“It’s cheating, but I don’t think it’s, like, cheating.” Hua Hsu talks to students and reflects on the purpose of higher education in the age of artificial intelligence. And, then, Peter Slevin on a failed attempt to sell off public lands. Plus:

• The focal point of parental anxiety
• Mental-health care for those experiencing their worst fears
• What The New Yorker was reading in 1925

On a blustery spring Thursday, just after midterms, I went out for noodles with Alex and Eugene, two undergraduates at New York University, to talk about how they use artificial intelligence in their schoolwork. When I first met Alex, last year, he was interested in a career in the arts, and he devoted a lot of his free time to photo shoots with his friends. But he had recently decided on a more practical path: he wanted to become a C.P.A. His Thursdays were busy, and he had forty-five minutes until a study session for an accounting class. He stowed his skateboard under a bench in the restaurant and shook his laptop out of his bag, connecting to the internet before we sat down.

Alex has wavy hair and speaks with the chill, singsong cadence of someone who has spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. He and Eugene scanned the menu, and Alex said that they should get clear broth, rather than spicy, “so we can both lock in our skin care.” Weeks earlier, when I’d messaged Alex, he had said that everyone he knew used ChatGPT in some fashion, but that he used it only for organizing his notes. In person, he admitted that this wasn’t remotely accurate. “Any type of writing in life, I use A.I.,” he said. He relied on Claude for research, DeepSeek for reasoning and explanation, and Gemini for image generation. ChatGPT served more general needs. “I need A.I. to text girls,” he joked, imagining an A.I.-enhanced version of Hinge. I asked if he had used A.I. when setting up our meeting. He laughed, and then replied, “Honestly, yeah. I’m not tryin’ to type all that. Could you tell?”

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Republican senators inserted (and later removed) a measure in the tax-and-spending bill that would have required the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to sell more than two million acres of publicly owned land in the next five years, ostensibly to “decrease housing costs for millions of Americans.”

Q: How bad is it?

Peter Slevin, Chicago-based contributing writer who covers politics: Not bad at all, in fact. Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican, withdrew his proposal after a cadre of Western conservatives vowed to defeat even a watered-down version. The land sales would have included only a tiny percentage of the roughly six hundred and fifty million acres managed by the federal government, but opponents were deeply skeptical of the motives and the vaguely worded guidelines for what lands would be sold and for which purposes. Conservatives in Montana were so incensed by Lee’s first attempt that the Senate proposal exempted the state in favor of eleven other Western states. “Once the land is sold, we will never get it back. God isn’t creating more land,” Representative Ryan Zinke, the Montana Republican who successfully stripped a similar provision from the House version of the bill, said. On social media, Lee wrote that, while he failed this time, he will work with President Trump “to put underutilized federal land to work for American families.” But, for now, the backlash from his own party kept the acreage out of private hands and securely under federal control.

Listen: In honor of Canada Day, revisit “Consolation,” a short story by the Canadian writer André Alexis.Watch: Richard Brody looks back at “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould,” about a Canadian icon, starring another Canadian icon—Colm Feore.Read: It’s been—well, probably more than—one week since you heard this classic Canadian tune.

P.S. “Summer demands a particular approach to drinking,” Helen Rosner once declared. To get through the season, she recommends Spanish vermouth: “a fortified wine with guts and spine and teeth and claws.” 🍷

Hannah Jocelyn and Erin Neil contributed to today’s edition.