Americans don't want to work past the traditional retirement age of 65. In fact, we increasingly don't intend to work past 62, Axios' Felix Salmon writes.

• Why it matters: The pandemic was a pointed reminder that we only live once. Millions of workers seem to have taken that lesson to heart.

🖼️ The big picture: The U.S. population is getting older. The Social Security trust fund is running out of money. Technological improvements mean that many jobs are much less physically taxing than they used to be.

• All of those developments favor working longer. Yet when we're asked, only 46% of workers under 62 expect to continue working past that age.

That percentage has been declining for a decade — but has plummeted since the pandemic.

• New York Fed researchers found that since March 2020, the number of years Americans who expect to continue working has plunged by 9.5%.
• "The decline is broad-based across age, education, and income groups," they write.

🔎 Between the lines: Thank the long bull market in stocks and housing, which has made 60- to 70-year-olds richer than ever — and able to afford retirement.

• Less happily, millions of Americans found themselves forced into retirement after 2020 by ill health — a phenomenon that contributed to the subsequent labor shortage.

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AI's heaviest hitters are suiting up for a titanic showdown over who will answer the world's questions, Axios' Scott Rosenberg and Ina Fried write.

• Why it matters: The new fight has broken out because tech's leaders expect users will move away from traditional internet search and toward seeking quick answers from chatbots — using text, voice, or even connecting with AI-powered virtual personas.

State of play: Google has owned this role in the digital universe for two decades, reaping a river of cash from monetizing users' attention. But the rise of ChatGPT — owned by OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft — opened the door to change.

🔬 Zoom in: A new voice-assistant version of ChatGPT could headline today's OpenAI demo of new features for the popular chatbot, The Information reports.

• Google has a raft of new AI tricks to show off at its event this week.

🍎 Apple's turn will come next. The iPhone maker has promised to unveil its long-awaited generative AI strategy at its Worldwide Developers Conference in early June.

• The company may showcase a new version of Siri, according to The New York Times, which described the upgrade as a "brain transplant" for Apple's voice assistant.

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A big problem for President Biden's campaign: COVID and Jan. 6 have been pushed to the back of many people's minds, according to a poll by The New York Times and Siena College.

• Why it matters: These were two of the biggest news stories in recent American history. Voters are forgetting their association with the Trump presidency.

Voters are — by far — most likely to (negatively) cite former President Trump's behavior and the economy (as a positive).

• "Because of recency bias ... people typically feel their current problems most sharply. And they tend to have a warmer recall of past experiences, which can lead to a sense of nostalgia," The Times' Upshot writes.

📌 Between the lines: The Biden campaign is pushing to puncture the Trump nostalgia bubble. In the past month, Biden has hit Trump's family separation policy, COVID bleach comments and the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

• Keep reading (NYT gift link).

📊 Breaking: Trump leads in five of six swing states in Times/Siena polls out this morning.

• In a head-to-head race with Trump, Biden squeaks out a lead among likely voters in Michigan. Among registered voters (a looser screen), Biden leads in Wisconsin. Trump leads among likely voters in Wisconsin.
• Trump leads both groups in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania (in the inaugural Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll).

Why it matters: "Trump's strength is largely thanks to gains among young, Black and Hispanic voters," writes Nate Cohn, The Times' chief political analyst.

🏛️ In Senate races, Democratic candidates led in all four states polled: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada.

Pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses are waning. But small contingents of students are continuing demonstrations at commencement ceremonies.

• Some 30 students walked out of Duke's commencement ahead of a speech by Jerry Seinfeld, who's staunchly pro-Israel.

Other weekend protests occurred at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, U.C. Berkeley, Boston's Emerson College and the University of Wisconsin.

• Go deeper: SecState Tony Blinken delivers some of the Biden administration's strongest public criticism of Israel's conduct.

President Biden, speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Seattle on Friday evening, on Donald Trump's courthouse demeanor:

Hello, Seattle! And thank you for the warm welcome. But please keep it down because Donald Trump is sleeping. "Sleepy Don!" I kind of like that these days.

Read the full speech.

Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki claims in her new memoir, "Say More," that President Biden never looked at his watch during a ceremony for soldiers killed during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. But that contradicts news photos and firsthand accounts of Gold Star families, Axios' Alex Thompson writes.

• Psaki, now a star anchor at MSNBC, writes that "the president looked at his watch only after the ceremony had ended." She accuses critics of "misinformation."

Why it matters: In TV ads and social media posts, Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly have used images of Biden checking his watch during the ceremony to try to undermine the president's brand as an empathetic leader.

🖼️ The big picture: Psaki's book is the latest instance of current and former Biden administration officials downplaying or misrepresenting controversial episodes from the Afghanistan withdrawal ahead of the election.

• The story stands out because her account of Afghanistan is one of the few parts of the book where Psaki goes deep behind the scenes of the Biden White House.

Reality check: Psaki's new account is at odds with photos from the ceremony at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and on-the-record statements from Gold Star families who were there.

• AP's photographer on the tarmac snapped two photos of Biden looking at his watch twice, 10 minutes apart, as fact-checkers at USA Today and Snopes noted soon afterward.

Psaki declined to comment.

• Keep reading.

Press freedom in the U.S. has fallen sharply in the past year to a new low, Axios' Sara Fischer writes from this year's World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders.

• Why it matters: The organization cited consolidation that has gutted local news, and unprecedented levels of distrust in American media.

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Imagine if you could touch your phone screen to feel the texture of that shirt you might buy, the roughness of a sand dune, or the ridges of a block of wood.

• That's the promise of surface haptics — a branch of mechanical engineering that aims to improve the displays in our cars, appliances, and, yes, on cellphones and tablets, Axios' Jennifer A. Kingson writes.

🫰 Zoom in: Northwestern University engineers have built touchscreens that enable us to feel sensations — sticky, rough, fuzzy.

• They've produced "a touchscreen that touches you back," as Michael Peshkin, professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern, tells Axios.

Keep reading.