Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2017

Last month, a rebellion inside Russia left lingering questions about what really happened and about what the ramifications would be for President Vladimir V. Putin.Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The Times, discusses what Mr. Putin has done since the mutiny and looks at how those actions might reveal how vulnerable the president is.Guest: Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Mr. Putin is rewarding loyalty among the ruling elite and showering his most important constituency — the men with guns — with cash.The mutiny gave a glimpse of a post-Putin Russia. Is the window still open?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

6 Jul 202330min

Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has become a sensation on YouTube for ostentatious and sometimes absurd acts of altruism.Today, Max Read, a journalist and contributor to The Times, discusses what the rise of one of YouTube’s most popular star tells us about the platform and its users.Max Read is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and writes about technology and internet culture in his newsletter “Read Max.”Background reading: Why do so many people think Mr. Donaldson is evil?MrBeast is out to become the Elon Musk of online creators.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

5 Jul 202329min

The patients in this story came to the Yale Fertility Center to pursue pregnancy. They began their I.V.F. cycles full of expectation and hope. Then a surgical procedure called egg retrieval caused them excruciating pain.Some of the patients screamed out in the procedure room. Others called the clinic from home to report pain in the hours that followed. But most of the staff members who fielded the patients’ reports did not know the real reason for the pain — a nurse at the clinic was stealing fentanyl and replacing it with saline.Today, we’re sharing the first episode of “The Retrievals,” a five-part narrative series from Serial Productions and The New York Times, reported by Susan Burton, a veteran staff member at “This American Life” and author of the memoir “Empty.” Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

4 Jul 202358min

The Supreme Court delivered another major decision this past week, ruling in favor of a web designer who said she had a First Amendment right to refuse to create wedding websites for same-sex couples.Adam Liptak, a Times correspondent who covers the court, explains what the ruling might mean for all kinds of different groups of Americans.Guest: Adam Liptak, who covers the United States Supreme Court for The New York Times.Background reading: The justices settled a question left open in 2018: whether businesses open to the public and engaged in expression may refuse to serve customers based on religious convictions.Here’s what to know about the free speech decision.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

3 Jul 202328min

HF0, or Hacker Fellowship Zero, is a start-up accelerator that provides 12-week residencies for batches of fellows from 10 different start-ups. Their experience, which culminates in a demonstration day, is supposed to be the most productive three months of the fellows’ lives. Dave Fontenot, one of HF0’s founders, was inspired by the two years he spent living in monasteries in his 20s: While monastery life was materially ascetic, he found that it was luxurious in the freedom it gave residents to focus on the things that really mattered. And this year at the Archbishop’s Mansion in San Francisco, the home of the fellows, almost everyone has been monastically focused on what has become the city’s newest religion: artificial intelligence.The A.I. gospel had not yet spread in 2021, when Fontenot and his two co-founders, Emily Liu and Evan Stites-Clayton, started the accelerator. Even a year ago, when HF0 hosted a batch of fellows at a hotel in Miami, six out of the eight companies represented were cryptocurrency start-ups. But at the mansion in San Francisco, eight of the 10 companies in HF0’s first batch this year were working on A.I.-based apps.That generative A.I. has largely supplanted crypto in the eyes of founders and venture capitalists alike is not exactly surprising. When OpenAI released ChatGPT late last year, it set off a new craze at a time when the collapsing crypto and tech markets had left many investors and would-be entrepreneurs adrift, unsure of where to put their capital and time. Suddenly users everywhere were realizing that A.I. could now respond to verbal queries with a startling degree of humanlike fluency. “Large language models have been around for a long time, but their uses were limited,” said Robert Nishihara, a co-founder of Anyscale, a start-up for machine-learning infrastructure. “But there’s a threshold where they become dramatically more useful, and I think now it’s crossed that.”This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

2 Jul 202332min

On Thursday, the Supreme Court overturned decades of precedent by striking down affirmative action and declaring that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful.Adam Liptak, who covers the United States Supreme Court for The New York Times, explains the ruling, and what it means for American society.Guest: Adam Liptak, who covers the court for The New York Times.Background reading: The Supreme Court’s vote to reject affirmative action programs was 6 to 3, with the liberal justices in dissent.In 2016, in its last major case on affirmative action in higher education, the Supreme Court upheld an aspect of an idiosyncratic admissions program at the University of Texas at Austin.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

30 Jun 202327min

In a San Francisco courtroom, federal regulators are fighting to block one of the biggest deals in the history of Silicon Valley. David McCabe, who covers technology policy for The New York Times, talks about Lina Khan, the F.T.C. chair who is the architect of the lawsuit, and the growing campaign to finally rein in big tech.Guest: David McCabe, a New York Times correspondent covering technology policy.Background reading: The Federal Trade Commission sued Microsoft to stop the company from closing its purchase of the video game powerhouse Activision Blizzard, escalating government efforts to stymie the largest consumer technology deal in decades.Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, appeared in federal court on Wednesday to defend the deal by pledging support for open platforms and consumer choice.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

29 Jun 202327min

Since its introduction less than a year ago, ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence platform that can write essays, solve math problems and write computer code, has sparked an anguished debate in the world of education. Is it a useful research tool or an irresistible license to cheat?Stella Tan, a producer on The Daily, speaks to teachers and students as they finish their first semester with ChatGPT about how it is changing the classroom.Guest: Stella Tan, an audio producer for The New York Times.Background reading: ChatGPT’s potential as an educational tool outweighs its risks, a Times technology columnist argues.While schools debate what to teach students about powerful new A.I. tools, tech giants, universities and nonprofits are intervening with free lessons.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

28 Jun 202329min