The Fantasy of a Nonprofit Dating App
Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. When you swipe and swipe and nothing’s working out, it could be that you’ve had bad luck. It could be that you’re...
View ArticleElon Musk Can’t Stop Talking About Penises
Last week, between posting photos of himself and slashing the federal bureaucracy, Elon Musk found the time to make some penis jokes. The world’s richest man briefly changed his display name on X to...
View Article‘Terrified’ Federal Workers Are Clamming Up
Federal workers are scared. They don’t know who to trust. As President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have hacked away at federal agencies over the past few weeks,...
View ArticleHow Sam Altman Could Break Up Elon Musk and Donald Trump
The rivalry between Sam Altman and Elon Musk is entering its Apprentice era. Both men have the ambition to redefine how the modern world works—and both are jockeying for President Donald Trump’s...
View ArticleA New Kind of State Media
For all the norms Donald Trump flouted in his first term, his approach to filling out his administration was familiar. He rooted around the same sets of professions as his predecessors, hiring lawyers,...
View ArticleThere Are No More Red Lines
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post almost 12 years ago, he went out of his way to assuage fears that he would turn the paper into his personal mouthpiece. “The values of The Post do not need...
View Article‘It Feels Like It’s Chaotic on Purpose’
Updated at 3:20 p.m. on March 2, 2025. If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Matteo Wong on Signal at @matteowong.52.Late Friday night, the Trump...
View ArticleThe Nicest Swamp on the Internet
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.In the ever-expanding universe of obsolete sounds, few can compare to the confident yawp of a dial-up modem....
View ArticleChatbots Are Cheating on Their Benchmark Tests
Generative-AI companies have been selling a narrative of unprecedented, endless progress. Just last week, OpenAI introduced GPT-4.5 as its “largest and best model for chat yet.” Earlier in February,...
View ArticleTrump’s Crypto Reserve Is Really Happening
Donald Trump wants to get back into the casino business. These days, the onetime owner of the infamous Taj Mahal casino is not interested in slot machines. He is set on a much newer kind of gambling:...
View ArticleWait, Who Is Posting Those Unflattering J. D. Vance Memes?
J. D. Vance doesn’t look like himself. In recent days, memes have spread across social media in which the vice president’s face has been Photoshopped to give him cartoonishly chubby cheeks. He looks...
View ArticleMove Fast and Destroy Democracy
So, it was capitalism after all. More specifically, crony capitalism. I am talking, of course, about how the leaders of the tech world revealed themselves before and after the 2024 presidential...
View ArticleDOGE’s Plans to Replace Humans With AI Are Already Under Way
If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Matteo Wong on Signal at @matteowong.52.A new phase of the president and the Department of Government Efficiency’s...
View ArticleElon Musk Looks Desperate
For years, Donald Trump’s critics have accused him of behaving like a crooked used-car salesman. Yesterday afternoon, he did it for real on the White House South Lawn.Squinting in the sun with Elon...
View ArticleWas Sam Altman Right About the Job Market?
The automated future just lurched a few steps closer. Over the past few weeks, nearly all of the major AI firms—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Amazon, Microsoft, and Perplexity, among others—have...
View ArticleLeBron James and the Limits of Nepotism
I need you to watch this 13-second video of ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith walking to his courtside seat at a Los Angeles Lakers game. I need you to notice how Smith, perhaps the biggest voice in...
View ArticleForever 21’s Brief, Hideous Life
Forever 21 opened in my hometown when I was in middle school, when the opening of a new store at the mall was still a big deal. When the sign first went up, nobody knew what “Forever 21” was. I...
View ArticleSearch LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI
Editor’s note: This search tool is part of The Atlantic’s investigation into the Library Genesis data set. You can read an analysis about LibGen and its contents here. Find The Atlantic’s search tool...
View ArticleThe Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem
Updated at 5:40 p.m. ET on March 21, 2025Editor’s note: This analysis is part of The Atlantic’sinvestigation into the Library Genesis data set. You can access the search tool directly here. Find The...
View ArticleThe Careless People Won
Perhaps the biggest surprise of Careless People, the new tell-all memoir by the former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, is that a book chronicling the social network’s missteps and moral...
View ArticleWhat the JFK File Dump Actually Revealed
In 1962, the CIA had a driver’s license made for one of its officers, James P. O’Connell. It gave him an alias: James Paul Olds. We know this because the document containing the information was...
View ArticleThe Gleeful Cruelty of the White House X Account
On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post...
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My Day Inside America’s Most Hated Car
Photographs by Kent NishimuraOn the first Sunday of spring, surrounded by row houses and magnolia trees, I came to a horrifying realization: My mom was right. I had been flipped off at least 17 times,...
View ArticleThe Great Tesla Sell-Off
In Los Angeles, where I live, you don’t expect to be heckled while driving an electric car to the grocery store. But on a recent afternoon, a couple of men on bikes saw the Tesla logo on the front of...
View ArticleSo Much for the MAGA Divorce
Steve Bannon seems resigned to sharing power with the “tech bros,” as he calls them. Last week, when I spoke with President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and continued ally, he was clear about...
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