Commentary

I was still at an age where a Scholastic book fair on a day when golden-brown leaves might rustle underfoot in The Bronx or when a ham and cheese Lunchable were enough of a rare treat to excite me when I learned about fake drawer fronts. I’ll explain later. My mother, aged at what I assumed to be as young as the women on Living Single but definitely not as old as the ladies on Golden Girls, lived in a high-rise building owned by the New York City Housing Authority, known to most as the projects. The projects are known for their pungent hallway smells, metal doors, and stairs which were always of good use when the elevators were frequently broken — especially on days when you and your mom might have grocery shopped for oxtails, goldfish snacks, cabbage, and other goods at C-Town, a chain of supermarkets in the northeast.

Organizations across the country are grappling with how to deal with the headline-grabbing idea-generator known as ChatGPT, launched publicly for free in November as part of a research project by San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company, OpenAI. Most groups appear to fall into one of two camps: those who would ban it to avoid cheating, as Baltimore County Public Schools has done, and those who would embrace it as a limited — if flawed — tool, like the writers of a recent op-ed published in The Sun, who recommended it as a sort of thought organizer.

So the Battle of the Balloon is over — and, not surprisingly, America won. On Saturday, one of the most advanced U.S. weapons systems — an F-22 Raptor — shot down one of China’s most primitive surveillance systems: a balloon that had been traversing the United States during the previous week. The whole incident leaves me feeling unsettled and alarmed. Oh, I’m not worried about the spy balloon. The violation of U.S. airspace was unacceptable, but it did not pose any actual threat, and it’s doubtful that it gathered any intelligence that Chinese spy satellites cannot.

The recently concluded winter 2023 meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors focused on the many challenges facing the country’s large and medium-sized cities. Many of the concerns were those directly related to the continuing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic dislocations. With city leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., the Brookings Institution organized a webinar titled “Governing the Post-Pandemic City.”  Hosted by Brookings’ interim President Amy Liu, the panel included as speakers Mayor Justin Bibb of Cleveland and Mayor Bruce Harrell of Seattle. In their discussion, I heard the recognition by these leaders that cities – and particularly their downtowns — are not going back to their pre-pandemic status as the public health threat lessens.

It’s hard to believe. A program rehabilitating 3,476 apartments, almost all in quite visible high-rise buildings, has had so little public attention. The program is RAD, an acronym for the Rental Assistance Demonstration, conceived in the Obama administration and approved by Congress in 2012. Locally, the Housing Authority of Baltimore City was quick to act — and soon led a partnership with both private and nonprofit companies — and without any public relations fanfare. Developers who have not yet participated should now be aware that there’s still opportunity to be involved in Baltimore and nationally. Just as importantly, developers should leverage RAD’s momentum here by pursuing rehabilitation and new construction projects in the 16 neighborhoods where the RAD investment — $743 million to date — has already been made.

Last summer, a piece of artwork generated with artificial intelligence took a first prize at the Colorado State Fair. To me, the image looks like a view from the back of the stage at an opera. You see the backs of three singers, then, past them, vague squiggles and forms that may or may not be an audience, and all around, dominating everything, the fantastical Lord of the Rings-style palace where they are performing. The artwork looks cool at first glance, but after a second, it feels kind of lifeless. “As I came back to the image and sat with it for a while, I found that my efforts to engage it at depth were thwarted,” L.M. Sacasas wrote in his newsletter on technology and culture. “This happened when I began to inspect the image more closely. As I did so, my experience of the image began to devolve rather than deepen.”