Hello from Palo Alto,

For the autocrats, 2023 was a pretty good year. For the rest of us, not so much. 

New wars emerged, old ones persisted, and a global rift over reality and truth deepened further. Divisions over how to interpret the world around us have, of course, existed since time immemorial, but we often forget that the yawning gulf between societies today is driven by algorithms engineered in my unlikely new home in Silicon Valley.

A few months ago, just as generative artificial intelligence took the global spotlight and we all buckled up for another tech shake-up, I landed in Silicon Valley. Every year, the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University brings together a small but mighty cohort of journalists and tasks them with figuring out the future of our embattled profession.