Ecuador’s Risky War on Narcos

In today’s edition, the avenger, and then:
•A.I. comes to your phone
•When the apocalypse is just another day
•Andrew O’Hagan’s bonfire of the vanities

After several hoursof closed-door meetings with security officials, Daniel Noboa, the recently elected President of Ecuador, sat in a darkened office of the Presidential palace—an elegant eighteenth-century building, known as Carondelet, that overlooks the old center of Quito. When I arrived for our first meeting, Noboa was at a wide, empty desk, staring intently at his phone. Several minutes passed in silence before he looked up, mumbling an apology. We shook hands, and I asked how he was doing. “Surviving,” he said. He didn’t mean this in the ordinary, mildly ironic, getting-through-the-day way. A week earlier, he explained, a dozen hit men had been intercepted crossing the border from Colombia, apparently sent by drug traffickers to kill him. Four of the would-be assassins had been killed in a shoot-out with Ecuadorian security forces. The rest were in detention, but there were presumably others out there. Now that he was President, he said with a rueful laugh, he would never be out of danger again.

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Apple’s first forays into the world of artificial intelligencehave been called narrow and cautious. But Kyle Chayka writes that “Apple Intelligence, a small model that could eventually be nestled on more than a billion iPhones around the world, crosses a kind of Rubicon: A.I. is entering our personal lives, and once it’s there it’s not likely to retreat.”Read more »

Kyle Chayka’s column, Infinite Scroll, publishes every Wednesday.

P.S. Humidity,as the cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan points out,can do funny things to your hair.