Decades ago, it was a truism that the 24/7 news cycle exercised a malign influence on policy making. It kept senior leaders fixated on a flickering television screen when their time would have been better spent weighing evidence, debating alternatives, and considering opposing views. All true. But today we contend with 24/7 commentary, which is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it, even as it causes a kind of dry rot of our good judgment. Supporters of the Trump administration's war against Iran periodically complain that much of the criticism the administration faces is as ludicrous as denouncing Franklin D. Roosevelt's war leadership in April 1942 would have been, before Midway, Guadalcanal, and the North Africa landings. They have no record of extending that sort of charity to previous administrations, but that does not invalidate the larger point. The 24/7 commentary treadmill means that certain simplifying words get used over and over. But in war, above all things, realities are almost invariably complex. Take the very word war. Advocates and critics of the Iran conflict assume, without question, that this is a war that began on February 28, and that it was launched by President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu....

The jury's speedy decision to reject Elon Musk's lawsuit against the other founders of OpenAI and Microsoft confirmed what we saw in the courtroom: Musk's case was a weak one, in part because he waited so long to file it. Watching the closing arguments last week, OpenAI's attorneys detailed point by point how the law was on their client's side, while the plaintiff's team focused on Sam Altman's apparent lack of credibility and expressed disbelief that anyone would disagree with Musk's accusations. The final effect was that, after the verdict, some found it hard to believe Musk had lost ' including the man himself. In a post he later deleted, Musk called Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers a 'terrible activist Oakland judge,' then announced his plans to appeal, declaring, 'There is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity.' But Altman and Brockman weren't the only figures who benefited from OpenAI's non-profit investments. As much as Musk and his legal team tried to make the trial about Altman, the proceedings revealed just as much about Musk....

Musk accused Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI, and Microsoft of 'stealing a charity' by creating a for-profit affiliate of the frontier AI lab. Jurors, however, found that any harms that Musk may have suffered came before the deadline for filing his claims under the law. While the trial delved deeply into the melodramatic history of OpenAI and featured testimony from leading figures in Silicon Valley, it ultimately turned on fairly narrow questions of the law. The trial focused on whether and when Altman and the other defendants had made and broken promises to Musk, but his case failed to convince jurors that he had a valid claim. In particular, OpenAI had advanced a statute of limitations defense, which sought to prove that any harms Musk sought to litigate had taken place before 2021. (The specific date varied by the charge: before August 5, 2021, for the first count; August 5, 2022, for the second count; and November 14, 2021, for the third count.) Ultimately, the jury found that argument persuasive, which made for a short deliberation period....

Bill Cassidy did not want to talk about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Last month, as we shuffled through the U.S. Senate subway, a subterranean corridor connecting lawmakers' offices to the Capitol, the senator from Louisiana was fielding rapid-fire questions from reporters about two of his favorite topics: drug pricing and college sports. But I asked him about his least favorite: Did he regret confirming Kennedy as health secretary' I was eager to know because, in spite of that decision, Cassidy may be looking at the end of his political career. This weekend, after 11 years in the Senate, he is headed into a Republican primary election with polls trending out of his favor. His vote last year to hand the keys of America's immunization policy to one of America's most prominent vaccine skeptics now hangs over him as a political move that may not have been enough to save his life in politics. Cassidy'who was one of the few Republicans to initially balk at confirming Kennedy'is pro-vaccine. As a liver specialist in a crowded Baton Rouge charity hospital at the turn of the new millennium, he saw firsthand the effects of hepatitis B, a vaccine-preventable disease; he later set up a school-based program in Baton Rouge that inoculated tens of thousands of children against the virus. At Kennedy's confirmation hearing, Cassidy justified his vote by claiming that Kennedy could help restore faith in the medical establishment. It was, by all apparent measures, a vote against his values, an attempted olive branch to the new administration....