Race and ethnicity

It’s early morning in a classroom at Brown University. Six students settle into their seats and consider the cardboard box in front of them: doughnuts. Their teacher, Matthew Pratt Guterl, brings them every Tuesday and Thursday, when he leads the freshman seminar on the history of Black resistance. Today, the class is discussing the book “In My Place,” by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who was the first Black student to attend the University of Georgia in 1961. Guterl’s students analyze a photograph of Gault taken when she was about their age, a first-year student at an all-white university. Her expression is resolutely composed — a kind of armor, they decide — despite the fact that she has faced down protesters since arriving at school. At the head of the table, Guterl, 52, tall and broad, guides the conversation. “I want you to think about the way her whole book is written with that armor on,” he said. “It’s not a memoir that exposes much of Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s weaknesses.” The … [Read more...] about Reckoning with an Upbringing in a ‘Noah’s Ark’ of a Family, With ‘Two of Every Race’

The one and only Barbara Lee. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images There are still about 11 months until California’s 2024 primaries, but now we may know all the key players in the highly anticipated Democratic battle to succeed Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. Silicon Valley congressman Ro Khanna , who was seen as a possible Senate candidate, announced on Sunday that he is endorsing his Oakland colleague Barbara Lee and will co-chair her campaign. Barring the emergence of an unexpected major contender, that means three Democratic members of the U.S. House are running to succeed Feinstein: Lee, Katie Porter , and Adam Schiff . Khanna’s decision helps Lee in multiple ways. First, he may be able to bring some fundraising skills to Lee’s campaign, which in the early going is struggling to keep up with Porter’s and Schiff’s fundraising operations. In a state with as many expensive media markets as California’s, underfunded statewide candidates lose — … [Read more...] about 3 House Democrats Will Face Off in California’s Senate Race

Is the latest generation of the Chevrolet Corvette a supercar? Many have described the mid-engine C8 as having supercar levels of power, but not being exclusive enough, expensive enough or luxurious enough to achieve that label. Even the high-performance Z06 , which gets into six-figure territory, isn’t a supercar to all. So what about the new 2024 Corvette E-Ray , which is expensive and the first hybrid Vette and the first all-wheel-drive model? To test the supercar prowess of the Corvette E-Ray, the folks at Hagerty got their hands on one and decided to pit it against two undeniable supercars: a 2021 Ferrari F8 Spider and a 2020 Lamborghini Huracán Evo RWD Spyder. Part of Jason Cammisa’s drag racing video series, this particular installment wanted to answer the question: can the E-Ray live up to the hype? Before we answer that, it should be noted that Cammisa and team did not get the Ferrari and Lamborghini models from those Italian automakers themselves. As he … [Read more...] about Can the Hybrid Corvette Beat Ferrari and Lamborghini in a Drag Race?

The comedian and host of “Real Time with Bill Maher” accused Democrats on Friday of placing diversity above meritocracy, warning it could hurt ultimately the party. Maher began his monologue by tearing into nepotism. “Show business is full of nepotism babies, politics is full of nepo babies, even modeling … has fallen to nepotism. But in sports, there are no nepo babies,” he said. “There are the sons and daughters of former players, but it’s not why they play. Laila Ali didn’t knock out 21 opponents by smacking them with a birth certificate.” “So enjoy the good life, nepos. Just don’t say you didn’t have a big advantage, or it didn’t matter that much who your parents were, or ‘It just got my foot in the door.’ This is fucking show business, getting your foot in the door is 80% of it.” “Sports is the last place where it doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from, just what you do,” Maher said, adding he trusts that “the 450 players in the NBA” are the best players in the … [Read more...] about ‘Merit Itself Is Now Under Attack’: Maher Warns Democrats To Stop Choosing Race Over Merit

Hong Kong (CNN) Alibaba says it will launch its own ChatGPT-style tool, becoming the latest tech giant to jump on the chatbot bandwagon. The Chinese behemoth said it was testing an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot internally. It did not share details of when it would launch or what the application would be called. "Frontier innovations such as large language models and generative AI have been our [focus] areas since the formation of DAMO in 2017," an Alibaba ( BABA ) spokesperson told CNN in a Thursday statement, referring to an acronym for the company's research arm that focuses on machine intelligence, data computing and robotics. "As a technology leader, we will continue to invest in turning cutting-edge innovations into value-added applications for our customers as well as their end-users." Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares ticked up 1.4% on Thursday morning. Read More Google's AI chatbot Bard had … [Read more...] about Alibaba is launching a ChatGPT rival too

(CNN) Google's much-hyped new AI chatbot tool Bard , which has yet to be released to the public, is already being called out for an inaccurate response it produced in a demo this week. In the demo, which was posted by Google on Twitter , a user asks Bard: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?" Bard responds with a series of bullet points, including one that reads: "JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system." The way we search for information online is about to change According to NASA , however, the first image showing an exoplanet — or any planet beyond our solar system — was actually taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope nearly two decades ago, in 2004. Shares in Google's parent company Alphabet fell 7.7% Wednesday, wiping $100 billion off its market value, after the inaccurate response from Bard was first reported … [Read more...] about Google shares lose $100 billion after company’s AI chatbot makes an error during demo