It’s Monday, June 8. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Caitlin Flanagan on Jill Biden’s new memoir. John McWhorter on the state of wokeness. Plus: The college romance show millennial moms can’t stop watching. And much more.

But first: Two big questions about artificial intelligence.

The debate over artificial intelligence seems to be developing as quickly as the technology itself, with programmers, lawmakers, and everyday citizens all having their say. The latest turn was kicked off by Pope Leo, with his AI encyclical last month.

In his evenhanded take on the technology, there was one detail about which the pope was firm: There is no mind in the machines. “Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean,” he wrote.

The people building the machines aren’t so sure. Last week, we learned that Anthropic, Meta, and Alphabet have hired psychologists, philosophers, and other experts to probe whether there might be a spirit in their digital creations. So is AI conscious? It’s the latest in a series of questions we find ourselves facing that feel like they should be from a science-fiction novel.

Tyler Cowen tackles it in his piece for us today. Don’t miss his take:

In our second offering today, Senator Josh Hawley, the Republican from Missouri, grapples with more practical, but no less significant, questions about AI: Will it cause mass layoffs? How dangerous are chatbots with malicious designs? How will the spread of power-hungry data centers affect energy bills? And what can we do about all this?

Hawley offers a simple and absolute answer: Let the public set the rules about AI, not its creators. “The American economy will not automatically orient itself around the interests of American families,” he writes. “We must make that moral commitment ourselves.” Don’t miss this important contribution to perhaps the most important debate out there right now.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

Caitlin Flanagan: It’s Not Jill Biden’s Fault

Caitlin Flanagan

Jill Biden’s new memoir on her time in the White House is being panned by journalists, former aides, and Democrats who spent years pretending that her husband was still fit for office. But is it really fair to blame Jill when so many were in on it? In her latest column, Caitlin Flanagan sticks up for the former First Lady. Read full story

Is America’s Racial Reckoning Over? with John McWhorter

Coleman Hughes

John McWhorter has been a voice of reason on race in America for decades. For the latest episode of his podcast, Coleman Hughes sits down with the Columbia University linguist and New York Times columnist to take stock of the moment: What actually happened to wokeness, and what replaced it? They discuss why black men voting Republican is a sign of progress, how five percent of the students at elite schools set the entire cultural temperature, and more. Listen on

The Show Millennial Moms Can’t Stop Watching

Dana Schuster

Amazon’s hit show “Off Campus” is about the romances surrounding a college hockey team. But the audience isn’t college students—it’s “moms who want to revisit their carefree college days,” writes Dana Schuster. She explains why millennial moms in their 30s and 40s can’t stop binge-watching “Off Campus” past midnight, finding that for a generation of women whose lives have become routine, a little fictional angst goes a long way. If you want to understand this rabid fanbase, read Dana’s piece. Read full story

In case you missed the news, we’re counting down Great Americans as we approach the big 250 next month.

Next up in the series: the Kennedys. Will Rahn writes about Jack and Bobby and the family that was never a dynasty. Instead, he says, they were a “flash of light”—eight years of real power followed by six decades of afterimage that America just can’t quit.