Hop Backstage

Rick Clark, the executive director of undergraduate admission at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his staff spent weeks this summer pretending to be high school students using A.I. chatbots to fill out college applications.The admissions officers each took on a different high school persona: swim team captain, Eagle Scout, musical theater performer. Then they fed personal details about the fictional students into ChatGPT, prompting the A.I. chatbot to produce the kind of extracurricular activity lists and personal essays commonly required on college applications.Mr. Clark said he wanted to get a handle on how A.I. chatbots might reshape the admissions process this fall — the start of the first full academic year that the tools will be widely available to high school seniors — and c...

As they traversed the harsh, wooded terrain in northeastern Greece, the 18 asylum seekers were presented with an agonizing dilemma: Take the safer route through villages and over highways, but into the arms of the Greek authorities, or travel through the forests and fields being ravaged by Europe’s largest recorded wildfire.They opted for the forests.On Aug. 21, around 9 p.m., the group of asylum seekers burned to death in Europe’s largest recorded wildfire. Their bodies, charred beyond recognition, were discovered the next day.Greek authorities assumed the victims were migrants because no one was looking for missing people locally. And for more than a month, their identities, and the circumstances of their deaths, remained a mystery.But over weeks of reporting, The New York Times was able...

Peter Salovey, the president of Yale, announced Thursday that he will step down in June after 11 years in office, during which he increased the university’s endowment, student enrollment, and its racial, ethnic and economic diversity.This month, the university announced that its entering class was one of its largest ever — 22 percent of students were eligible for federal Pell Grants for low-income students, and 21 percent were the first in their families to go to college. A decade ago, the number of first-generation students was 12 percent. This year, Black students made up 14 percent of the class, 18 percent were Latino, 42 percent were white and 30 percent were Asian American. (The numbers do not add up to 100 because some students indicated two or more races and ethnicities.)Peter Sa...