The Cultural Impact of Notre Dame Football Goes Far Beyond the Playing Field

On Thursday, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish play the Penn State Nittany Lions in the Orange Bowl, which doubles as one of the college football playoff semifinals. The game marks the latest of Notre Dame’s many successes on the gridiron. In its 138-year history of playing football, the Catholic university has checked off every measure of success. It’s produced 109 All-Americans and seven Heisman trophy winners, while winning 45 bowl games and 11 national championships. A victory against Penn State would move the Irish one step closer to the 12th title that has eluded them since 1988. 

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So great has Notre Dame’s success been that other private Christian colleges have aimed to follow in its footsteps. Brigham Young University, Baylor University, and Liberty University have all taken steps to become the leading universities for their religious communities — and football is a big part of that endeavor. These schools recognized that Notre Dame’s football success helped to integrate American Catholics into the mainstream, and they believed that it could help strengthen their own faith communities and evangelize to non-believers.

At the turn of the 20th century, American Catholics, especially the immigrants flooding into the U.S., faced doubts about their religious and national identities and allegiances. Notre Dame football helped to assuage these concerns and change the public’s perception of American Catholicism. Competing in football meant embracing the same “gentleman’s game,” played by American elites at schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. It meant conveying that Notre Dame would produce the sort of men who could win through violent competition — precisely what the Gilded Age business environment demanded.

And Notre Dame did more than just compete — especially after Knute Rockne arrived as head coach in 1918. He facilitated the school’s rise from regional program to national powerhouse by winning four national championships. He credited the faith of his football players for his conversion to Catholicism in 1925. By the time he died in a plane crash in 1931, Rockne was one of the most popular Catholics in America. A small German Catholic farming community in Texas even renamed itself “Rockne” after children attending a local Catholic school voted to memorialize the coach.

Read More: Football Power Was Always Part of the Plan for Liberty University

The popularity of Notre Dame football during the Rockne era helped forge the distinct identity of American Catholics and counter claims that they weren’t American. The Catholic faithful across the country could now participate in the American ritual of cheering for their football team on Saturday, while also attending the global ritual of Mass on Sunday. As a result, the Fighting Irish reflected and shaped American Catholics’ journey to assimilate into mainstream American culture.

Administrators at other private Christian schools took note. In 1919, BYU resurrected its football program 19 years after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) had banned the game. Mormons, like Catholics, faced questions about their Americanism. They remained outside of mainstream Protestant American culture despite more than two decades of religious, cultural, and political transformations that edged them toward American cultural norms.

By the time Rockne experienced success at Notre Dame, Mormons were looking to make the final leap and squarely enter the mainstream. Church leaders and BYU administrators believed a successful big-time college football program would help them along the journey. Like Catholics at Notre Dame, the LDS Church hoped playing — and excelling at — America’s game would unite their religious community, prove their Americanness, and increase their interactions with non-Mormons.

Accordingly, in 1923, the school recruited Rockne to spend the summer as an adjunct instructor in order to host a football-coaching clinic. He taught the coaches his latest techniques and plays. The camp was a success. In 1928, the hiring of G. Ott Romney – the first cousin once removed of Mitt Romney – brought BYU its first taste of winning football. He led the Cougars to a tie in his inaugural “Holy War” rivalry game against the University of Utah, their first winning season in 1929, and an impressive 8-1 record in 1932.

BYU wasn’t the only Christian school influenced by Rockne’s Notre Dame teams. Yet, his impact on Baylor University, the world’s largest Baptist university, was quite different. In 1925, the famed coach invited the Bears, who had won the Southwest Conference the year before, to visit South Bend to open the college football season. Notre Dame was the defending national champion, with a team led by the famed “Four Horsemen,” making the stakes high, with regional and religious supremacy on the line.

In the run-up to the game, Baylor’s coach used Notre Dame as an example to beg his administration for more money. Yet, the repeated use of a derogatory term for Irishmen in the Baylor student newspaper left the defending champions looking to make a statement. Rockne’s team dominated Baylor on both sides of the ball. By the third quarter, Notre Dame’s backups were in the game, and the final score was 41-0. 

In his sermon the next day, the pastor at First Baptist Church in Waco used the game to reflect on Baylor’s place in American culture and urged his congregants to not lose faith in the team after the humiliating defeat to the large Catholic school. The pastor, and officials at Baylor, understood that giving up wasn’t an option. Football offered too many potential benefits for a religious institution.

Read More: How the Orange Bowl Made History

That was true even of Baylor, which didn’t need the sport to help Baptists enter mainstream America. Instead, the school was free to use football to shape the religious, gendered, and racial beliefs of players, students, and fans. The creation of the Baylorettes — a group of 80 female students, who joined the school’s band in halftime shows — in 1948 meant that football games helped shape the gendered expectations for women at the school. While men led the team on the field, women’s role in big-time Baptist college football was to titillate and entertain. Additionally, Baylor reinforced the segregationist Southern order by refraining from fielding a Black player on its team until 1965.

The school’s devotion to football only grew over time. By the time it won another Southwest Conference Championship in 1974, the school had inaugurated a new stadium and its administration consistently supported the football program financially.

Nevertheless, despite the emphasis BYU and Baylor placed on football, Notre Dame remained the pacesetter for the possibilities of football at a religious university. Its team continued to win and the injection of television exposure and dollars beginning in 1949 and growing from there expanded the school’s brand even more.

The televangelist Jerry Falwell took note of this success. In 1971, he founded Liberty University. The school’s motto promised “Here we Train Champions for Christ” and Falwell saw a successful big-time college football program like Notre Dame as an essential element of his vision. 

In 1989, Sports Illustrated interviewed him about Liberty football. Falwell boasted, “I know Lou Holtz [the head coach] at Notre Dame. He is a fine evangelical Christian, you know. I have an idea he’d schedule us when we were ready.” The next year, Notre Dame signed a $75 million (over $177 million today) exclusive TV contract with NBC to broadcast its football games. No conservative evangelical better understood the power of this television exposure and money than Falwell. As he toiled to save America from desegregation, feminism, drugs, rock and roll, homosexuality, and the Democratic Party, he consistently pointed to Notre Dame and BYU as his role models for creating a strong religious identity – and revenue steam – through football. He believed recruiting the best conservative Christian athletes to Liberty would help win football games, give conservative evangelicals “their” school, and revive America.

Liberty, therefore, poured millions of dollars into its football program. Falwell used his team to imbue students with a new strident, aggressive form of faith that reshaped religion and politics in 21st-century America: Christian Nationalism. But Liberty is still waiting for Notre Dame’s invitation to play in South Bend.

The 2024 college football season may prove to be the high point for Notre Dame’s big-time Christian college football disciples. BYU went 11-2 in its second season in the Big XII Conference and blew out Deion Sanders’s Colorado team in the Alamo Bowl. Baylor finished 8-5, though it lost to LSU in the Texas Bowl. Liberty failed to repeat their 2023 success — which included a Fiesta Bowl bid — but still won eight games earning a trip to the Bahamas Bowl.

While each big-time Christian college football team succeeded this season, Notre Dame continues to inspire and outperform its football followers. The long history of the Fighting Irish illustrates the way faith and football can aid assimilation, strengthen community, and evangelize non-believers. Ultimately, the distinctly American, masculine, and violent game continues to shape these religious communities through the gridiron gospel.

Hunter M. Hampton is an assistant professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University. He is the author of The Gridiron Gospel: Faith and College Football in 20th-Century America, coming out with the University of Illinois Press in the fall.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/7205461/notre-dame-football-christian-colleges/

How the Orange Bowl Made History

On Jan. 9, 2025, Coach Marcus Freeman’s Fighting Irish will battle Coach James Franklin’s Nittany Lions for a spot in college football’s national championship game. Regardless of who wins, a Black head coach will move on to contend for the FBS national championship title for the first time in history.

This historic Orange Bowl has been shaped by the struggle over race and place embedded within the history of the bowl game itself and its host city, Miami. For almost a century, the Orange Bowl has demonstrated the power of sport as a contested space, as white boosters and Black players used the bowl to promote the city—redefining the game in the process.

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First played in 1935, the Orange Bowl was the product of New Deal funds, as Miami struggled to redefine itself after the devastating hurricane of 1926 and the stock market crash of 1929. Civic leaders formed the Greater Miami Athletic Association to bring more tourists from the U.S. and Latin America for “Football in the Tropics.” Jack Bell, who was a member of the Orange Bowl Committee and sports editor for the Miami Herald argued, “Miami is the ideal – you might say only – spot in the southeastern section of the United States in which to stage a big New Year’s Day attraction.” All of Florida was on board.

The game racially integrated in 1955, following the Cotton Bowl (1948) and Sun Bowl (1950), which finally refused to honor the longstanding “gentlemen’s agreement” in college football to bench Black players from northern teams when playing in the segregated south.

Read More: The Troubling Truth About the World War II-Era Rose Bowl That Became Part of American Sports Lore

Miami had become known as the Magic City, built on white boosterism and segregated Black labor from the U.S. South and the Bahamas; it had long reinscribed the traditional racial order of the Old South even as it sold itself as a part of a new one. Integration represented white boosters’ commitment to elevating the bowl over racial tradition by bringing in the best teams and players in the nation, regardless of race. On Jan. 1, 1965, the Texas versus Alabama Orange Bowl was the first bowl game televised live in primetime.

For Miami and the rest of the country, the Orange Bowl went on to hold a storied place in selling America’s favorite winter playground. It grew up alongside the city, moving from 5,134 spectators in 1935 to a sellout crowd of more than 80,000 in 1975. By that time, the Orange Bowl Festival, which included the college football game, parade, and other sporting events, had arguably become the state’s most successful annual event. The Orange Bowl stadium now hosted regular season games for the University of Miami Hurricanes and the city’s professional team, the Miami Dolphins.

The iconic stadium amplified the Hurricanes’ regular season play, as the mid-20th century program received two Orange Bowl invites among other notable achievements.

Even after desegregation, promotional material for the Orange Bowl largely centered on and celebrated white play, showcasing the economic and racial ideals of what was now called the Sunbelt South which encouraged the migration of white middle-class families to the “Florida-California Sun country.”

The expansion of the Orange Bowl, however, was not just a white man’s game. Another football contest emerged as Black southerners challenged their social exclusion from the sport and the Orange Bowl. From 1947 to 1978, the Orange Bowl served as the site of the Orange Blossom Classic, a de facto national championship for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) recently revived in 2021.

According to the rich scholarship of Derrick White and the Black College Football Hall of Fame, HBCUs, of which more than 90 were established between 1837 and 1900, began playing football in 1892. By the early 1900s, programs faced off in midseason “classics” that showcased the history of HBCUs and Black college football. The Orange Blossom Classic modeled itself after the Rose Bowl, the oldest and most prestigious college football bowl game, seeking to position cross-country teams in an end-of-the-season showdown.

By the mid-1960s, the Orange Blossom Classic was the first and only Black college football game televised. It helped standout Black athletes barred from predominantly white institutions (PWIs) find a way to the NFL. In the 1968 NFL draft, the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), an all-Black conference, supplied 31 players in contrast to the all-white Big Ten’s 29. Notably not one of those players faced a white football team or played regularly on television or in invited NCAA All-Star games.

Read More: The Surprising Link Between Napoleon Bonaparte and the 2023 Philadelphia Eagles

Black college football was not alone in utilizing the Orange Bowl as a space for reinvention. By the end of the 1970s, the University of Miami Hurricanes football program, like Miami itself, had lost its luster. In 1979, Coach Howard Schnellenberger became the program’s eighth head coach in ten years with a familiar promise: the program would win a national championship in five years. Unlike white boosters and coaches before him, he recognized the value of local Black talent to making it a reality. He signed 15 local players for his second season and 22 for his third. At the end of the 1983 season, when the team headed to the Orange Bowl for the national championship game, 64 of the 86 players were from Florida. Almost half of the program was Black.

Schnellenberger fielded more Black players than any other college program previously. He persuaded local talent on the chance to play in the Orange Bowl stadium in front of a hometown crowd, a feat many had already accomplished for standout Black high school teams like the Northwestern Bulls (Liberty City) and Jackson Generals (Allapattah). Liberty City and Allapattah are two historical Black neighborhoods which, alongside Coconut Grove, have rich football legacies. According to the STARZ docuseries Warriors of Liberty City (2018), as of 2017, “Miami had 47% more players in the NFL than any other city.” Many came from these neighborhoods.

Through the efforts of local Black phenoms like Reggie Sutton and Eddie Brown, Fred Robinson and Rodney Bellinger, Alonzo Highsmith and Melvin Bratton, the Hurricanes secured their first national championship on Jan. 2, 1984. The Hurricanes ended the decade “the team of the 1980s,” winning two more national championships. They also challenged a blue-blood style of play. Blue bloods are the most elite programs in college football like Notre Dame and Penn State, recognized for a more understated on-the-field presence.

As mythologies of Black deviancy and inadequacy circulated in the 1980s through the image of the “welfare queen” to help argue for a war on poverty and drugs, the Hurricanes’ swagger foregrounded a new face for college football and style, amplifying exemplary Black collegiate play in the process. By the end of the 1980s, Miami football and college football, in general, was king.

On Thursday night, Marcus Freeman and James Franklin will step onto this stage and into this history. They will showcase Black athletic and coaching talent for the most elite programs in college football in one of the most iconic bowls in the nation. Their ability to break into the blue-blood system and dominate represents an opportunity to advance changes in football leadership that have stalled even as Black players have gained recognition and fame on the field. When Miami Times columnist Ebenezer C. Edwards wrote his regular column, “Across the Board with Scrooge,” for the leading Black weekly newspaper in South Florida in 1970, he noted that Black players made up 40% of the NFL but only accounted for four assistant coaches of the 190 coaches in total. In 2024, despite over half of college football players identifying as Black, Black head coaches still comprise only 12% of the league: 16 of 134 teams.

On Jan. 20, MLK Day, either Freeman or Franklin has the potential to change history again, becoming the first Black coach to win a national championship. Regardless of whether they win, they represent, perhaps most importantly, that a change is gonna come. In fact, it has been many decades in the making.

Kate Aguilar is an assistant professor of African American and sports history at Gustavus Adolphus College. Her research focuses on the intersection of Black student activism and the Black athlete at the University of Miami (Fla.).

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/7205275/orange-bowl-history/

Does the First U.S. Death Mean Bird Flu Is Getting More Dangerous?

Any time a person catches H5N1, or bird flu, their infection is a chance for the virus to mutate in the wrong direction. When someone dies from the bird flu—as an elderly Louisiana man did on Jan. 6, becoming the first U.S. death from the disease—experts get especially concerned.

Could this person’s deadly infection signal that the H5N1 virus is becoming more adept at infecting people and causing severe disease in humans?

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Here’s what experts say.

A closer look at the recent death

So far, 66 people in the U.S.—most of them farmworkers who spent time around infected cattle and poultry—have been infected with H5N1, but all have recovered after mild illnesses.

Health officials get samples from these infected individuals in order to keep tabs on the virus, monitoring it for any signs that it might be mutating to become more adept at infecting people, spread more easily among people, or cause more serious disease. So far, there have been no indications that the virus is changing to allow it to jump from person to person.

The Louisiana man was swabbed for samples of the virus in his nose and throat before his death. So were the sick chickens in his backyard, with which he was in direct contact. After analyzing these genetic sequences, scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found a few mutations that weren’t detected in infected chickens on the man’s property, suggesting that the virus began changing after infecting him.

Read More: We Are Not Safe from Bird Flu Until We Protect Farmworkers

But the mutations weren’t sufficient to make the virus transmit more easily from one person to another, they concluded. The virus they identified was also detected in wild birds and chickens in the U.S. and in some human cases in the country and Canada, but it’s different from the strain responsible for the major outbreaks in dairy cows and chickens throughout country.

The good news, according to the CDC analysis, is that they found no changes in the part of the viral genome that mutates to resist antiviral drugs, so current drug treatments should still be effective against this strain of H5N1.

The reassuring—and less reassuring—news

Despite the fact that the virus mutated in the patient, the CDC scientists say that scenario is slightly more reassuring than if a version of the virus that is more adapted to human infection was found in wild birds or chickens. “Although concerning, and a reminder that A(H5N1) viruses can develop changes during the clinical course of a human infection, these changes would be more concerning if found in animal hosts or in early stages of infection (e.g., within a few days of symptom onset) when these changes might be more likely to facilitate spread to close contacts,” the CDC scientists write in the report. “Notably, in this case, no transmission from the patient in Louisiana to other persons has been identified.”

Read More: Can Bird Flu Survive in Milk?

The Louisiana man’s virus did not contain changes that allow H5N1 to more easily infect mammalian cells—as the H5N1 found in most of the infected dairy cows do. But experts say that viruses are notoriously indiscriminate mutators, and that it’s a matter of time before H5N1 hits on the right combination of mutations that enable it to spread more easily among people or cause more serious disease.

It’s also important to note the man’s specific risk factors. He was over age 65, which puts him at higher risk of developing severe disease with any viral infection, and also had underlying health conditions, according to state health officials. The fact that he died after his infections doesn’t necessarily mean he had a more virulent strain of H5N1.

The bottom line—for now

Based on the genetic study, CDC scientists say the risk to the public “has not changed and remains low.” Risk of infection is highest among people in the dairy and poultry industries who make direct contact with infected animals, or among people, such as the Louisiana man, who keep backyard flocks that could get sick from contact with infected animals in the wild.

So far, U.S. health officials have not decided to recommend vaccinating anyone in the country with doses of a previously developed vaccine in the U.S. national stockpile. Newer, updated versions of a vaccine based on the same mRNA technology behind the COVID-19 shots are currently being developed and tested in the event human outbreaks occur and wider vaccination is needed.

source https://time.com/7205507/bird-flu-virus-mutating-death/

How China Is Advancing in AI Despite U.S. Chip Restrictions

In 2017, Beijing unveiled an ambitious roadmap to dominate artificial intelligence development, aiming to secure global leadership by 2030. By 2020, the plan called for “iconic advances” in AI to demonstrate its progress. Then in late 2022, OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT took the world by surprise—and caught China flat-footed.

At the time, leading Chinese technology companies were still reeling from an 18-month government crackdown that shaved around $1 trillion off China’s tech sector. It was almost a year before a handful of Chinese AI chatbots received government approval for public release. Some questioned whether China’s stance on censorship might hobble the country’s AI ambitions. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s export controls, unveiled just a month before ChatGPT’s debut, aimed to cut China off from the advanced semiconductors essential for training large-scale AI models. Without cutting-edge chips, Beijing’s goal of AI supremacy by 2030 appeared increasingly out of reach.

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But fast forward to today, and a flurry of impressive Chinese releases suggests the U.S.’s AI lead has shrunk. In November, Alibaba and Chinese AI developer DeepSeek released reasoning models that, by some measures, rival OpenAI’s o1-preview. The same month, Chinese videogame juggernaut Tencent unveiled Hunyuan-Large, an open-source model that the company’s testing found outperformed top open-source models developed in the U.S. across several benchmarks. Then, in the final days of 2024, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-v3, which now ranks highest among open-source AI on a popular online leaderboard and holds its own against top performing closed systems from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Read more: How the Benefits—and Harms—of AI Grew in 2024

Before DeepSeek-v3 was released, the trend had already caught the attention of Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO and one of the most influential voices on U.S. AI policy. In May 2024, Schmidt had confidently asserted that the U.S. maintained a two-to-three year lead in AI, “which is an eternity in my books.” Yet by November, in a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School, Schmidt had changed his tune. He cited the advances from Alibaba, and Tencent as evidence that China was closing the gap. “This is shocking to me,” he said. “I thought the restrictions we placed on chips would keep them back.” 

Beyond a source of national prestige, who leads on AI will likely have ramifications for the global balance of power. If AI agents can automate large parts of the workforce, they may provide a boost to nations’ economies. And future systems, capable of directing weapons or hacking adversaries, could provide a decisive military advantage. As nations caught between the two superpowers are forced to choose between Chinese or American AI systems, artificial intelligence could emerge as a powerful tool for global influence. China’s rapid advances raise questions about whether U.S. export controls on semiconductors will be enough to maintain America’s edge.

Read more: How Israel Uses AI in Gaza—And What It Might Mean for the Future of Warfare

Building more powerful AI depends on three essential ingredients: data, innovative algorithms, and raw computing power, or compute. Training data for large language models like GPT-4o is typically scrapped from the internet, meaning it’s available for developers across the world. Similarly, algorithms, or new ideas for how to improve AI systems, move across borders with ease, as new techniques are often shared in academic papers. Even if they weren’t, China has a wealth of AI talent, producing more top AI researchers than the U.S. By contrast, advanced chips are incredibly hard to make, and unlike algorithms or data, they are a physical good that can be stopped at the border.

The supply chain for advanced semiconductors is dominated by America and its allies. U.S. companies Nvidia and AMD have an effective duopoly on datacenter-GPUs used for AI. Their designs are so intricate—with transistors measured in single-digit nanometers—that currently, only the Taiwanese company TSMC manufactures these top-of-the-line chips. To do so, TSMC relies on multi-million dollar machines that only Dutch company ASML can build. 

The U.S. has sought to leverage this to its advantage. In 2022, the Biden administration introduced export controls, laws that prevent the sale of cutting-edge chips to China. The move followed a series of measures that began under Trump’s first administration, which sought to curb China’s access to chip-making technologies. These efforts have not only restricted the flow of advanced chips into China, but hampered the country’s domestic chip industry. China’s chips lag “years behind,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo told 60 minutes in April.

Read more: Research Finds Stark Global Divide in Ownership of Powerful AI Chips

Yet, the 2022 export controls encountered their first hurdle before being announced, as developers in China reportedly stockpiled soon-to-be restricted chips. DeepSeek, the Chinese developer behind an AI reasoning model called R1, which rivals OpenAI’s O1-preview, assembled a cluster of 10,000 soon-to-be-banned Nvidia A100 GPUs a year before export controls were introduced.

Smuggling might also have undermined the export control’s effectiveness. In October, Reuters reported that restricted TSMC chips were found on a product made by Chinese company Huawei. Chinese companies have also reportedly acquired restricted chips using shell companies outside China. Others have skirted export controls by renting GPU access from offshore cloud providers. In December, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. is preparing new measures that would limit China’s ability to access chips through other countries. 

Read more: Has AI Progress Really Slowed Down?

While U.S. export controls curtail China’s access to the most cutting-edge semiconductors, they still allow the sale of less powerful chips. Deciding which chips should and should not be allowed has proved challenging. In 2022, Nvidia tweaked the design of its flagship chip to create a version for the Chinese market that fell within the restrictions’ thresholds. The chip was still useful for AI development, prompting the U.S. to tighten restrictions in October 2023. “We had a year where [China] could just buy chips which are basically as good,” says Lennart Heim, a lead on AI and compute at the RAND corporation’s Technology and Security Policy Center. He says this loophole, coupled with the time for new chips to find their way into AI developers’ infrastructure, is why we are yet to see the export controls have a full impact on China’s AI development.

It remains to be seen whether the current threshold strikes the right balance. In November, Tencent released a language model called Hunyuan-Large that outperforms Meta’s most powerful variant of Llama 3.1 in several benchmarks. While benchmarks are an imperfect measure for comparing AI models’ overall intelligence, Hunyuan-Large’s performance is impressive because it was trained using the less powerful, unrestricted Nvidia H20 GPUs, according to research by the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab. “They’re clearly getting much better use out of the hardware because of better software,” says Ritwik Gupta, the author of the research, who also advises the Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit. Rival Chinese lab’s DeepSeek-v3, believed to be the strongest open model available, was also trained using surprisingly little compute. Although there is significant uncertainty about how President-elect Donald Trump will approach AI policy, several experts told TIME in November that they expected export controls to persist—and even be expanded.

Before new restrictions were introduced in December, Chinese companies once again stockpiled soon-to-be-blocked chips.“This entire strategy needs to be rethought,” Gupta says. “Stop playing whack-a-mole with these hardware chips.” He suggests that instead of trying to slow down development of large language models by restricting access to chips, the U.S. should concentrate on preventing the development of military AI systems, which he says often need less computing power to train. Though he acknowledges that restrictions on other parts of the chip supply chain—like ASML’s machines used for manufacturing chips—have been pivotal in slowing China’s domestic chip industry.

Heim says that over the last year, the U.S.’s lead has shrunk, though he notes that while China may now match the U.S.’s best open source models, these lag roughly one year behind the top closed models. He adds that the closing gap does not necessarily mean export controls are failing. “Let’s move away from this binary of export controls working or not working,” he says, adding that it may take longer for China to feel them bite.  

The last decade has seen a dizzying increase in the compute used for training AI models. For example, OpenAI’s GPT-4, released in 2023, is estimated to have been trained using roughly 10,000 times more compute than GPT-2, released in 2019. There are indications that trend is set to continue, as American companies like X and Amazon build massive supercomputers with hundreds of thousands of GPUs, far exceeding the computing power used to train today’s leading AI models. If it does, Heim predicts that U.S. chip export restrictions will hamper China’s ability to keep pace in AI development. “Export controls mostly hit you on quantity,” Heim says, adding that even if some restricted chips find their way into the hands of Chinese developers, by reducing the number, export controls make it harder to train and deploy models at scale. “I do expect export controls to generally hit harder over time, as long as compute stays as important,” he says.

Within Washington, “right now, there is a hesitation to bring China to the [negotiating] table,” says Scott Singer, a visiting scholar in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The implicit reasoning: ‘[If the U.S. is ahead], why would we share anything?’” 

But he notes there are compelling reasons to negotiate with China on AI. “China does not have to be leading to be a source of catastrophic risk,” he says, adding its continued progress in spite of compute restrictions means it could one day produce AI with dangerous capabilities. “If China is much closer, consider what types of conversations you want to have with them around ensuring both sides’ systems remain secure,” Singer says.

source https://time.com/7204164/china-ai-advances-chips/

See Photos of Devastating Palisades Fire in California

Thousands of residents have been forced to evacuate the Los Angeles area as wildfires continue to tear through the region Wednesday. The Palisades Fire, which was first reported at 10:30 AM PST on Tuesday, was fanned by wind gusts of up to 60 MPH into Tuesday night, leaving the Los Angeles area under major evacuation orders. 

As of Wednesday morning, the fire had spread to at least 2,921 acres and was 0% contained, with an expectation that its only going to spread due to the strong Santa Ana wind gusts and low humidity fueling the fires. 

A second fire, the Eaton fire, was reported by CalFire on Tuesday evening, and had spread to 2,227 acres by Wednesday morning. It, along with three other reported fires in Los Angeles and Riverside counties, were 0% contained on Wednesday morning. 

The fire has burned through homes and businesses in the Pacific Palisades, but official numbers on how many structures have been destroyed have not been released yet Nearly 70,000 people in the LA region were without power early Wednesday. 

California Governor Gavin Newsom, who declared a state of emergency Tuesday night, said early Wednesday morning that the state had deployed over 1,400 firefighters to the region to fight these “unprecedented fires.” As of early Wednesday morning, no fatalities had been reported. The cause of the fire is under investigation.

See photos of the massive fire below:

source https://time.com/7205487/california-wildfire-palisades-fire-photos/

Netflix Documentary Reveals How The Jerry Springer Show Became Known for Explosive Fights

Fights broke out all the time on The Jerry Springer Show, the NBC talk show that ran from 1991 to 2018, where guests went on to discuss their deepest, darkest secrets and confront their biggest enemies.

But the drama that played out on TV was only half the story. In the two-part documentary, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, out Jan. 7 on Netflix, former producers reveal what went into creating the show and how they primed guests for those fights. Springer died in 2023, and none of them have a bad word to say about him. But there is so much trash-talking among the producers about how the show was run, it’s surprising that a fight doesn’t break out in the docu-series itself.

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Here’s a look at the juiciest tidbits about what went into the making of The Jerry Springer Show. 

The goal of The Jerry Springer Show

Springer, a former news anchor who served as the mayor of Cincinnati from 1977 to 1978, initially wanted to host a serious show and had dreams of running for Congress. Instead of becoming a politician, he became a subject of politicians’ inquiries: Jerry Springer includes footage of a Chicago city council hearing into the violence of the show.

The docu-series argues that the sensational tone of the show can be traced back to its Executive Producer Richard Dominick, who worked at tabloids like Weekly World News and the Sun before he became The Jerry Springer Show showrunner from 1994 to 2008. Under Dominick’s tenure, ratings went through the roof. Guests included a man who cut off his own penis and a man who left his wife and two daughters and married a horse.

Dominick appears in the series and has no regrets about his approach. As he explains, “Life is hard,” and weird news “takes you away from your world.”

Annette Grundy, one of the producers under Dominick, says that the aim was to put together a program that would catch people’s eye even with the sound turned off.

Why there were so many fights on The Jerry Springer Show

When the show first started out, it was pretty tame. Springer would interview guests like a teenager excited about going to college. Then Dominick was hired, and he knew those softball interviews were not going to get the kind of high ratings that the networks wanted.

Producers say they got marching orders to make sure guests got into fights after an explosive 1997 episode called “Klanfrontation,” in which members of the Ku Klux Klan got into a brawl with Irv Rubin, the founder of the Jewish Defense League. The KKK members had just been initiated into the Klan, and the point of the episode was to see if they could give up their allegiance to the Klan before they got in too deep.

After this episode, show producers focused on setting up more explosive arguments through the guests.

Show guests were initially treated like royalty, shuttled to the studio in a limousine. When they got to the studio, the producers would coach them on what to say on air and try to get them worked up. In Jerry Springer, one guest recalls receiving drink tickets and being encouraged to get drunk.

In Jerry Springer, there is footage of producers doing mock interviews with guests in which they are literally screaming at them. One named Toby Yoshimura recalls, “I would throw the door open to the dressing room, pick up a chair, throw it across the green room and start screaming.” Footage of his mock interview with a guest shows him calling her a “meth-head piece of s***.” As he explains what he was trying to do, “you’re starting a s***-fight. You rev them up to tornado level and then you send them out on stage.”

As for Springer’s approach to the show, he once described the difference between himself and the popular TV show host Oprah Winfrey by saying, “she does a real talk show. I don’t do a talk show. I do a circus. There are just no lions.”

Springer viewed the show as a place to “demonstrate outrageousness,” he says in archival footage included in the docu-series. He always maintained that all opinions deserve to be heard, no matter how out-there they are.

“In a free society, the media should reflect all elements of that society, not just the mainstream. On our show, for example, we have Klansmen on, we have neo-Nazis on—they killed my family,” Springer, the son of Holocaust survivors, says in another interview shown in the series. “I hate these people. I hate what they stand for. I may hate what you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it.”

source https://time.com/7205126/jerry-springer-netflix-doc-true-story/

The Fashion Fight That Exposes the Flaw in Trump’s Tariff Logic

Tariffs might be Donald Trump’s favorite political tool — one that he envisions as a catch-all solution to U.S. problems. Recently, Trump bragged about how his threat to impose a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico if they won’t curb immigration prompted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to scurry to Trump’s Mar-A-Lago club to meet with the President-elect.

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Trump’s fondness for tariffs is connected to a skewed sense of American history. Trump sees a model in William McKinley, who, first as a Republican congressman from Ohio and later as President, pushed for tariffs and protectionist policies. On the campaign trail, Trump specifically touted the 1890 McKinley Tariffs as a model to emulate, crediting them with making the country the wealthiest in the world.

Yet, Trump’s boasts reveal a shallow understanding of the political fight over the McKinley tariffs. Instead of motivating an era of protectionist patriotism, the tariff wars of the 1890s pitted the federal state against the New York economic elite in a long struggle over power and influence. 

That was especially true of one provision in the 1890 Tariff Act that made the import of luxury dresses extremely expensive. Wealthy elite women saw this provision as an attack on their lifestyle. 

As a result, rather than acquiescing and acquiring their couture from U.S. merchants as McKinley and his supporters hoped, the wealthy women took a stand. The ensuing battle grabbed headlines for more than 10 months and entrenched the superiority of French fashion among American elites. Far from strengthening the government or the economy, it actually helped enshrine a new era of free trade. 

Much like today, tariffs were controversial in the late 19th century. Proponents saw them as a way to boost U.S. manufacturing. Yet—perhaps surprisingly—both the wealthiest Americans and the working poor opposed them. The majority of the working poor protested that tariffs raised prices without increasing wages. Meanwhile, wealthy retailers and manufacturers protested their reduced access to materials.

Read More: Tariffs Don’t Have to Make Economic Sense to Appeal to Trump Voters

The debates over tariffs were fierce. However, they weren’t partisan. Although McKinley and the Republican Party were associated with high tariffs, not all Republicans supported this policy. Many wealthy Republicans—like William Astor and William K. Vanderbilt, who made their fortune in commerce and shipping—favored free trade. 

In 1890, it was the protectionist side of the GOP that won the internecine battle. As Republicans sought to differentiate themselves politically from Democrats, they became increasingly dependent on financial contributions from industrialists who called for aggressive tariffs. 

McKinley spearheaded the effort to grant their wish, and after 450 amendments, the Republican majority in both houses of Congress passed a bill that increased the tax rate on a wide range of goods and materials, expanded significantly the graded valuation system, and imposed hefty penalties on fraud. 

Yet the provision that prompted a political uprising among wealthy New Yorkers wasn’t focused on manufacturing or common textiles like wool or cotton. While on average, the bill placed a 48% tax on items, schedule L applied a 60% tariff on silk and silk goods, velvets, laces, and embroideries. As these plush goods did not have a robust domestic industry in need of protection, elite women saw the measure as vindictive, and as a way for the government to keep making money from imports.

Shortly after President Benjamin Harrison signed the tariff bill on Oct. 1, 1890, schedule L transformed the debate from one about industry and politics to one about culture and consumption. 

At the heart of the saga were two dresses that Mrs. Caroline Astor — William Astor’s wife and the leader of “The Four Hundred,” a list of New York’s most important social influencers — ordered from the French couturier “Maison Félix” earlier that year. She intended to wear them for the Patriarch’s Ball, one of the most prestigious events on the social elite’s calendar. 

Yet, when the dresses arrived at the U.S. Custom House in New York in December 1890, federal officers, who suspected they were undervalued intentionally to avoid the tariff, seized them and sent them for appraisal. The assessment determined the gowns’ value at 3,500 francs or around $700 (about $24,000 today), which was 1.5 times more than the $400 Astor paid, and about 3.5 times the value that the designer’s agents had declared them to be worth.

Although Mrs. Astor could certainly afford to pay the few hundred dollars in fees and penalties to release her dresses, she refused to do so. She recognized that her prominence enabled her to take a powerful political stand against the tariffs — one that would capture headlines. Appealing to Secretary of the Treasury William Windom, Astor argued that the charges were wrong and that requiring her to pay was unlawful. Her protest implied that the government had no business intervening in the elite’s decisions.  

Astor’s plea to Windom fell on deaf ears. Since the government found no value in keeping the dresses, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Spaulding decided to auction them in the hopes of recuperating some of the lost fees. Customs agents also hoped that the auction would embarrass Astor and persuade her to pay the fees to avoid the scandal. 

But Astor wouldn’t blink and the auction proceeded as scheduled. 

The sale exceeded all of the government officials’ expectations, bringing the government $1,430, more than double the appraisal amount. The lucky buyers were the Bloomingdale Brothers who resold one dress in their department store, and Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, a notorious nightclub known for its lewd entertainment and cancan dancers, who gave the other dress to one of their performers—the actress Jennie Joyce.

Although Mrs. Astor was displeased that her couture gowns ended up in the hands of a low-brow entertainer, her stand inspired other women to use their financial muscle to challenge the tariffs on imported dresses. By 1891, the press reported that the New York Custom House had accumulated a large stock of Paris-made gowns seized from “rebellious” customers who refused to pay the tariffs. A cartoon in Puck magazine titled “McKinley and the Fashions” mocked the government as more interested in becoming a fashion retailer than a governing body. It depicted a sale of “Mrs. Van Astorbilt’s seized gowns”—conflating the names of Astor and Vanderbilt—as the best show in town.

Read More: Why Trump’s Tariffs Could Raise Grocery Prices

The cartoon also illustrated the futility of the government’s efforts to keep elite American women from acquiring their favorite French dresses without paying a tariff. It depicted a ball scene where only dresses with an “official Mckinley stamp” were allowed in, but it also depicted the many ways that elite women found to dodge the duty. Indeed, in 1892, the wedding dress of Cornelia Martin, the only daughter of socialite Bradley Martin, caused a scandal, when the family claimed it was a “used and soiled” dress to avoid paying the hefty taxes.

Despite hopes that that tariffs would cause the fashionable elite to turn to domestic dressmakers, wealthy American women maintained their loyalty to French designers who they believed set the standards with regards to style. 

When it came to taste, the power laid not in the corridors of government, but in the consumer decisions of women. The American fashion industry could not compete with French styles, no matter how many tariffs the government placed or how many dresses it confiscated.

By resisting the tariff, women like Mrs. Astor showed that their consumer practices were not frivolous indulgences in conspicuous consumption, but choices interwoven in the debates of the day with major implications for the economy and the political system.

In the midterm elections, which took place a month after Congress enacted the McKinley tariff, the GOP lost its House majority. Two years later—with the tariffs as the main issue—President Harrison lost to Democratic former president Grover Cleveland, and the Democrats also captured full control of Congress.

McKinley had hoped his tariffs would invigorate the economy and force the rich to pay for their luxurious consumption. Yet, their failure to change ingrained habits serves as a cautionary tale. Mrs. Astor might have lost two precious gowns in her battle with McKinley, but she won the war because the highly visible fight only intensified her cultural influence.

This suggests that Trump ought to be wary of tariff fights backfiring. While he may see them as the perfect geopolitical weapon, they aren’t likely to change the preferences of American consumers and might come with a heavy political price at the polls.

Einav Rabinovitch-Fox teaches at Case Western Reserve University and writes on the intersections between culture and politics. She is the principal editor of Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America. Her recent book is Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism (University of Illinois Press, 2021) and she is currently writing a book on the 1930s Broadway musical Pins and Needles.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/7202002/fashion-trump-tariff-history/