Download a PDF of this issue May|June 2023 Vol. 121, No. 5 Features Alien Minds, Immaculate Bullshit, Outstanding Questions College in the age of ChatGPT. By Trey Popp Basketball In His Blood Thirty years after starting the basketball juggernaut AND1, Seth Berger C’89 WG’93 continues to live and breathe hoops—as a father of three (plus a guardian to five Nigerian brothers), a venture capitalist affiliated with the Philadelphia 76ers, and the longtime head coach of a suburban Philadelphia boarding school team that his AND1 cofounder calls the “Duke of high school basketball.” By Dave Zeitlin A ..read more

“ChatGPT is on everyone’s mind right now,” John Jackson told me in March during an interview about the PIK Professor and Annenberg School dean becoming Penn’s 31st provost on June 1 [“Gazetteer,” page 18]. It has certainly been on the mind of senior editor Trey Popp, with the result being this issue’s cover story, “Alien Minds, Immaculate Bullshit, Outstanding Questions.” The title conveys the complexity, uncertainty, and at times sheer weirdness involved in the ongoing speculation over how the introduction of ChatGPT and other large language models—able to answer questions and produce text on ..read more

College in the age of ChatGPT. By Trey Popp | Illustration by Chris Gash Sidebar | The Coming Economic and Ethical Earthquake Download a PDF of this article InJune 2021, Chris Callison-Burch typed his first query into GPT-3, a natural language processing platform developed by the San Francisco-based company OpenAI. Callison-Burch, an associate professor of computer and information science, was hardly new to AI chatbots or the neural networks that power them. He’s been at the forefront of machine translation since the early 2000s, and at Penn he teaches courses in computational linguistics and ..read more

Dr. Holly Pittman at Lagash, December 2018. Unearthing the world’s oldest tavern while reconstructing daily life in ancient southern Mesopotamia. By Beebe Bahrami | Photography courtesy Lagash Archaeological Project Sidebar | Ancient Lagash Download a PDF of this article It is the spring of 2022 and hard going. An excavator diligently chips away densely packed clay earth within the walls of an archaic mudbrick building.  Hard-packed tawny earth stretches toward the horizon in every direction. Sara Pizzimenti, an archaeologist and ceramicist from the University of Pisa and one of the seaso ..read more

Like the brand-new students who will soon be arriving, Penn is in the process of creating a new beginning. By Liz Magill One of the greatest gifts of working in higher education is that with each new class of students, you get a dose of reinvention and reinvigoration yourself. It’s the same for our University. At exactly 7 p.m. Eastern Time on March 30 we announced the newest Penn class, the Class of 2027. Out of nearly 60,000 applicants—the largest pool in Penn history—the class we have brought together is undeniably outstanding. Letters of recommendation described extraordinary contributions ..read more

Aging men, mutinous women, some edgy content, more band notes. Keeping Up Howard Freedlander’s essay “The Cane and the Glory” on his use of a cane at the 2022 55th Reunion parade of classes [“Alumni Voices,” Mar|Apr 2023] caught my attention, but not only for the similar spelling of our last names. Like Howard, I too am getting older (actually five years older than he). Through good fortune, I have not yet been relegated to canedom, having to date avoided a serious fall. In fact, I feel damn healthy! Yet I share Howard’s vanity and feelings of inner toughness and recognize that my masculinity ..read more

Notes on a skewering. By Nick Lyons Many years ago a dear old friend sent me a letter nasty enough to signal the end of a long and happy friendship. It was a sharp smack in the face—deliberate, unexpected, harsh, and meant to hurt. It did. What had I done to deserve this? What dreadful unintended affront to him, what lack of respect, what rude comment on his latest novel? I had used the word “miffed” in an otherwise genial letter, expressing mild irritation that he had not visited an exhibition of my wife’s paintings. My letter had mostly been devoted to asking about his writing, his wife’s h ..read more

The upside of being a sucker. By Tess Wilkinson-Ryan The first year of the pandemic, my fourth-grader and I did a lot of walking around Philadelphia. I would insist that we get out each day, cajoling her with pleas for “fresh air” or “stretching our legs.” To engage her on one of these walks, I told her she could be a subject in some of the studies I was reading for my research project, a book on suckers. I had been rereading economics and psychology studies from the last half-century to chart how the fear of playing the fool can distort human decision-making. I started my daughter off with a ..read more

Lauren Cho, Mask and Wig’s first-ever female lead, starred in the spring show opposite David McCabe. New traditions were made—and longstanding ones maintained—as women took the stage for Mask and Wig’s annual spring production for the first time in the group’s 134-year history. “Isaw them, and I thought, I have to do this.” So recalled Lauren Cho C’26, who as a high school senior watched the Mask and Wig Club’s show in New York during its 2022 spring tour. A few months earlier, the 134-year-old Penn group that had long billed itself as the country’s “oldest all-male collegiate musical comedy t ..read more

A new book from the Annenberg Public Policy Center details how the 2020 election continues to shape US politics. Whether or not the 2024 presidential election turns out to be a rematch between Joe Biden Hon’13 and Donald Trump W’68, the issues Democrats and Republicans will be fighting over are likely to sound familiar. Arguments central to the 2020 election concerning the economy, pandemic response, race and social justice, and the legitimacy of the US electoral system played prominent roles in the 2022 midterms and are still very much with us. At the same time, 2020 reflected an extraordina ..read more