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- El Salvador’s Mass Incarceration of U.S. Deportees
Ana paced near the arrivals terminal of the San Salvador airport, eyeing the door where deportees from the United States are released. She was there on a sweltering day in May to pick up her son, who had been detained in Texas and deported. She would drive him home, she decided, and cook him dinner. They would figure out what to do next.But when a group of men walked out wearing ICE-issued sweatsuits, their shoelaces removed from their shoes, her son wasn’t among them. She approached a police officer, who searched his name on a tablet. “He’s being taken to prison,” he told her.Ana, who spoke with me on the condition that I not use her real name or her son’s name, was confused. Her son, 25, did not face charges in either the U.S. or El Salvador. Ana got the name of the police station where her son had been taken. From there, she was told, he would be transferred to a maximum-security prison that has become infamous in El Salvador for the number of prisoners who have died in custody. She sped to the station and begged an officer to let her inside. “You can have five minutes with him,” the officer said, “but try to control yourself.”The officer returned with her son, who was wearing a white shirt and handcuffs. He looked handsome, Ana thought. He had been living in the United States for four years, having fled El Salvador after being physically attacked by both gangs and police officers, according to his asylum application. Ana started crying as she hugged him. She promised to deliver food to the prison.“This isn’t going to be forever,” he said as the officer escorted him away. She hasn’t seen or heard from him since.A year and a half ago, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 31-year-old Salvadoran man, was deported to El Salvador and detained in a maximum-security mega-prison known as CECOT. Abrego’s deportation, which was in violation of legal orders, prompted a public backlash and a federal judge’s intervention; he was ultimately returned to the United States. But as public attention has shifted elsewhere, El Salvador has continued imprisoning deportees sent from the United States, including many who have not been charged with any crime. They have disappeared into the country’s black hole of a correctional system, where lawyers can’t locate them. Even though the U.S. is aware of these extrajudicial… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - Democrats Might Actually Win the SenateWhen this year began, the Democrats were heavy underdogs to take back the Senate in the midterms. The task would require not only toppling Susan Collins in Maine but also winning at least five states that voted for Donald Trump in 2024, while holding on to all of the party’s existing seats. The realistic best-case scenario seemed to be a replay of the so-called blue-wave 2018 election, during Trump’s first term, in which Democrats took back the House but the Senate remained in Republican hands. To gain control of the upper chamber, Democrats would need an incredible stroke of luck. They might have gotten one.Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran, and the resulting spike in oil prices, shifted the boundaries of the politically possible. A year ago, Trump was merely unpopular: By about 11 percentage points, more people disapproved of his performance than approved of it, according to The New York Times’ polling average. He would kill for such good numbers today. Seven months into the Iran debacle, his disapproval margin has widened to 23 percentage points—worse than his numbers in the immediate aftermath of January 6.Predictably, Trump’s unpopularity is spilling out into the midterm races. Recent polls have been almost unbelievably positive for Democrats. Troy Jackson is ahead, albeit narrowly, in Maine. Abdul El-Sayed has a modest lead in Michigan, and Democrats have even bigger advantages in the swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, both of which Trump won in 2024. Most astonishing, Democratic candidates are in position to pull off upsets in Alaska, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa, which all went for Trump by more than 10 percentage points. Republican incumbents look beatable even in Kansas, where Trump won by 16, and Nebraska, where he won by 20. As a result, in prediction markets, Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate are now more than 60 percent.[Read: The supporters urging Trump to declare martial law for the midterms]If the election in November plays out as the polls are suggesting it will, Republicans will have their leader to thank—and themselves. With few exceptions, Republican candidates have created almost no distance from the president. Indeed, candidates in must-win red states, including Jon Husted of Ohio and Ken Paxton of Texas, gave speeches at the same Republican midterm convention where Trump led the audience in a pledge to the “greatest president in the history of the United States.”Democrats, by contrast,… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- Inside the Biggest Feud in Artificial IntelligenceBeing in San Francisco in the mid-2020s sometimes feels like what I imagine living in Los Alamos was like in 1943, when the Manhattan Project rolled into town. The air is heavy with excitement and dread. Engineers toil, day and night, on systems of profound consequence. Wild-eyed prophets sell visions of a transformed world, and politicians drop in to check on the progress of the project. Everyone knows that the fates of nations, and trillions of dollars of capital, rely on what happens here, yet no one can fully appreciate what it would mean if the project succeeds.One person consumed by this question is Dario Amodei, a Princeton-educated physicist who in 2016 left Google to join OpenAI, then a fledgling non-profit AI research lab. He looked the part of a mad scientist, with round glasses and short brown ringlets that he twisted in his fingers whenever he was feeling nervous or thinking hard about something. He was known among his colleagues as a brilliant, bullheaded researcher with deep convictions about AI, which he often expressed by writing long essays that he circulated inside the company.The most famous of these essays among OpenAI workers was a 26-page document titled “Big Blob of Compute.” Amodei wrote it in 2017, shortly after arriving at OpenAI, and it spelled out his grand theory of intelligence—how it emerged in nature, how it could be built into AI systems, and how it could be developed safely. Amodei’s hypothesis that machine intelligence was primarily a function of scale—that AI systems got smarter as they got bigger—steered OpenAI’s research agenda toward large language models, which Amodei saw as a promising path to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a human-level intelligence capable of doing anything the brain can.By the middle of 2020, three teams were racing toward AGI: OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain. But a fourth team was quietly assembling under Amodei, then OpenAI’s vice president of research. Amodei and his team had led the development of GPT-2, then GPT-3, and he was feeling ever more certain that he wasn’t going to stick around for GPT-4.Career-wise, things were going great for Amodei. GPT-3 was a hit among programmers, and his research on large language models was starting to bear fruit. A year earlier, two researchers on Amodei’s team, Jared Kaplan and Sam McCandlish, came up with what they called the “scaling laws”—equations that described predictable increases in LLM performance… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- Bluegrass and Billy Strings
Somewhere in my head, I carry a little list of bands that represent perfect self-contained mechanisms, regardless of category: the Modern Jazz Quartet, Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Nuevo Quintet, and the Chieftains. Now there’s another: the band led by the bluegrass singer, guitarist and songwriter Billy Strings. I’m late to Billy Strings; three Grammys late, to be exact, all for best bluegrass album of the year in 2021, 2025 and 2026. He’s been around for a while but I didn’t catch up until his new album, So Much for Goodbyes, which is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve heard this year — particularly a wonderful track called “Lucid Daydream”, which bends the bluegrass format in a very compelling way. Last year Strings was invited to support Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson on a few dates of their Outlaws tour, and cancelled his own summer dates in order to do so. I found a clip of his cover of “Tangled Up in Blue”, not from the Outlaws shows but from his own gig in Hartford, Connecticut in July of this year, and I think it’s completely brilliant — nothing radical in terms of reinterpretation, but in sheer spirit and love of the material it’s up there with the very best of Dylan covers. Like “Lucid Daydream”, it’s also a great demonstration of how good he and his band can be in what is anyway an idiom rooted in the joyous expression of instrumental virtuosity. He’s a superfine picker, kind of a turbocharged bluegrass Mark Knopfler, as the short solos on the Dylan song demonstrate, but he’s matched every step of the way by Alex Hargreaves on fiddle, Billy Falling on banjo, Jarrod Walker on mandolin, and Royal Masat on string bass. Together they show how an old-time diasporic music form can be brought right up to the present. I’m just sorry it took me a while, in this instance, to find that out. But better late than never. * The photo of Billy Strings, taken at a gig this summer by an uncredited photographer, is from his Facebook page. So Much for Goodbyes is out now on the Reprise label. [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - The Babies Left Behind in America
Photographs by Meridith KohutEstela Garcia and 2-year-old Eber repeat their routine every morning: Around 8 a.m., he rustles her awake in the bed they share. She picks him up, changes his diaper, and pulls out a fresh set of tiny clothes. While Estela dresses him, Eber coos, “Mama, mama.” She smiles and strokes his cheeks, trying to hide her sadness at his confusion. Estela is 50 and has three sons, but Eber is not one of them. She’s been caring for him because ICE deported his parents to Venezuela, despite his mother’s pleas to be reunited first.Estela and her husband, Miguel, moved to Mobile, Alabama, 20 years ago to raise their own boys in a place that felt safe and had a slower rhythm than Las Vegas, where they’d met. Miguel works as a remodeling contractor. He spent years developing their four-acre property, building a wood shop, a chicken coop, and houses for two of their children (the third lives 15 minutes down the road). They bought peacocks as pets and planted bright perennial gardens, adorning them with stone fountains. By the driveway, they fly an American flag from an antique tractor. Over the years, their home evolved into a kind of retirement sanctuary—until this past winter, when it started to look like a day care.A police officer pulled over Eber’s mother, Marlyn, last November and, without accusing her of an infraction, turned her over to ICE, despite her work permit and pending asylum application. Eber, who had just finished breastfeeding, and his 7-year-old brother, Isaac, had nowhere to go. Marlyn’s 23-year-old cousin took the boys briefly. Then two of Marlyn’s friends—both undocumented—agreed to take one child each. Eber was moved into a rusty trailer with no heat; the woman watching him put socks on his hands to keep him warm. He was sick, but she was too scared of ICE to take him to a doctor. Isaac’s caregiver worked nights. Sometimes he made it to school; sometimes he didn’t.The boys needed a better home. Frantic phone calls among Marlyn’s friends and co-workers eventually led to Estela. They had all worked together at a plant nursery, and Estela was the only American citizen they knew. She agreed to take the boys and then return them to Marlyn, not knowing that doing the right thing would go so wrong: that county officials would end up investigating her for trafficking; that her… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
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Ana paced near the arrivals terminal of the San Salvador airport, eyeing the door where deportees from the United States are released. She was there on a sweltering day in May to pick up her son, who had been detained in Texas and deported. She would drive him home, she decided, and cook him dinner. They would figure out what to do next.But when a group of men walked out wearing ICE-issued sweatsuits, their shoelaces removed from their shoes, her son wasn’t among them. She approached a police officer, who searched his name on a tablet. “He’s being taken to prison,” he told her.Ana, who spoke with me on the condition that I not use her real name or her son’s name, was confused. Her son, 25, did not face charges in either the U.S. or El Salvador. Ana got the name of the police station where her son had been taken. From there, she was told, he would be transferred to a maximum-security prison that has become infamous in El Salvador for the number of prisoners who have died in custody. She sped to the station and begged an officer to let her inside. “You can have five minutes with him,” the officer said, “but try to control yourself.”The officer returned with her son, who was wearing a white shirt and handcuffs. He looked handsome, Ana thought. He had been living in the United States for four years, having fled El Salvador after being physically attacked by both gangs and police officers, according to his asylum application. Ana started crying as she hugged him. She promised to deliver food to the prison.“This isn’t going to be forever,” he said as the officer escorted him away. She hasn’t seen or heard from him since.A year and a half ago, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 31-year-old Salvadoran man, was deported to El Salvador and detained in a maximum-security mega-prison known as CECOT. Abrego’s deportation, which was in violation of legal orders, prompted a public backlash and a federal judge’s intervention; he was ultimately returned to the United States. But as public attention has shifted elsewhere, El Salvador has continued imprisoning deportees sent from the United States, including many who have not been charged with any crime. They have disappeared into the country’s black hole of a correctional system, where lawyers can’t locate them. Even though the U.S. is aware of these extrajudicial… [TheTopNews] Read More.
2 weeks ago
When this year began, the Democrats were heavy underdogs to take back the Senate in the midterms. The task would require not only toppling Susan Collins in Maine but also winning at least five states that voted for Donald Trump in 2024, while holding on to all of the party’s existing seats. The realistic best-case scenario seemed to be a replay of the so-called blue-wave 2018 election, during Trump’s first term, in which Democrats took back the House but the Senate remained in Republican hands. To gain control of the upper chamber, Democrats would need an incredible stroke of luck. They might have gotten one.Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran, and the resulting spike in oil prices, shifted the boundaries of the politically possible. A year ago, Trump was merely unpopular: By about 11 percentage points, more people disapproved of his performance than approved of it, according to The New York Times’ polling average. He would kill for such good numbers today. Seven months into the Iran debacle, his disapproval margin has widened to 23 percentage points—worse than his numbers in the immediate aftermath of January 6.Predictably, Trump’s unpopularity is spilling out into the midterm races. Recent polls have been almost unbelievably positive for Democrats. Troy Jackson is ahead, albeit narrowly, in Maine. Abdul El-Sayed has a modest lead in Michigan, and Democrats have even bigger advantages in the swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, both of which Trump won in 2024. Most astonishing, Democratic candidates are in position to pull off upsets in Alaska, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa, which all went for Trump by more than 10 percentage points. Republican incumbents look beatable even in Kansas, where Trump won by 16, and Nebraska, where he won by 20. As a result, in prediction markets, Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate are now more than 60 percent.[Read: The supporters urging Trump to declare martial law for the midterms]If the election in November plays out as the polls are suggesting it will, Republicans will have their leader to thank—and themselves. With few exceptions, Republican candidates have created almost no distance from the president. Indeed, candidates in must-win red states, including Jon Husted of Ohio and Ken Paxton of Texas, gave speeches at the same Republican midterm convention where Trump led the audience in a pledge to the “greatest president in the history of the United States.”Democrats, by contrast,… [TheTopNews] Read More.
2 weeks ago
Being in San Francisco in the mid-2020s sometimes feels like what I imagine living in Los Alamos was like in 1943, when the Manhattan Project rolled into town. The air is heavy with excitement and dread. Engineers toil, day and night, on systems of profound consequence. Wild-eyed prophets sell visions of a transformed world, and politicians drop in to check on the progress of the project. Everyone knows that the fates of nations, and trillions of dollars of capital, rely on what happens here, yet no one can fully appreciate what it would mean if the project succeeds.One person consumed by this question is Dario Amodei, a Princeton-educated physicist who in 2016 left Google to join OpenAI, then a fledgling non-profit AI research lab. He looked the part of a mad scientist, with round glasses and short brown ringlets that he twisted in his fingers whenever he was feeling nervous or thinking hard about something. He was known among his colleagues as a brilliant, bullheaded researcher with deep convictions about AI, which he often expressed by writing long essays that he circulated inside the company.The most famous of these essays among OpenAI workers was a 26-page document titled “Big Blob of Compute.” Amodei wrote it in 2017, shortly after arriving at OpenAI, and it spelled out his grand theory of intelligence—how it emerged in nature, how it could be built into AI systems, and how it could be developed safely. Amodei’s hypothesis that machine intelligence was primarily a function of scale—that AI systems got smarter as they got bigger—steered OpenAI’s research agenda toward large language models, which Amodei saw as a promising path to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a human-level intelligence capable of doing anything the brain can.By the middle of 2020, three teams were racing toward AGI: OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain. But a fourth team was quietly assembling under Amodei, then OpenAI’s vice president of research. Amodei and his team had led the development of GPT-2, then GPT-3, and he was feeling ever more certain that he wasn’t going to stick around for GPT-4.Career-wise, things were going great for Amodei. GPT-3 was a hit among programmers, and his research on large language models was starting to bear fruit. A year earlier, two researchers on Amodei’s team, Jared Kaplan and Sam McCandlish, came up with what they called the “scaling laws”—equations that described predictable increases in LLM performance… [TheTopNews] Read More.
2 weeks ago
Somewhere in my head, I carry a little list of bands that represent perfect self-contained mechanisms, regardless of category: the Modern Jazz Quartet, Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Nuevo Quintet, and the Chieftains. Now there’s another: the band led by the bluegrass singer, guitarist and songwriter Billy Strings. I’m late to Billy Strings; three Grammys late, to be exact, all for best bluegrass album of the year in 2021, 2025 and 2026. He’s been around for a while but I didn’t catch up until his new album, So Much for Goodbyes, which is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve heard this year — particularly a wonderful track called “Lucid Daydream”, which bends the bluegrass format in a very compelling way. Last year Strings was invited to support Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson on a few dates of their Outlaws tour, and cancelled his own summer dates in order to do so. I found a clip of his cover of “Tangled Up in Blue”, not from the Outlaws shows but from his own gig in Hartford, Connecticut in July of this year, and I think it’s completely brilliant — nothing radical in terms of reinterpretation, but in sheer spirit and love of the material it’s up there with the very best of Dylan covers. Like “Lucid Daydream”, it’s also a great demonstration of how good he and his band can be in what is anyway an idiom rooted in the joyous expression of instrumental virtuosity. He’s a superfine picker, kind of a turbocharged bluegrass Mark Knopfler, as the short solos on the Dylan song demonstrate, but he’s matched every step of the way by Alex Hargreaves on fiddle, Billy Falling on banjo, Jarrod Walker on mandolin, and Royal Masat on string bass. Together they show how an old-time diasporic music form can be brought right up to the present. I’m just sorry it took me a while, in this instance, to find that out. But better late than never. * The photo of Billy Strings, taken at a gig this summer by an uncredited photographer, is from his Facebook page. So Much for Goodbyes is out now on the Reprise label. [TheTopNews] Read More.
2 weeks ago
Photographs by Meridith KohutEstela Garcia and 2-year-old Eber repeat their routine every morning: Around 8 a.m., he rustles her awake in the bed they share. She picks him up, changes his diaper, and pulls out a fresh set of tiny clothes. While Estela dresses him, Eber coos, “Mama, mama.” She smiles and strokes his cheeks, trying to hide her sadness at his confusion. Estela is 50 and has three sons, but Eber is not one of them. She’s been caring for him because ICE deported his parents to Venezuela, despite his mother’s pleas to be reunited first.Estela and her husband, Miguel, moved to Mobile, Alabama, 20 years ago to raise their own boys in a place that felt safe and had a slower rhythm than Las Vegas, where they’d met. Miguel works as a remodeling contractor. He spent years developing their four-acre property, building a wood shop, a chicken coop, and houses for two of their children (the third lives 15 minutes down the road). They bought peacocks as pets and planted bright perennial gardens, adorning them with stone fountains. By the driveway, they fly an American flag from an antique tractor. Over the years, their home evolved into a kind of retirement sanctuary—until this past winter, when it started to look like a day care.A police officer pulled over Eber’s mother, Marlyn, last November and, without accusing her of an infraction, turned her over to ICE, despite her work permit and pending asylum application. Eber, who had just finished breastfeeding, and his 7-year-old brother, Isaac, had nowhere to go. Marlyn’s 23-year-old cousin took the boys briefly. Then two of Marlyn’s friends—both undocumented—agreed to take one child each. Eber was moved into a rusty trailer with no heat; the woman watching him put socks on his hands to keep him warm. He was sick, but she was too scared of ICE to take him to a doctor. Isaac’s caregiver worked nights. Sometimes he made it to school; sometimes he didn’t.The boys needed a better home. Frantic phone calls among Marlyn’s friends and co-workers eventually led to Estela. They had all worked together at a plant nursery, and Estela was the only American citizen they knew. She agreed to take the boys and then return them to Marlyn, not knowing that doing the right thing would go so wrong: that county officials would end up investigating her for trafficking; that her… [TheTopNews] Read More.
2 weeks ago
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