John Dickerson

John Dickerson is a CBS senior national correspondent and Chief Political Analyst. He is also a Contributing Writer to The Atlantic and is co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest.

  • 11/03/2023: Ray Bradbury punk rock graduation.

    Ray Bradbury was so poor growing up that in order to dress up for his graduation he had to wear his uncle’s suit.

    His uncle had died recently.

    The suite was the one he wore when he died.

    His uncle was shot.

    The suit still had the bullet hole in it.

    I learned that from this lovely interview on Day at Night.

    • More Notions

  • 03/25/2023: A satisfying GPT exchange

    A lot of the coverage of change GPT has been about the learning and development of artificial intelligence. What I wonder is how we, as humans, are going to slowly learn and acculturate to the kinds of exchanges with ChatGPT and its cousins. What I’m thinking about is the psychological closeness that will accrue in […]

  • 03/24/2023: Chat GPT on the difference between how to think about important issues.

    There is a gap in American public conversation between what gets covered and what is objectively important. Presidential campaigns exacerbate this gap. I asked Chat GPT to list the important stories and then I asked Chat GPT to list the stories about issues that impact the greatest number of Americans, which is a rough proxy […]

  • 03/24/2023: This is how we beat the robots

    I’m not kidding. When artificial intelligence becomes so good at copying human behavior, we will need to get really good at head fakes. Remember this simple rule: head fakes beat deep fakes. This is how we will beat Chat GPT. https://t.co/CZoZUpjYBk — John Dickerson (@jdickerson) March 24, 2023

  • 03/24/2023: We Have Three Questions on Prime Time

    https://johndickerson.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/CN-PT-JOHN-DICKERSON-_17_16x9_JD_SOCIAL-DELIVERABLE.mp4

  • 03/23/2023: Beethoven's Grit and Gut

    You’ve probably seen the stories about how scientists used strands of Beethoven’s hair to examine his DNA. They did so in the hopes of trying to learn more about the cluster of illnesses that troubled the composer throughout his life. He was a mess. I knew that he was afflicted–most notably by a loss of […]

  • 03/22/2023: Historical Shade and political anti-intellectualism

    Governor Ron DeSantis gave this response to Donald Trump’s nickname “Ron Sanctimonious” in a recent interview: “I don’t know how to spell the sanctimonious one. I don’t really know what it means, but I kinda like it, it’s long, it’s got a lot of vowels. We’ll go with that, that’s fine.” The nickname thing is […]

  • 03/22/2023: John McPhee on reading out loud.

    From The Paris Review. INTERVIEWER Is reading your work aloud still important? MCPHEE Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. […]

  • 03/21/2023: How Imprint helps me beat the morning and makes the day richer

    For those of you who have read my Atlantic essay on recapturing my day, you know about my daily fight to beat the morning. I have found an extremely useful tool: The Imprint app. I have developped a pretty good routine for keeeping focus while at my desk (thank you Calk Neport, Marshall Goldsmith, David […]

  • 03/18/2023: Writing: The leaving out

    I’ve written a lot in this space about the space in which art takes place. In the writing I’m working on now I’m working on that puzzle. How to say what you need to say, and how to evoke and how to carry along a reader without giving them too much. I don’t want to […]

  • 03/15/2023: Faith and Hope

    At the end of 2020 I wrote about that pandemic year so I wouldn’t forget what it was like. I wrote about hope and Thomas Merton: “By hope…the abstract and impersonal become …intimate conviction,” wrote the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. “What I believe in faith, I possess and make my own by hope.” Hope in […]