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Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
OpenAI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Credit - Florian Generotzky—laif/Redux A year is a long time in the AI industry. In the last 12 months, OpenAI released not one but three generations of 'reasoning' models (which take time to analyze problems rather than giving an immediate answer) kicking off a new paradigm in AI research that many competitors raced to follow. The company—now one of the most valuable private companies in the world, with a $300 billion valuation—also launched its video-generation model, Sora, and integrated image generation into ChatGPT, sparking a viral social media trend. CEO Sam Altman, meanwhile, appeared at the White House in January as President Trump announced a $500 billion program to build the datacenters where OpenAI believes it will train 'superintelligence.' Perhaps sensing where the political winds were blowing, OpenAI relaxed restrictions on ChatGPT-generated images and responses, announcing it would allow more outputs that might be considered offensive. Altman has spent much of the year engaged in a controversial battle to restructure OpenAI as a for-profit company, and seeking to reduce its reliance on Microsoft, its main cloud computing provider. Amidst rapid technical change and the shifting tectonics of politics, Altman never dropped his relentlessly optimistic message. 'The fact that we're offering, great, aligned, safe, free, powerful AI to hundreds of millions of people every day, I think that's pretty cool,' he recently told TIME. Write to Billy Perrigo at
Economist
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Economist
William F. Buckley, the man who put the charm into conservatism
Culture | Standing athwart history, yelling stop Photograph: Eyevine/New York Times/Redux/Sam Falk R EADY to feel lazy and unaccomplished? William F. Buckley wrote his first bestseller when he was 25. Over the next 57 years, he would write more than 50 books, including 20 novels. When he was 29, he founded the National Review, a magazine. When he was 40, he created 'Firing Line', a public-affairs tv show; he would go on to host 1,505 episodes. Buckley wrote and edited thousands of articles, made thousands of public speeches, and once, quixotically, ran for mayor of New York. (He won 13% of the vote.) This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline 'Right on' Will it rev up new fans for the motorsport? Fenix, in Rotterdam, lets visitors make up their own minds American and Irish writers dominate the list Rachel Zegler's streetside 'Evita' reveals a lot about fame and London In this week's list, the water is not so fine In a post-apocalyptic horror sequel, monsters and mockery co-exist
National Geographic
3 days ago
- Science
- National Geographic
A roadrunner in your neighborhood? It's a growing possibility.
The greater roadrunner is native to the American Southwest and parts of northern Mexico. But now it's turning up more frequently in new areas. Photograph By Konrad Wothe/Picture Press/Redux About a decade ago, Mary Taylor Young and her husband were pulling into the driveway of their cabin, a property nestled at 6,700 feet, in southern Colorado. Suddenly, they saw a face that they weren't expecting: a roadrunner, with its signature spiky head crest and baby blue coloring around the eyes. 'My husband and I were both like, 'Oh, my God, what is a roadrunner doing here?'' Young, a biologist and nature writer, says. ''Dude, you belong in the desert. What are you doing?'' Young says its wasn't unheard of to see roadrunners in and around the nearby town of Trinidad, Colorado, which sits at about 6,000 feet in the northernmost part of the roadrunner's range in the state. However, she was surprised by this higher altitude sighting, something that's becoming more common. The greater roadrunner is native to the American Southwest and parts of northern Mexico. This bipedal bird can often be seen running through cities like Albuquerque, Phoenix, and El Paso, searching for small lizards, mice, insects, and other food sources. But now it's turning up more frequently in new areas as it expands its range due to climate change. A greater roadrunner hunts a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake in Arizona (left), and munches on a worm (right). Photograph By Alan Murphy/ BIA/ Minden Pictures (Top) (Left) and Photograph By Hal Beral/VWPics/Redux (Bottom) (Right) Young has documented the species that visit her property over the last three decades, chronicling them in her book, Bluebird Seasons: Witnessing Climate Change in My Piece of the Wild. She says roadrunner sightings are steadily increasing on her property and in and around Trinidad. Mike Rader, wildlife education supervisor with the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, is seeing similar changes in his state. 'There have been increased sightings of greater roadrunners in Kansas, especially in the last couple of decades,' he says. 'While I don't know if it is a true range expansion, they have been reported further north in the state, even into central Kansas.' According to maps provided by Chuck Otte, a Kansas bird record keeper, there had been credible historical sightings reported for the bird in 26 Kansas counties by 1989. By 2025, that number had grown to over 50 counties. Rader says the swell in reporting could be in part due to more widespread internet and greater cell phone and camera access in recent decades. Still, 'in my gut, I do feel that there are more here now than when I started birding over 40 years ago,' he says. Nate Swick, an ornithologist and digital communications manager for the American Birding Association, says it's happening in Missouri too. 'Back when I was growing up in southwest Missouri in the '90s, roadrunners were really scarce,' he says. 'Sometimes people would see them down around Branson, but they were few and far between. Now 30 years later, they're fairly regular nesting birds in that part of the state, though still infrequently seen.' He adds that the birds are turning up further north and east in recent years. Swick recalls one particular experience seeing a pair in a neighborhood in Springfield, a town in the Ozark Mountains, during a trip home in 2014. 'It's a bird you usually associate with desert landscapes, so it was wild to see them walking around on green lawns,' he says. According to ABC Birds, the greater roadrunner has already extended its range eastward as far as Arkansas and Louisiana over the last century. The National Audubon Society predicts that the species will further expand its northern range by 27 percent with 3 degrees of warming, a threshold that some scientists expect us to cross as early as 2070. This would mean more roadrunner sightings in places like Houston, northern Nevada, and up Colorado's front range nearly as far north as Denver. Meanwhile, in places like New Mexico, where the roadrunner reigns as the state bird, it seems to be benefitting from even drier conditions, which are expected to increase with climate change. According to Jon Hayes, director of Audubon Southwest, roadrunner populations spiked in the state in the 2010s, which he says is likely correlated to drought conditions experienced across much of the Southwest in that timeframe. 'And that's the big story here with the roadrunner is that as a changing climate pushes more hot and dry conditions, those critters that are adapted to hot and dry conditions are going to probably do pretty good in the short term there,' he says. While most famous for its fast feet, the roadrunner can also fly. Photograph By Alan Murphy/ BIA/ Minden Pictures Seeing new roadrunner neighbors moving into communities might appeal to many people. Rader says most Kansans who come across these quirky birds are 'truly excited' to encounter them. 'Personally, I always enjoy seeing them,' he says. 'They are still considered a novelty here in Kansas.' While a drier and hotter landscape puts many wildlife at risk, roadrunners can take advantage of a warming world thanks to number of adaptive traits. For one, they're able to obtain water from their food sources instead of drinking and can secrete a concentrated salt solution through a gland near their eyes, helping them to conserve water. Plus, roadrunner's have one more advantage when it comes to taking on environmental challenges that might stymy other species—their bird brains. 'They're smart and adaptable,' Swift concludes. However, Hayes warns that the conditions that are helping roadrunners expand their range aren't worth celebrating. 'We don't necessarily want to see those arid conditions extended to too many of those areas, because the species that are in those areas are going to lose out,' Hayes says. In fact, the National Audubon Society's 2019 Survival by Degrees report found that two-thirds of North American birds are at risk of extinction from global temperature rise. 'Whenever we're thinking about the change in climate, we do have to recognize that there are going to be winners and losers from this,' Hayes says. 'Roadrunners are one that likely benefit from more of the country looking like the arid Southwest.' Climate change is expanding the road runner's range. Photograph By Alan Murphy/ BIA/ Minden Pictures Young believes one of these 'losers' in her area is the broad-tailed hummingbird, a species she is seeing less frequently at her cabin's feeders. Meanwhile, another hummingbird species—the black-chinned—seems to be becoming more dominant there. The broad-tailed hummingbird, whose fragmented range is limited mostly to mountains in the West and parts of Mexico, is highly vulnerable to climate change, according to Audubon. And as savvy as they are, even roadrunners will eventually top out when it comes to spreading to new habitats, Hayes predicts. 'Sure, they'll expand north, but they're not going to go up into the Rocky Mountains,' he notes. 'I mean, they're not going to go up into the pine forest. They'll hit their limits as well.'
New Statesman
3 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
Ro Khanna: American optimist
Photo by Stephen Voss / Redux / eyevine The Phillies baseball team was one run up in the sixth inning when the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna gazed at the crowd, turned to me and said: 'I'm American. Americans are optimistic.' Nihilism, cynicism and fascism are buzzwords in America today. Optimism, less so. But people did look happy. Families knocked their heads together for selfies, squinting through the sunlight at their phones. Young bros munched hotdogs with one hand and slurped Miller Lites with the other. Predictions of the death of the republic felt far away. For a moment, Saul Bellow seemed to have got it wrong when he wrote, 'The human species as a whole has gone into politics.' The Phillie Phanatic, the team's green, fluffy mascot, the most eminent in America, got off his quad bike, climbed a wall ten feet in front of us and began vigorously humping the air. I suggested the country might be a bit stuck, spiritually. 'I have perfect confidence in the American spiritual purpose,' the representative for Silicon Valley dutifully replied. 'It's the political class that hasn't been worthy of the American people.' He looked around the stadium again. 'Do people seem like they're in a dark place? They seem like they're in a good place here.' Khanna's optimism runs deeper than baseball crowds. Where other Democrats think we live in an irredeemably populist age and dismiss voters as indulging demagoguery, he sees an enduring belief in democracy. 'People underestimate the spirit, the democratic spirit, and the resilience of our people,' he continued. 'Martin Luther King did not decry the spirituality of the American people. He summoned it. Obama didn't decry it. Kennedy didn't decry it. Leadership is about finding the register to tap in to it.' Khanna, 48, has been in Congress since 2016 and co-chaired Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign. He has become the leading Democrat opposed to Trump's campaign in Iran and has co-led a War Powers Resolution, which instructs the president to withdraw unauthorised forces acting against Iran. Like the Maga isolationists, he wants to avoid another Iraq. In 2004, aged 27, he ran against a Democratic congressman who supported Bush's war. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'I'm not a pacifist,' Khanna told me on the phone last week. 'I don't believe in foreign interventions that are going to make matters worse.' He wants the Democrats to be the party that 'stands for peace abroad and good jobs at home – we need to retake the mantle of being the anti-war party that Donald Trump took from us. We need to stand united again.' Khanna perches on the party's progressive wing, but skirts around its trademark social justice rhetoric. He avoids questions about whether he'll run for the 2028 presidency. But ignore that: the signs suggest he will. He's a constant presence on television and takes pride in often appearing on Fox. As early as March 2022, Sanders' top aides were telling Khanna to run in 2024 if Joe Biden stood down. A year later, the New York Times reported that he was already being talked about as a candidate for 2028. Last year, the Atlantic said that Khanna refused to rule out a run. 'The old guard needs to go' he told me, in his professional, studious manner. The implication was obvious: it's time for his generation to lead. A few weeks earlier in north DC, Khanna strolled into a coffee shop with a chai tea. He was wearing a blue tie with a fat Trumpian knot, a congressional pin, and shiny hair gel. He had an impassive air, a rarity in agitated Washington. He thought his party was 'very self-flagellating and introspective for two months' after the election. But now the listing economy meant the president had 'committed the cardinal sin in American politics: you can't destroy wealth. You can't go after people's money.' He's 'optimistic' the Democrats will win come 2028. Khanna thinks the party hasn't had a truly open primary since Barack Obama ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008. Who are his would-be competitors for the Democratic nomination this cycle? Apart from Kamala Harris, who is slowly rising from her political grave to attend fundraisers, and Chris Murphy, Trump's bête noire in the Senate, the field is packed with governors. There's California's Gavin Newsom, who has launched a podcast in which he banters with leading Maga figures. The Illinois billionaire and long-time Democrat donor JB Pritzker is being touted by old party hands in Washington. Harris's 2024 running mate, Tim Walz, is keeping up his public appearances. Bringing up the rear is Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro. But the only energy in the party since the election has been on Bernie Sanders' anti-oligarchy tour, featuring his support act, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another frontrunner. At a stop in Pennsylvania in May, a union leader introduced Sanders with the line: 'No other politician is able to do it like him.' Which, given that he is 83, is part of the problem. 'The two most consequential Democrats in the modern era [are] Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders,' Khanna said. Khanna's politics are a mix of Sanders and Obama. His Obama-esque brand of optimism makes Sanders' progressive policies sound less radical to the establishment. Is he Bernie's heir? 'No, that would be highly presumptuous. Bernie Sanders is not cloneable. Great leaders like Bernie or Obama have no heirs. Who's Winston Churchill's heir? Who's Gandhi's heir?' At the game, we were sitting four rows behind first base. Khanna and his younger brother, an urbane federal attorney, were to my left, with their parents to my right. The brothers were trading notes on whether the pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates was the best in the league. Their mother leaned over and mischievously said baseball had got better once the rules were changed to shorten the time between pitches. She and their father – an aloof, dignified man who prefers cricket – raised the boys in nearby Bucks County, and would bring them to a game once a year. 'They'd get all the food!' she reminisced. Nowadays, the family obliges when Khanna shepherds them pitch-side in freshly bought Phillies hats to take a photo for social media. [See also: Oliver Eagleton: Imperial calculations] Khanna's parents came over from the Punjab in 1968. His maternal grandfather, Amarnath Vidyalankar, spent time in prison for supporting civil disobedience during Ghandi's campaign for India's independence from British rule. He went on to become an MP and lead the Punjabi branch of the Indian National Trade Union Congress. 'He was my inspiration,' Khanna said. 'He really stood for the ideals of non-violence, pluralism, self-determination.' What does he take from his grandfather's story? 'The importance of courage in politics, the importance of a willingness to stand up for what you believe.' That Martin Luther King drew deeply from Gandhi's satyagraha philosophy means the American civil rights leader looms large in Khanna's politics. 'In his book on non-violence King said that we must be angry and reform a system – not obsess over the players in the system.' For Khanna, King is the bridge between the seemingly disparate worlds of the Punjab and the United States, between the activism his grandfather championed and the country Khanna now wants to lead. The morning of the baseball game, Khanna was on ABC News telling his fellow Democrats to admit they were wrong to let a senile 81-year-old run for president. In our seats, he flicked through emails on his phone, triaging the fall-out. The party is still writhing over its part in Trump's comeback. Khanna thinks voters can only trust the Democrats again once they own up to that mistake. His politics, too, cuts against the party's progressive grain. He pushes what he's light-heartedly called 'Blue Maga', a coinage ill-suited for a Democrat popularity contest. Ditto the fact that the Maga guru Steve Bannon told me Khanna is one of his favourite Democrats. Whatever the optics, Khanna wants to beat Trump by spreading the bounty of economic growth. His main idea – what he calls economic patriotism – is to reindustrialise the US with a Marshall Plan for America. He wants Medicare for all. He fights for more taxes on the wealthy, getting big money out of politics and a higher minimum wage. But he is no Luddite: he sees technology as America's saviour. At Yale Law School in the late 1990s Professor Lawrence Lessig told him all the interesting law would be in Silicon Valley. He heeded the advice, joined a firm and represented 'tech start-ups, tech companies, venture capital'. He got the call from the Obama administration in 2009 to become a deputy assistant secretary in the Commerce Department. Elon Musk called him a 'leading thinker' for a blurb quote for his 2012 book Entrepreneurial Nation. And then, after a few false starts, he was elected to the House of Representatives for California's 17th Congressional District, located in Silicon Valley, in 2016. Venture capitalists backed Khanna's run, and so his call for wealth taxes presents a puzzle: why did capital's traffic wardens support this union-backing progressive? 'They still support me,' he said, 'because I'm pro-innovation.' 'They believe I'm a technology optimist, and I believe that technology has to be part of the solution of the American renewal.' Technology itself, in Khanna's world, sits on a different moral plane to those technologists who use 'their wealth to distort politics'. 'I'm very opposed to this vision that innovation is incompatible with democracy.' Khanna is intensely relaxed about artificial intelligence. He thinks robots will replace workers at a slower rate than the doomsters suggest. 'We need to have strong labour protection, so there's collective bargaining, so workers get to decide and control machines, not be displaced by machines.' Again, something for both the technologists and the progressives. Compare that language to a recent tweet from Sanders: 'AI is coming for YOUR job.' Khanna's ecumenical approach to politics means he shuns this populist division of us and them – and yet retains the policy. Labour protections are fine. But what if workers aren't around to feel the benefits of a trade union? Might AI be a meteor that wipes us out? 'No, no, it's like any technology: we need to have a humanistic frame for it.' There's a proprietary pride in the way Khanna touts the supremacy of Silicon Valley. It's an area in which his 'progressive capitalism' fuses with his conviction that America is exceptional and unique. His usually decorous tone takes on a nationalistic pitch. 'The EU has no credibility [on tech],' he said. 'They haven't produced a single consequential tech company other than [the Dutch supplier for semiconductors] ASML,' he said. 'America will lead. America will make a decision. We have failed in having the proper sense of regulation. But people laugh at the EU's regulations because it'd be like if I tried to regulate [American] football, never having played football.' And what of that famed 'special relationship' with the UK? Does the UK have any standing on technology? 'It's a yawn. I care more about what some random congressperson thought about AI than when Rishi Sunak said he was going to do an AI summit. I kind of laughed.' And why is that? 'Because it'd be like if I said I wanted to do a summit of what it's like to live in the developing world. It's like, what the hell do you know about what's going on about innovation and technology?' The UK does have a trillion-dollar tech industry, I pointed out. 'I have a $14trn tech district,' Khanna replied. His thoughts on Sunak were delivered with brevity: 'Fine. Technocrat. Proud of his story.' Khanna sees little resemblance between himself and Sunak because his newly minted Silicon Valley neighbour (Sunak's now a fellow at Stanford) lacks a 'humanistic side'. 'I mean, I'm proud of him as someone who overcame being Indian and Hindu and was proud of his whole heritage, but I think it was not transformational an ideology. I respect him on a personal basis.' Forget Sunak. There's another young politician in Washington who courts Big Tech and preaches reindustrialisation, who can thrive in the Valley and the Rust Belt – and who hopes one day to lead their party. Khanna at a Bernie Sanders rally in San Francisco, March 2024. Photo by Nick Otto for the Washington Post In February, JD Vance defended an employee on Musk's cost-cutting team who had once tweeted, 'You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,' and, 'Normalise Indian hate.' Khanna took issue with that, and tweeted at Vance: 'Are you going to tell him to apologise for saying 'Normalise Indian hate' before this rehire? Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.' Vance, whose wife's parents are also Indian immigrants, replied: 'For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up… You know what I do worry about, Ro? That they'll grow up to be a US Congressmen [sic] who engages in emotional blackmail over a kid's social media posts. You disgust me.' Internet spats are one way in which Khanna has made himself the Democrats' loudest critic of the vice-president. On 5 May, Khanna gave a speech, pointedly at their shared alma mater Yale Law School, in which he criticised Vance for the administration's attacks on free speech and universities, calling the vice-president's time at Yale a 'stain on the degree of every Yale graduate'. Though Khanna comes from an immigrant family, and Vance from a broken one, they have similar careers. 'But very different values,' Khanna said. 'I'm not for getting rid of due process. I believe that our multi-racial democracy is a strength, not a weakness.' In his convention speech last year, Vance argued that America is not an idea, but a nation state, a group of people living between two oceans, whose interests come above those ideals debated in Independence Hall – where both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were signed – three miles from the stadium. 'It is a nation state,' Khanna said, but 'we also have the dedication to the idea, where we're conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition of equality.' Vance is 'making us less exceptional' he added. 'He's making us another ordinary nation.' He worries America might become a place where humans are ordinary, not one where their brutishness is alloyed with a higher purpose. '[Trump and Vance] made America so much about transaction and survival of the jungle and doing what's in your self-interest, or you're a sucker and you're weak. And that's a very impoverished vision of America. That's every other nation. 'What makes America the spark of vitality, of inspiration is that we seek to ennoble that. We seek to inspire beyond that. That's our exceptional nature.' American exceptionalism is not in vogue much nowadays. Large factions of the left and right see American imperialism as a sinful enterprise. In many ways, they think it's time the US became more like every other nation. Might Trump be the archetypal American leader, the apogee of… 'the American id,' Khanna jumped in. 'Kennedy or Obama is the embodiment of the American ideal.' We walked up the stadium steps after the game and Khanna asked me to sum up his perspective in two sentences. 'Progressivism mixed with American exceptionalism,' I offered. 'American progressivism,' he said, smiling, 'I'd never thought about it like that before.' We drove 40 minutes north to a village hall in Bucks County, the part of Pennsylvania where Khanna grew up. The changeable sign on the lawn outside read: 'MEI CATERING BUCKS BEST WEDDING – 215 364 2130'. Inside, around 100 people sat beneath leftover wedding decorations. One organiser told me the local Republican representative, Brian Fitzpatrick, has not held in-person town halls for the district in years. On the stage, Khanna promised to stay until all their questions were answered. (When I left, he was fielding questions by the stage.) The first questioner told Khanna he should call Trump voters 'white supremacists'. Khanna demurred. He would never label half the country like that. These are fellow Americans, endowed with exceptionalism. He doesn't believe it, anyway. Three other questioners (at least one a self-identifying millennial) were worried about the party's language and messaging: 'We need to stop using this weak language – this is Nazi crap. This is eugenics.' I spied two surgical masks in the room. Khanna said Trump voters do not like what the president is doing and can be won over. 'That's because they're stupid,' one woman muttered behind me. Noticeably, he did not mention trans people in one of his answers: 'gay, lesbian…' he paused, listing those under threat from the administration. 'Trans!' an audience member shouted out. '… or whatever your sexuality,' Khanna continued. He strangely still thinks 'woke' only means respecting minorities' history but his condemnation of cancel culture to me (he called himself a 'free-speech absolutist') suggests he knows the political toll wokeness has taken on the Democratic Party. The night before, Khanna got talking to Trump voters who were protesting outside his town hall in Allentown. They had recognised him from his appearances on Fox News. Khanna invited them in to listen to his speech. When he said he was trying to pass a bill supporting Trump's plan to lower prescription drugs, 'they clapped. I talked about not cutting Medicaid. They clapped. They love the economic patriotism of building new industry and how we're going to build manufacturing. And this is what we need to do: engage these Trump supporters.' Ro Khanna is an American optimist. In one sense, he pans Trumpland sewage for nuggets of hope. In another, he sees through crises to an irrepressible American spirit. Trump's marauding power cannot crush his conviction that democracy will endure. He has no time for the idea that politicians have become sad stars in a reality television show. He once said Trump will be a footnote in American history. That seems complacent, even innocent. But Khanna's Sanders-esque policies lend his politics of optimism an edge of reality, a confidence to turn and face the reasons we live in a Trumpian age. [See also: Labour is losing its mind] Related
New Statesman
3 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
Giorgia Meloni's selective memory
Photo by Gianni Cipriano/The New York Times / Redux / eyevine Twice, in Donald Trump Jr's foreword to the new English translation of Giorgia Meloni's memoir, the businessman and Apprentice judge dwells on her 'working-class' background. Long before Meloni became the Italian prime minister, he tells us, she was a 'young working-class woman with a deep love and vision for her nation'; this autobiography tells of her rise from a 'working-class Roman neighbourhood' to government. Trump Jr – son of a billionaire US president – clearly feels well placed to credit Meloni's closeness to the underdog, squeezing two mentions of her working-class credentials into his slender 268-word preface. I Am Giorgia asserts Meloni's ordinariness as a Christian, a mother, and an Italian. It is not rare for politicians to boast about the challenges they have overcome and even their parents' blue-collar jobs. But what makes Meloni working class? She tells of how she began life in Rome's 'well-heeled' Camilluccia district, albeit in a family immediately ripped apart by the exit of her father who ran away to the Canary Islands. Further disaster hit, Meloni reports, when she and her sister accidentally destroyed the family home in a fire, forcing them 'out on the street' – or at least, prompting her mother to buy a different apartment, in the capital's Garbatella district. Conceived in the 1920s as a 'garden city' for Rome's working-class population, during Meloni's childhood much of Garbatella's social housing stock was being sold off to new owner-occupiers. Her father's absence left its mark on the young Meloni; she also tells of being bullied as a child. The mix of abandonment and victimisation sets up a story of perseverance against the odds, also dramatising her defiance against schoolteachers who scolded her early right-wing views. The fact that Meloni never went to university (she attended a hospitality training college) also surely sets her apart from many politicians. Yet clichés about growing up in 'gritty' streets are misplaced. Several Italian responses to this book highlighted that Meloni's parents owned stakes in multiple businesses, while an investigation by the Domani newspaper alleged that her claims about the scale of the housefire were strongly exaggerated. What of Trump Jr's claim that she has become 'one of the most significant political figures in the world', heralding a 'worldwide conservative revolution' against 'globalist elites'? I Am Giorgia appeared in Italian in May 2021, and soon became a top-selling pamphlet for the politician who led the opposition to Mario Draghi's cross-party government. Since then, she has continued to rise, both mobilising protest votes in the 2022 Italian election and maintaining right-wing dominance ever since. Her success in uniting traditional conservatives and her own more radical political tradition has become something of a model internationally. This English translation, issued by Skyhorse – a US publisher whose website landing page is dominated by the face of Robert F Kennedy – adds no new material on her time in office. The editors of I Am Giorgia have made few obvious interventions, and allusions to her party's neofascist heritage – notably her repeated praise for Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) co-founder Giorgio Almirante – appear without further clarification. It would have been easy enough to muster a footnote to detail the nature of the MSI: though given that Almirante called his party the home of 'fascists in a democracy' up until his death in 1988, perhaps this would not have cast his political heir Meloni in a positive light. In I Am Giorgia, Meloni adopts the tone of an outsider, painting conservative values as the victim of an all-consuming elite disdain. Even Silvio Berlusconi's political dominance in the 1990s and 2000s – during which she herself became a minister aged just 31 – does not trouble this account. Instead, we get stories of MSI members who were killed in the political violence of the 1970s and early 1980s, when, according to Meloni, right-wingers were 'criminalised'. Liberal hegemony is painted as an 'intangible dictatorship' working to destroy national culture: 'the mass deportations of the Soviet era have been replaced by policies supporting immigration'. Conservatives are underdogs because they are resisting a ubiquitous progressive orthodoxy. Indeed, to define oneself as right-wing means exclusion 'from the circles of the elites, from the radical-chic salons that Italy is filled with'. When the Italian edition of the book was published, Meloni's party was in opposition; today, if she is fighting 'elites' at all, she is doing so at G7 summits and Nato meet-ups. Those she calls 'elites' are defined less by wealth or political authority than by their attitudes, especially on immigration, national identity, and the nuclear family. Tellingly, this book is also endorsed not just by the US president's son but also by the world's richest man. Elon Musk has been a great admirer of Meloni's focus on falling birthrates in Western countries, and this book leans heavily into this theme. She likewise casts her stance against 'unregulated' immigration as a defence of the weakest in society, from immigrants encouraged to risk their lives at sea, to the working-class Italians she deems 'most vulnerable' to competition for jobs and public services. Globalists use immigration as a 'tool to erode national identity' but the state can accept 'compatible immigration', especially by Christians or those with even distant Italian heritage. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Some of Meloni's admirers in the press tell a reassuring story about how a once-populist politician has been tempered by the demands of office. Yet this book, originally published 16 months before her election win, complicates such a narrative. Well before she became premier, Meloni's party had combined heated rhetoric about identity with pro-business economics and a commitment to the major Western institutions. Accounts of Meloni's pragmatic moderation since 2022 routinely cite her support for Ukraine, or her abjuring of any Ital-exit from the EU. Yet these positions were baked in years before she took office, and the harsher rhetoric about the EU in this book is time and again tempered by an insistence on the need for a united Europe, 'rooted in civilisation and identity'. If Meloni has not abandoned 'populist' notes, this is perhaps because her harsh condemnation of progressive 'totalitarianism' is not matched with truly radical alternatives of her own. Hence even in last June's EU election, her party's manifesto warned against a 'superstate reminiscent of the… Soviet model' and instead vaguely proposed a 'Europe of peoples and nations'. In truth her approach to EU politics has sought cooperation, not least as Italy has been the main recipient of post-pandemic EU funds. Meloni's prominence in the EU since 2022 has been remarkable: in part the product of weak leaders in Paris and Berlin, but also of other countries' politics becoming rather more like Italy's own. The likes of Marine Le Pen's National Rally or Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom increasingly follow a 'Melonian' path of seeking to reorder Europe from within rather than just rebel against it. On immigration, on fossil fuels, and even on military spending, the EU is ever less of an enemy for Meloni's party. Her government can today even boast of its role as a 'bridge' between Brussels and the Maga camp in Washington. Still, even if Trump Jr or his father are ideological admirers of Meloni, the US president's erratic foreign policy and line on tariffs are also potential points of friction. Meloni has brought her part of the Italian right into the heart of the Euro-Atlantic institutions. Trump's moves to shake up these same institutions from above could still cause problems for her. But otherwise, if this is a 'worldwide conservative revolution', it continues apace. I Am Giorgia: My Roots, My Principles Giorgia Meloni Skyhorse, 288pp, £25 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Keir Starmer faces war on all fronts] Related
