The Scourge of ‘Win Probability’ in Sports
To watch baseball or any other sport is to confront the fundamental unpredictability of the universe, its utter refusal to bend to your wishes, no matter how fervent. In recent years, some broadcasters...
View ArticleWhat’s With All the Trumpy VCs?
Updated at 8:07 a.m. ET on October 15, 2024The venture capitalist Shaun Maguire is a particularly prolific poster. And lately, his takes have become almost unavoidable.Maguire manages Sequoia Capital’s...
View ArticleFeeld, the Polyamory Dating App, Made a Magazine. Why?
A lover of magazines may find a few good reasons to pay attention to AFM, a new publication about sex and relationships. It’s visually fun and full of excellent writing. It’s also the latest in a long...
View ArticleThe End of Parallel Parking
For decades, my dad has been saying that he doesn’t want to hear a word about self-driving cars until they exist fully and completely. Until he can go to sleep behind the wheel (if there is a wheel) in...
View ArticleThe AI Boom Has an Expiration Date
Over the past few months, some of the most prominent people in AI have fashioned themselves as modern messiahs and their products as deities. Top executives and respected researchers at the world’s...
View ArticleWhat Does That Bark Mean?
The first thing I ever said to my dog was, “Do you want to come home with me?” He was six pounds, and 10 weeks old. He craned his head forward and sniffed my mouth.In the four years since, I have...
View ArticleA Calculator’s Most Important Button Has Been Removed
I worry that the calculator we’ve known and loved is not long for this Earth. This month, when I upgraded my iPhone to the latest operating system, iOS 18, it came with a refreshed Calculator app. The...
View ArticleThe Age of AI Child Abuse Is Here
Muah.AI is a website where people can make AI girlfriends—chatbots that will talk via text or voice and send images of themselves by request. Nearly 2 million users have registered for the service,...
View ArticleThe Slop Candidate
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.For me, it’s the amber glow of the fry machine gently illuminating the exhausted 45th president of the United States of...
View ArticleAmerica’s Strangest Tourist Destination
At a gate topped by barbed wire just north of White Sands Missile Range, a miles-long line of vehicles formed before dawn on Saturday. Once or twice a year, the U.S. Army rolls this gate open so that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
‘Stop Counting Votes, or We’re Going to Murder Your Children’
Photographs by Jenn AckermanWhen Melissa Kono, the town clerk in Burnside, Wisconsin, began training election workers in 2015, their questions were relatively mundane. They asked about election rules,...
View ArticleA Defense of the Leaf Blower
The trees have a job: to blush their leaves orange or red and then drop them to the lawns and pavements below. If you are one of the many millions of Americans who own their homes, you may soon be...
View ArticleThe Next ‘Stop the Steal’ Movement Is Here
The election is rigged. Democrats are already working to steal the election from Donald Trump, and the results are going to be illegitimate. That is, unless Trump wins. This is the message that has...
View ArticleThe Worst Statue in the History of Sports
Sunday was supposed to be one of the greatest days of Dwyane Wade’s life. Back in January, Pat Riley, the longtime president of the Miami Heat, announced the team’s plans to honor Wade with a statue,...
View ArticleThis Is What $44 Billion Buys You
Elon Musk didn’t just get a social network—he got a political weapon.It’s easy to forget that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was so rash and ill-advised that the centibillionaire actually tried to...
View ArticleThe Giant Asterisk on Election Betting
On Election Night, millions of Americans will watch anxiously as the ballot counts stream in. Most will be worried about the political future of their country. Some will also have money on the...
View ArticleDemocrats Are Treating a Big Win as a Liability
Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a tight race for a Senate seat, has been on the defensive about a manufacturing renaissance happening in her own backyard.Thanks to incentives that...
View ArticleSomething That Both Candidates Secretly Agree On
If the presidential election has provided relief from anything, it has been the generative-AI boom. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has made much of the technology in their public messaging, and...
View ArticleThe Gateway Pundit Is Still Pushing an Alternate Reality
The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website with a history of spreading lies about election fraud, recently posted something out of the ordinary. It took a break from its coverage of the 2024 presidential...
View ArticleThe Broken Promise of USB-C
Can we talk about the cables in our lives? I’ll start: I have a circa-2020 iPhone, which features a Lightning port for charging. My monitor, laptop, and e-reader all have ports for USB-C, the connector...
View ArticleMusk’s Twitter Is the Blueprint for a MAGA Government
In a recent interview, the former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made an offhanded comment that connected a few dots for me. Ramaswamy was talking with Ezra Klein about the potential...
View ArticleNobody Look at Mark Zuckerberg
After the 2016 elections, critics blamed Facebook for undermining American democracy. They believed that the app’s algorithmic News Feed pushed hyperpartisan content, outright fake news, and...
View ArticleThe Right’s New Kingmaker
Charlie Kirk took his seat underneath a tent that said Prove me wrong. I wedged myself into the crowd at the University of Montana, next to a cadre of middle-aged men wearing mesh hats. A student...
View ArticleX Is a White-Supremacist Site
X has always had a Nazi problem. I’ve covered the site, formerly known as Twitter, for more than a decade and reported extensively on its harassment problems, its verification (and then...
View ArticleThe Tyranny of the Election Needle
TheNew York Times is once again poking readers’ eyes with its needle. A little digital gauge, like the one that might indicate that your boiler or nuclear-power plant is about to explode, “estimates...
View Article