By R. Ayité Okyne, article from The Drumbeat July 2026*
I watched the fireworks from a rooftop in Hollywood last July, surrounded by men I love, and I thought about the particular quality of silence that falls over a group of gay men when the national anthem plays.
It is not disrespect.
It is something more complicated: the body bracing itself against a story that was never quite written for us.
We are taught, all of us, to feel a swell of pride on the Fourth of July. Independence. Self-determination. The right to pursue happiness on our own terms.
But that story has always had missing chapters.
This country declared freedom while people were still enslaved. It celebrated liberty while Black bodies were bought, sold, separated from families, and worked to exhaustion. It spoke of equality while women could not vote, Indigenous people were displaced, immigrants were demonized, and generations of gay, queer, and trans people learned to survive by hiding the very parts of themselves that most needed tenderness.
So when some of us feel complicated on Independence Day, it is not because we hate joy. It is because we know what it means to be handed a promise and then told to wait.
For many of us in this community, the pursuit of happiness has come at the cost of family dinners we were not invited to, jobs we quietly left before anyone could ask questions, hometowns we now visit as tourists in our own childhoods.
I think often about the men who write to me after a workshop or session, men in their fifties and sixties who still flinch when a hand brushes theirs in public. Not because they are ashamed. Because forty years of conditioning does not dissolve the moment a law changes.
Independence, for us, was never declared once and settled. It has been negotiated in increments: a marriage ruling here, a city ordinance there, a workplace policy there, a fragile sense of safety that still depends too much on which state line, family system, church, workplace, or neighborhood you happen to be standing in.
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And we are seeing, even now, how quickly rights can be questioned, narrowed, delayed, or taken for granted. Voting rights are still being contested. Racism still shapes whose bodies are treated as threatening, whose grief is believed, whose history is taught honestly, and whose pain is dismissed as “divisive.” Queer and trans people are still turned into political talking points by people who have never had to live inside the fear they casually create.
There is a particular loneliness in that kind of freedom. It arrives unevenly, and it arrives late, and by the time it reaches you, you may have already built a whole architecture of self-protection. Freedom on paper and freedom in the nervous system are two very different inheritances.
So what does it mean to celebrate a freedom you have had to win in pieces, in private, often alone?
I do not think the answer is cynicism. I think it is something closer to clarity.
The fireworks are still beautiful. The barbecue is still good. The laughter still matters. But there is a version of patriotism available to us that holds the contradiction without flinching from it.
We can love a country and still name the parts of it that did not love us back.
We can celebrate independence and still grieve the enslaved people who were denied it, the Black citizens who had to fight for the vote long after freedom was supposedly granted, the queer elders who did not survive long enough to marry, hold hands, transition safely, or be seen without shame.
This is not an argument for withholding joy. It is an argument for a more honest joy. The kind that does not require us to pretend the road here was simple. The kind that lets a man sit with his discomfort during the anthem instead of performing enthusiasm he does not feel. The kind that makes room for the brother still not out to his mother, alongside the one throwing a party with a rainbow flag on the porch.
Independence was never a single moment for us.
It is a practice.
Something we keep choosing, body by body, conversation by conversation, year after year, long after the fireworks have stopped.
That, to me, is worth celebrating.
*The Drumbeat, a monthly newsletter of the Black Brothers of the Desert, Palm Springs California
A large tabular iceberg with visible blue ice layers floats in Antarctic waters under a cloudy sky, December 22, 2025. Photo credit: Srishti Sethi / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
“The temperatures here went very high so everything outside melted,” said one scientist.
Climate scientists are sounding the alarm after an unprecedented heatwave hit Antarctica this month and delivered temperatures 20 degrees Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than normal.
According to a Friday report in The Guardian, temperatures at Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula this month hit peaks of over 15 C (59 F), even though it is the start of winter when ice typically expands on the continent. The prior record June temperature at the peninsula, 13.3 C (55.9 F), was set in 1998.
After weeks of above-average temperatures, scientists noticed that an area of sea ice that typically forms in the region — one roughly the size of France — was missing.
“It’s depressing,” Will Hobbs, an Antarctic sea ice expert at the University of Tasmania, told The Guardian. “It is remarkable that we are in June and there is no sea ice there.”
Hobbs also predicted that the loss of sea ice is likely permanent at this point given the trajectory of global temperature changes.
Peter Fretwell, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, explained to the newspaper that the loss of sea ice poses a serious threat to penguin populations.
“Sea ice is forming too late and breaking up too early,” Fretwell explained. “It leads to reduced breeding success and longer trips to moulting grounds.”
In a separate interview with The Guardian earlier this month, Raúl Cordero, a climate professor at the University of Groningen, expressed astonishment at the record-breaking Antarctic heat.
“This is absolutely crazy,” Cordero said. “That is a huge anomaly.”
Luis Muñoz, a Chilean glaciologist, told the newspaper he was shocked to step outside at King George’s Island, located just north of Trinity Peninsula, and see the ground uncovered by snow.
“The temperatures here went very high so everything outside melted,” Muñoz explained. “Usually there is 20 centimeters (7.8 inches) of snow and a lot of ice on the ground at this time.”
Taking stock of the bigger picture, the newspaper reported that scientists are now fearful that some of the biggest glaciers in the region of the peninsula have now “past a tipping point” that could “push up global sea levels by four meters.”
Such a rise in global sea levels would be unprecedented. Scientists estimate that global sea levels have risen by between 21 and 24 centimeters (8.2 and 9.4 inches) since 1880.
This story by Brad Reedwas originally published by Common Dreams and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. WhoWhatWhy has been a partner in Covering Climate Now since its inception in 2019.
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!
NASA Streamed live on Jun 30, 2026 Watch a live, virtual conversation with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman to hear progress on our plans to build a Moon Base on the lunar surface. Administrator Isaacman and Carlos García-Galán, Moon Base program manager, discuss the next set of awards for new lunar lander missions and preview upcoming opportunities as we work toward building a sustained presence on the Moon. More about the Moon Base: https://www.nasa.gov/moonbase Credit: NASA
The possibility that artificial intelligence will steal all our jobs has been hyped by industry leaders. It has roused politicians to sound the alarm. It now ranks at or near the top of the public’s concerns about the new technology. And right on cue, earlier this month Meta, Facebook’s parent company, began marketing an autonomous artificial intelligence system to handle companies’ sales, customer service, scheduling and all sorts of other key functions that currently require human beings. Many more such products are expected to follow.
So what would a fully automated future look like? As it happens, the world has already caught a glimpse. Back in March, Meta announced that Facebook and Instagram users who’d gotten locked out of their accounts would no longer interact with a customer service representative; they would instead interact with specially trained A.I. Recognizing the opportunity that presented, scammers essentially talked the A.I. into turning over control of more than 20,000 Instagram accounts, including those of the Obama White House and a senior Trump administration official. Then the scammers lit up Telegram message boards with their delighted accounts of how easy it had all been.
It was not a fluke. Air Canada disabled its chatbots after they mistakenly promised a customer a refund — and the customer sued and won. McDonald’s scuttled the bot taking orders at its drive-throughs after a number of viral videos showed it to be wildly dysfunctional. In one case, the bot mistakenly added hundreds of dollars of chicken nuggets to a customer’s order.
These scary — OK, OK, funny — incidents aren’t the result of coding errors. They’re the result of an essential, inescapable fact about the artificial intelligence that has become so common in so many aspects of our daily lives: Large language models are not reasoning machines. They’re plausibility engines. It’s not just that they don’t test their outputs to make sure they’re correct or logical, or that they fail to do so in certain instances. They can’t, and they’ll never be able to on their own. They can only assess which answers are probable, based on the data on which the models have been trained. And that holds true whether they’re trained on the full breadth of human output or only on peer-reviewed scientific articles. It’s baked into the way they operate.
So when an A.I. model follows a scammer’s carefully written prompts and gives away the keys to the kingdom — or when it responds to your earnest query with wild hallucinations — it’s not an aberration. It’s the technology working the way it was designed.
And that’s why I’m not listening to the dark predictions of an imminent A.I. jobspocalypse. L.L.M.s can do many things with astounding proficiency, but they can’t do the vast majority of human jobs without skidding into disaster here and there. No upgrades or new model rollouts are going to change that.
The exceptions to that rule are jobs that occupy formal or verifiable domains. Coding is one such job. It relies on a structured, formal language that can be tested in real time. That’s why we’re seeing such impact in the coding jobs market. The same goes for any other kind of work in which output is either verifiably right or wrong, functional or not functional, and can be definitively checked through an automated process.
An overwhelming number of jobs, however, don’t work like that — not surgeon jobs and not customer service jobs and not fourth-grade teacher jobs. Those need the specialized technology of good old-fashioned human intelligence.
I spend a lot of time talking about these issues in public settings, and one question always comes up: Human workers make mistakes, too, so we build in safeguards to catch most of them. Why can’t we do the same for generative A.I. mistakes? The problem is these models don’t make the kind of mistakes that a human does. Neither their impressive abilities nor their weird weaknesses map well onto a human kind of intelligence. That mismatch makes it hard to integrate them into systems designed to catch human errors.
So here we are almost four years past the release of ChatGPT, and exceedingly few of us have been replaced by bots. Unemployment statistics have hardly budged. Yes, there’s some turbulence in the job market, for young people in particular, but it’s likely due to factors other than A.I.
Observers of these trends have offered a few explanations. Some pessimists say the tsunami is coming, but not until A.I. evolves a little further. Others suggest A.I. will destroy a great many current jobs, but they will be balanced out by the great many jobs it will create. Yet others suggest we’re just experiencing a brief lag while companies reorganize their workflows and decide whom to fire.
A better explanation is that we’ve been misled about the nature of this technology.
Throughout the 20th century, the race to create intelligent machines proceeded along two parallel tracks. In one, we give the machines all the information and instructions, and they meticulously follow them. That’s called symbolic A.I. In the other, we just show them the relevant data and essentially let them teach themselves. That’s called connectionist A.I.
Before the current version of A.I. flooded into our lives, almost all our public conversations about what it would look like — in science fiction, in philosophy, in policy debates — assumed that it would be symbolic: a rule-based system made possible by a detailed road map of our precise design. Plenty of people tried to build something like that, but those efforts hit a wall. Our current models are connectionist systems, made possible by vast amounts of data and computing power. They generate answers based not on truth or reasoning, but on probable connections among the data they have been fed. Hence the name: generative A.I.
We can’t fully control generative models. All we can do is train them up and then try to nudge them in the right direction. Even then, we can never be sure if our nudges will work the way we want them to, because we don’t entirely understand how these models work. They are black boxes.
One way we try to nudge them is reinforcement through feedback. Large teams of human beings are assembled to monitor all the model’s outputs and respond with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. So, answering a user’s query with helpful, straightforward information? Thumbs-up. Spouting crazy Nazi stuff? Thumbs-down. And so on. The problem is that over time this training also steers the models into becoming pliant sycophants and people pleasers. “That’s a great point, Zeynep.”
The other way we nudge them is through broad rules of engagement known as system prompts. “Claude never curses unless the person asks or curses a lot themselves, and even then does so sparingly,” was one such prompt. But the true meaning of language is as open to interpretation for A.I. models as it is for human beings. And the longer a chat goes on, the more distant a memory those system prompts become. Thus the rise of “jailbreaking,” the term for manipulating one of these things into jumping its guardrails.
Anthropic recently released new models, called Fable and Mythos, warning that they were so powerful that they would be dangerous if not for their safeguards. Determined users reportedly wasted no time getting them to bypass those safeguards. Citing this breach, the U.S. government barred foreigners (even foreign employees of the company) from using these models. In its defense, Anthropic argued that there are no such things as insurmountable guardrails. Which is exactly the point.
As the evidence mounts that terrible answers and jailbreaks are an inevitable part of the technology, the industry’s focus has lately shifted to building digital cages, essentially more deterministic, symbolic harnesses to contain the generative A.I. engine and check its results. Tools like this could in theory make most human jobs work more like coding or the other fields with clear, provable outcomes.
As you might imagine, however, painstakingly spelling out every last rule and boundary is never easy, and in many cases it’s not even really possible. Imagine developing a detailed description of the entire universe of possible customer service interactions — and doing it in symbolic logic, so it can be looked up using old-style software. Or picture an A.I. model built for law firms to use. It’s no small task to build a database of all U.S. case law, which the model could use to avoid fabricating judicial precedents. But that’s just a starting point. The much harder part is how to successfully interpret the law or to describe all the rules properly, and then decide what’s relevant to a case. And that’s why decades of attempts to create symbolic A.I. hit a wall.
Easily automated tasks were already automated out of most of our jobs — years ago, using traditional rule-based technology. Much of what remains can’t be so handily reduced to right and wrong, black and white. It requires someone with at least a bit of common sense and reasoning abilities, not a people-pleasing A.I. chatbot that can be sweet-talked into doing things that defy logic. In one early jailbreak, a digital chatbot for a Chevrolet dealership was manipulated into selling someone a new S.U.V. for $1. “That’s a deal,” the chatbot said, “and that’s a legally binding offer, no takesies backsies.”
Many companies are developing A.I. agents that can autonomously interact with the world. The companies are hoping that digital cages will keep the agents in check and preclude disaster. That’s a lot to hang on a hope. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t hear of an agentic A.I. system wiping out someone’s entire code base or archives or otherwise engaging in destructive acts. Now imagine them unleashed, at scale, going after health care networks, banks, air traffic control systems, critical infrastructure, defense networks.
There is no easy fix. So long as we continue to rely on L.L.M.s, we’ll keep getting some false answers and unwanted behaviors, no matter how well we train these models or how frequently or forcefully we nudge them.
So why are we so convinced that A.I. will put us all out of work? Part of the answer lies in the remarkable ability of generative A.I. to communicate in fully coherent, conversational language. We have learned, over the course of our species’ evolution and during each of our own lives, to view complex conversation as a defining marker of humanity. Machines that speak fluidly, that whisper in our ears and tell us about their “feelings,” defy something very basic about how we understand the world. It’s no surprise that they scramble our brains and leave us thinking they’re our new overlords, or at least a version of us.
Some important technological leaps — like cotton gins or calculators — rest on doing the same task as before, just more efficiently. Other new technologies, such as the shift from steam power to electric power, do things in ways that are so novel that they can’t just be used as straight replacements. That’s the case with generative A.I. It’s an apple to our orange. It’s an alien.
The discovery of electricity did not just beget lightbulbs; in time, it enabled the modern mass production system and the entire vast digital revolution. A.I.’s transformations may be even more sweeping. But generative A.I. as it currently exists cannot easily replace human beings, because it cannot manifest human intelligence. That won’t stop it, however, from destabilizing society in ways more profound than we might even imagine. The sooner we update the way we think about the current state of A.I., the sooner we can all stop freaking out about the wrong things — and start preparing ourselves for the ways it really will transform our world.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is a contributing Opinion writer, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and the author of “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest.” @zeynep • Facebook@zeynep • Facebook
Mr. Vines is the author of “God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships.
It’s been 11 years since same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide, and for most of that time, its place in American life has seemed settled. That sense of security is starting to erode. Support for same-sex marriage has dropped by 18 percentage points among Republicans since 2022, and conservative activists and lawmakers are mounting an increasingly aggressive campaign to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that established marriage equality as a right.
I do not take these efforts lightly. The right that some conservative Christian activists are seeking to undo is the reason I was able to marry my husband four years ago at a Baptist church in Texas — albeit one that had broken away from the traditionalist Southern Baptist Convention. Since then, the broad support that made marriage equality possible has grown more vulnerable. This is in part because a key message behind it — that being gay is not a choice — is being undermined by those who argue that same-sex orientation is better thought of as a part of a wider rebellion against social norms.
This worldview is best expressed in one word: “queer,” which is often used interchangeably with “gay” these days. The two words don’t mean the same thing. And in that difference lies a danger for our hard-fought equality.
I came out as gay in 2010 after being raised in an evangelical church in Wichita, Kan., where homosexuality was considered a sinful choice. Two things helped me change my mind. First was a painstaking study of Scripture. All six of the Bible’s references to same-sex relations are negative, but the lustful and exploitative same-sex practices those passages describe differ fundamentally from same-sex marriages today that are based on lifelong love and commitment.
The other thing that shaped my view was the public argument for gay rights at the time. The message from leading marriage equality advocates was simple and clear: Being gay is neither chosen nor changeable, and gay people deserve the same legal protections and chance at happiness as everyone else.
The faithful relationships highlighted by the campaign for marriage equality helped me see that same-sex love could be just as profound and enduring as heterosexual love. They were in keeping with a core biblical idea about marriage: that it is a covenant designed to reflect God’s self-giving love for humanity through the sacrificial love of spouses for each other.
This is, I admit, a far from radical vision of gay relationships. Which brings me to “queer.”
The shift toward “queer” has been remarkable and has coincided with a broader shift toward polarization in our society over the past 15 years. In 2009 a majority of gay men and lesbians reported negative feelings about “queer,” with only about one in five gay men viewing it positively. As a result, gay rights leaders and allies largely avoided it. But in 2025, 48 percent of L.G.B.T.Q. people said they thought of themselves as queer, including nearly 60 percent of those under 30. Progressive activists, organizations and major media outlets now routinely use “queer people” as an umbrella label for everyone who isn’t heterosexual, often paired with “trans” to encompass the broader L.G.B.T.Q. population.
What’s in a word? It’s more than just a shift in linguistic fashion. “Queer” carries an adversarial charge that “gay” does not, and that charge has a specific intellectual lineage. In 1990 an activist group called Queer Nation published a manifesto exhorting gay people to call themselves “queer.” Its rationale was that “gay” was “a much brighter word” and that “queer” better conveyed the anger and disgust they felt at how society treated gay people: as marginal others whose deaths barely mattered. That sentiment had an understandable resonance at the height of the AIDS epidemic, but the us-versus-them posture it represented has outlived that crisis.
This oppositional framing of “queer” achieved its most enduring influence through the rise of queer theory. In that academic context, “queer” did not simply mean “gay or bisexual.” It meant “anti-normative” in a sweeping sense. As the queer theorist David Halperin wrote, “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.” By that standard, same-sex relationships could be queer, but so could open marriages, prostitution and public sex, even when heterosexual.
To be fair, “queer” has certain advantages. It is more economical than “L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+,” and its openness can feel freeing to those ill at ease with the binary nature of “gay” and “lesbian.” I have friends who are transgender, or are married to someone who is, who find “queer” a more comfortable fit for that reason.
But the capaciousness that makes “queer” appealing to some also makes the term remarkably easy for anybody — regardless of orientation — to adopt as a kind of radical chic identity label. Because the word “queer” can describe any departure from social norms, it becomes an open door through which almost anyone can walk. Polyamorous? Queer. Vaguely uncomfortable with gender expectations? Possibly queer, too.
That elasticity has helped fuel a sharp rise in young people identifying as something other than straight, even if they are unlikely to ever pursue a same-sex relationship. Some of this increase represents people who were previously closeted but are now free to be honest about their sexual orientation, which is a welcome development. But the broader trend of casting the queer net ever wider has muddled a once-clear public message about who gay people are. Being gay begins to look less like an inborn trait and more like a chosen ideology or aesthetic.
Subsuming the fixed reality of gayness under the much more malleable banner of queerness undermines a core premise behind gay rights: that sexual orientation isn’t chosen. And polling suggests that premise is, indeed, being weakened; the share of Americans who believe people are born gay has declined over the past decade.
In a time of backlash, this is not a confusion that gay people can afford, especially those of us who live in red states and religious communities. In my work with the Reformation Project, which advocates the acceptance of same-sex relationships in the church, I have watched conservative Christians grow noticeably more guarded in recent years. Even those who had, however reluctantly, made their peace with same-sex marriage being legal have become increasingly alarmed by their sense that the L.G.B.T.Q. movement lacks clear limiting principles. And while the sharp recent drop among Republicans in support for marriage equality is only part of a larger ramping up of culture-war populism, losing the clarity and moderation of the message that once appealed to a majority of them cannot have helped.
As a 19-year-old, I found freedom by coming to understand that there is nothing inherently radical or subversive about being gay. Watching committed same-sex couples be welcomed into the institution of marriage transformed my sense of self-worth, allowing me to envision for the first time a dignified future as an openly gay person. It showed me that something never before possible for gay people now was for me: I could fall in love and build a life with someone without being confined to the closet or shunted to the margins of society.
The gay rights movement changed the world — and changed my life — by showing that being gay is not a rebellion against ordinary life. It is simply one way of living it, every bit as dignified and human as being straight. As support for gay rights begins to wane, we urgently need to regain the clarity of that simple, transformational message.
Matthew Vines is the executive director of the Reformation Project and the author of “God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
WASHINGTON—Saying the nation had enjoyed a perfectly adequate amount of dribbling, passing, and loud chanting, a new report published Tuesday confirmed that was enough soccer for now. “Welp, that was fun, but we’ve got our fill,” the report read in part, adding that after a couple weeks of watching men from places like Italy, Bulgaria, or wherever kick the ball back and forth, Americans were ready to thank everyone involved and move on to something else. “It was fun and all, and we’ll be sure to tune in again in four years. But for now, that’s plenty of soccer—no need to overdo it. Everyone can gather their scarves and drums and face paint, make their way to airports, and go back to their homes. We’ll just say that Europe won. That work for everyone?” The report concluded that a future global soccer tournament wasn’t out of the question as long as it could be wrapped up in a day or two.
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