production there. “To be as secure as a nation, we need a steady, affordable supply of our own energy,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
What A.I. can’t do
Artificial intelligence has sped up a lot of tasks at the office, reports Noam Scheiber, who covers the plight of white-collar workers. In some cases A.I. just does the tasks outright. (That’s the plight.)
But what A.I. can’t do — at least for the moment — is take a meeting:
As A.I. makes the production of knowledge work more and more efficient, the job of presenting, debating, lobbying, arm-twisting, reassuring or just plain selling the work appears to be rising in importance. And the need for those sometimes messy human tasks may limit the number of people A.I. displaces.
“These were always important skills,” said David Deming, an economist who is the dean of Harvard College. “But as the information landscape becomes more saturated, the ability to tell a story out of it — to take a ton of text and turn it into something people want — is more valuable.”
Noam spoke to a number of executives who feel the same way. I particularly liked his interaction with a consultant who had historically relied on experts (in, say, tax law or coding). The consultant told him A.I. was reducing the need for that expertise and increasing the value of generalists who excel at the complex business of dealing with clients. What he needs now are people “who have their phone glued to their head, who are everybody’s best friend, who are go-go-go.”
Take a moment to think about that — ideally during a meeting you hate. It could save your job!
Related: Stop debating whether A.I. is smarter than humans. It has “jagged intelligence”: brilliance in some areas, incompetence in others.
Here’s to dense dogs
Is your dog smart? One of mine is as dumb as a box of rocks. The other’s about 7 cents short of a dollar. (I love them both.) Yet many people, my colleague Emily Anthes reports, have dogs of exceptional intellect. Or so they think.
Earlier this year, Emily wrote about “canine prodigies” that know the names for dozens, even hundreds, of different toys. Afterward, she heard from many readers who said that their dogs were lexical masterminds, too.
She realized she was experiencing what scientists call the better-than-average effect. That’s a cognitive bias in which people overestimate their own abilities — and their dogs’ abilities — in comparison with those of other people (or dogs). A lot of people have it. In a 2025 YouGov survey, two-thirds of dog owners said that their animals were smarter than the average dog. It’s statistically impossible.
And that’s just fine. Watson, Emily’s dog, isn’t a genius. But he is “everything we could want in a dog: sweet, gentle, goofy, loving. I don’t need him to help me with the crossword — I just want him to curl up next to me while I do it. And at this, he excels.”
Read Emily’s paean to a very good boy.
Now let’s see what else is happening in the world.
- Credits: The New York Times
- Author: Sam Sifton
- Illustration: Peter Arkle
