People are peppering artificial intelligence chatbots everyday with questions, but when it comes to politics and the looming 2026 U.S. midterm elections, what role are AI platforms playing' Could an AI chatbot sway a voter to switch parties or re-examine their political beliefs' MIT researchers have built a new dashboard, called the LLM Election Observatory, to examine, in real-time, how popular AI chatbots are responding to questions about the 2026 midterm elections. The team behind the dashboard ' led by Professor Adam Berinsky, Assistant Professor Chara Podimata, and Professor Charles Stewart III ' has extensive experience studying voting and election administration, AI and misinformation, and how AI systems are impacting human decision making. In an effort to better understand how AI is shaping the election, they designed the dashboard to simulate how individuals across the country communicate with chatbots. The team tracks how different AI systems respond to the same fixed set of questions on a range of topics, including election certification, hot-button issues, result predictions, news coverage, and more. Every few days, the LLM Election Observatory team runs the questions through the chatbots again, monitoring how their responses vary as the election gets closer depending on user location, political party affiliation, identity and other factors. The goal of this work is not to merely understand how AI systems spread information, but also better comprehend how they are shaping political discourse and voter understanding of political issues across the country....

Last Sunday in Serbia, Alexander Vucic and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) lost to the Student List, a popular protest movement of students and academics that first formed two years ago in the aftermath of a roof collapse at a train station in the city of Novi Sad. Vucic and SNS have ruled Serbia in one way or another since 2012. Vucic initially served as First Deputy Prime Minister, then as Prime Minister, then as President. He had recently resigned the presidency to run once again for Prime Minister in a snap election, but his defeat and quick concession last Sunday finally broke the hold on power of the man and his party, despite their use of familiar tactics to give themselves numerous unfair electoral advantages. On the same day in Brazil, Flavio Bolsonaro'the son of the former right-populist president Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a 27-year prison sentence for attempting to overturn the results of the previous presidential election, which he lost'failed to defeat the left-wing Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the country's 81-year-old sitting president, who was running for re-election. Had the younger Bolsonaro prevailed, it would have spread and greatly solidified the right-populist takeover of South America, where (with support from the ideologically aligned Trump administration) such parties and politicians now govern Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Peru....

During its annual meeting on Oct. 19, the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) announced election of 100 new members, including MIT faculty member Michael Yaffe and six MIT alumni: Steven Allen Abrams '79; Susan L. Ettner PhD '91; Diane Medved Harper '80, SM '82; Albert Icksang Ko '81; Jennifer Lewis ScD '91; and Alexander Marson PhD '08. Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service. Michael Yaffe, David H. Koch (1962) Professor of Science, is the founding director of the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, as well as a professor in the MIT departments of Biology and Biological Engineering and a member of the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. He is also an attending surgeon and intensivist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he specializes in injury and surgical oncology, and was recently appointed as senior advisor to the director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for the NCI Intramural Research Program....

My previous post dealt with one vision of socialism, a society where people work for the fun of it and give away what they produce. It exists in the real world on a small scale embedded in a market society. My family will be hosting a meetup in our house in about three weeks at which we will provide all comers with food, drink and space for conversation, all at no cost. We will make most of the food ourselves ' we like cooking ' but with purchased ingredients. We bake our own bread but do not grow our own wheat or grind our own flour nor do we know anybody who does and is happy to give us some. The centralized form of voluntary socialism appeals to my imagination less but comes closer to working.1 Israeli kibbutzim range in size up to a thousand inhabitants. The oldest is more than a century old and monasteries, an earlier version of the same model, have lasted much longer. There are at least three reasons. The first is ideology, religion for the monasteries, socialism for the kibbutzim. That is a reason for people to donate their labor and money to the project but also a constraint on how the institution is run. Celibacy and poverty were important elements in the ideology of many monasteries but made them less attractive to many potential recruits. Equality of income was central to the socialist ideology and policies of the original kibbutzim but the source of a variety of problems for them....