Wiki News Live
Today:
Your Next Dog May Live Longer
NEWS | 03 May 2026
“I didn’t really speak the Silicon Valley language,” Halioua told me. Deming told Halioua that she didn’t sound smart. Families are willing to go into debt to finance a surgery if doing so means saving a beloved dog’s life. People may feel guilty if they can’t afford a daily pill that keeps their dog alive longer. Elderly people may think twice about adopting dogs that have the potential to live much longer.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 03 May 2026
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

Top Stories:
Another Reason the White House Ballroom Is an Eyesore
NEWS | 03 May 2026
Even if the White House is a stronghold, it is not meant to look like one. The tenor of White House security was set under Franklin D. Roosevelt. From the 19th century to World War I, the White House grounds had been accessible to a degree that can seem startling today. The streets on either side of the White House closed, better gates went up, and armed guards appeared on the mansion’s roof. Yet in making the barriers between himself and the people so visible, he has eroded the symbolism of the White House.

World:
My AI Matchmaker Let Me Down
NEWS | 03 May 2026
His AI matchmaker asked him at least an hour’s worth of questions about his past relationships, what he aspired to achieve in his career, what he was looking for in a partner, and his dating goals. But my matchmaker wasn’t having it. Whereas a human matchmaker knows if a client is lying about his height, and can at least guess if he’s lying about his personality, an AI matchmaker probably can’t (at least not yet). For my part, I now knew that the men in the Instagram videos who had drawn me to Amata were in a different category than the men my AI matchmaker thought I deserved. All the anger I’d felt toward my AI matchmaker melted away; its sins had been atoned.

Current Events:
For a Time, the U.S. Protected Democracy
NEWS | 03 May 2026
Gerrymanders that discriminate against Black voters could be justified today as merely offering partisan advantage to Republicans. Justices on both sides of the decision agree that what’s left now is a Voting Rights Act in name only. Much of what passes for conventional wisdom in political science is a recent product, only made possible by the Voting Rights Act. Voting rights were, to him, a matter of the “dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” and the law itself was meant to be a proactive guarantor of that destiny. The Voting Rights Act was the true instantiation of the Declaration of Independence.

News Flash:
Congress Can’t Meet Its Own Iran-War Deadline
NEWS | 03 May 2026
Most wars take a long time to achieve quagmire status, but Donald Trump’s Iran war is precocious. Just 60 days have passed since the president formally notified Congress about the military action there, on March 2. That makes today the deadline, under the War Powers Resolution (WPR), for the president to end the war, Congress to authorize it, or Trump to invoke a 30-day extension for withdrawal. Given a chance to rein in a wildly unpopular, unsuccessful, and likely illegal war, Congress might just do nothing—the latest sign of how ineffectual the body has become. In a letter to Congress, obtained by Politico, the White House claims that the war has “terminated” because of the current cease-fire.

Latest:
Atlantic Reads: How to Be a Dissident With Gal Beckerman
NEWS | 03 May 2026
On Wednesday, May 13, the Atlantic staff writer Gal Beckerman will sit down with podcast host Adam Harris to discuss Beckerman’s new book, How to Be a Dissident. Beckerman’s book is part philosophy, part history, and part manual for living with integrity in an age of conformity and authoritarian drift. In How to Be a Dissident, Beckerman draws on the stories of dissidents from around the globe and across time, to provide models for pushing back against tyranny. Harris and Beckerman will discuss the defining characteristics that such extraordinary figures share, and the lessons they can offer.

Breaking:
Animal Farm Is Not for Kids but They Made It a Kids’ Movie Anyway
NEWS | 03 May 2026
What you did at the animal farm was wrong!”), you are in luck. Andy Serkis’s Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: Two legs good, four legs better, six legs … best! Gregor Samsa goes from corporate drone to literal drone in this misunderstanding of The Metamorphosis from the studio that brought you a misunderstanding of Animal Farm! Andy Serkis’s Maus: Talking mice? Talking mice and cats?

Trending:
An Unexpected Type of Beach Read
NEWS | 03 May 2026
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Last summer, I spent a shocking amount of time at my local D.C. pool reading about the Ebola virus. My wife has adopted my nonfiction-thriller habit, which led her to David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, one of the books Holland recommends, just as I dug into Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl. The guys swear they’re all cool with it, but they’re having a really hard time using the right pronouns. Sammie’s trip there goes poorly, but it’s a lot of fun to read about.

This Just In:
Did a Human Write This?
NEWS | 03 May 2026
It’s an AI-detection company that uses machine learning to try to distinguish human writing from AI. But so much of what comes out, it’s not just that it’s believable human writing. And just to clarify: So a false positive is, if we flag something that’s human written as AI generated. Human, AI, AI assisted. So we’ll say something is human, AI, or AI assisted.

Today:
The Psychiatrist’s Case for Downsizing a Friendship
NEWS | 03 May 2026
He knew some people would call such delicacy an “anxious attachment style.” So now he was asking to be fixed. If anyone could excise your anxious attachment and sew you back up, it might be him. His anxious style, Levine suggested, might be part of what gave him that edge: He was hyperaware of subtle indicators that other people hadn’t picked up on yet. In one study, “anxious attachers,” as Levine calls them, detected and reported smoke rising from a computer before other participants did. And anxious attachers are reminded that “wall tennis” does not mean cutting people off.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 03 May 2026
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

Top Stories:
Photos of the Week: Screeching Championship, Direct Democracy, Victory Plunge
NEWS | 03 May 2026
Josep Lago / AFP / GettyThe researcher Akshayakumar Kompa holds a new plastic-like biomaterial derived from shrimp shells, created at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia in Barcelona, on April 24, 2026. Researchers say that this new material, developed from shrimp shells and reinforced with nickel, mimics the functional properties of plastic while offering high resistance to water, and that it is possibly part of a new era of biological materials capable of replacing single-use plastics with natural, sustainable alternatives.

World:
Atlantic Trivia, May 1, 2026: World Records
NEWS | 03 May 2026
Set yourself a time goal for today’s trivia. Atlantic Trivia Records History Characters From a story (opens in new tab) by Alex Hutchinson Set this past Sunday by the Kenyan Sabastian Sawe, the world record for what event is one hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds? Answer Submit Previous Question Next QuestionAnd by the way, did you know that when it was first popular, the martini was made with a gin-to-vermouth ratio of 2 to 1? This is far “wetter” than the way the cocktail is drunk today; a classic dry martini, according to the International Bartenders Association, is 6 parts gin to 1 part vermouth. And for a Churchill—named (dubiously) after the British prime minister’s preferences—you’re supposed to merely “observe the vermouth from across the room.”Have a great weekend!

Current Events:
So, About That AI Bubble
NEWS | 03 May 2026
Experts and journalists, myself included, were comparing the AI build-out to the railroad bubble of the 1800s and the dot-com bubble of the ’90s, in which speculation led to overinvestment that eventually crashed the stock market. Recently, however, the same researchers re-ran the experiment using the latest AI coding tools. “On basically every indicator we have, we were already seeing a big acceleration in the pace of AI progress,” Jean-Stanislas Denain, a senior researcher at Epoch AI, a think tank that measures AI capabilities, told me. AI companies are investing even more money into chips and infrastructure in anticipation of even more demand. “Now we’re doing it three times every week.”Six months ago, people arguing that AI was a bubble were pointing to real-world facts, whereas people arguing against the bubble hypothesis were making speculative promises about the future.