‘The Zone of Interest’ Review: A Genteel Life Abuts the Holocaust’s Horrors
Pool parties, gardening pleasures, horseback rides. Occasionally a servant brings a delightful little treasure, such as a fur coat. It’s quite delightful, being the wife of the Auschwitz commandant. Such is the premise of Jonathan Glazer’s staggering “The Zone of Interest,” a Holocaust movie unlike any other. Confining itself almost entirely to events just outside […]
Stocks Extend Post-Fed Rally – WSJ
Updated Dec. 14, 2023 4:37 pm ET Stocks extended their year-end rally. The S&P 500 rose 0.3%, Nasdaq Composite added 0.2%, Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.4%, closing at a new record high. Investors have recently been betting that the Fed will pivot to lowering interest rates next year, and the central bank helped […]
Biden’s Mixed Messages on Israel
President Biden made headlines by declaring on Tuesday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has to change.” As is typical with the President, his subsequent remarks were hard to follow, but many heard them as a call for a new Israeli government coalition willing to jump-start a two-state solution. It isn’t Mr. Biden’s place to […]
A Legal Strategy Against Campus Antisemitism
The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were equivocal, evasive and legalistic when they testified before Congress last week about antisemitism on campus. One reason is that their institutions, along with many others, face serious legal risk as a result of the hostility and intimidation to which their […]
Computers Will Soon Read Your Mind
It’s been almost a century since psychiatrist Hans Berger made the first electroencephalogram, providing a glimpse into the electric nature of the human brain. EEG readings have helped countless people struggling to recover from ailments ranging from epilepsy and sleep disorders to head injuries and brain tumors. Technology has come a long way since then, […]
OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever Has a Plan for Keeping Super-Intelligent AI in Check
OpenAI was founded on a promise to build artificial intelligence that benefits all of humanity—even when that AI becomes considerably smarter than its creators. Since the debut of ChatGPT last year and during the company’s recent governance crisis, its commercial ambitions have been more prominent. Now, the company says a new research group working on […]
What Fed Rate Cuts Mean for Home Buyers in 2024
Getting a mortgage should be slightly less painful in 2024. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve said it expected to cut interest rates three times next year. The Fed’s forecast brings a dose of holiday cheer to hopeful home buyers who have felt squeezed out of the market. Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All […]
My Surprisingly Unbiased Week With Elon Musk’s ‘Politically Biased’ Chatbot
Some Elon Musk enthusiasts have been alarmed to discover in recent days that Grok, his supposedly “truth-seeking” artificial intelligence was in actual fact a bit of a snowflake. Grok, built by Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company, was made available to Premium+ X users last Friday. Musk has complained that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is afflicted with “the […]
Europe’s Hawkish Rebellion Will Be Hard to Sustain
Dec. 14, 2023 11:07 am ET Central banks in Europe want to push back against the strengthening consensus that 2024 will be a year of interest-rate cuts. They may be swept up by it anyway. Investors expected both the European Central Bank and the Bank of England to leave borrowing costs unchanged Thursday. In this […]
Americans Are Spending on the Holidays After All
Dec. 14, 2023 11:06 am ET It came with ribbons. It came with tags. It came with packages, boxes or bags. Somehow or other the holiday shopping season came just the same. The Commerce Department on Thursday reported that retail sales rose a seasonally adjusted 0.3% in November from October. Even factoring in some downward […]