One morning in 1999, while I sat at the office computer where I built corporate websites, a story popped up on Yahoo. An internet domain name, Business.com, had just sold for $7.5 million—a shocking sum that would be something like $14 million in today’s dollars.
The dot-com era, then nearing its end, had been literally named for addresses such as this one.
I frequently ask ChatGPT to write poems in the style of the American modernist poet Hart Crane. It does an admirable job of delivering. But the other day, when I instructed the software to give the Crane treatment to a plate of ice-cream sandwiches, I felt bored before I even saw the answer. “The oozing cream, like time, escapes our grasp, / Each moment slipping with a silent gasp.” This was fine. It was competent. I read the poem, Slacked part of it to a colleague, and closed the window.
Last year, 18 percent of Stanford University seniors graduated with a degree in computer science, more than double the proportion of just a decade earlier. Over the same period at MIT, that rate went up from 23 percent to 42 percent. These increases are common everywhere: The average number of undergraduate CS majors at universities in the U.S. and Canada tripled in the decade after 2005, and it keeps growing.
Last fall, when Netflix hiked the cost of its top-tier Ultra HD plan by 15 percent, I had finally had enough: $22.99 a month just felt like too much for the ability to see Jaws in 4K video resolution. A couple of weeks later, I heard that Max was pushing up the fee of its own 4K streaming by 25 percent. Now I wasn’t just annoyed, but confused. Super-high-res televisions are firmly ensconced as the next standard for home viewing of TV and movies.
A man grunts and sighs in the crowded aisle next to you. His backpack swats your shoulder. “If an overhead bin is shut, that means it is full,” a flight attendant announces over the intercom. A passenger in yoga pants backtracks through the throng with a carry-on the size of a steamer trunk—“Sorry, sorry,” she mutters; the bag will need to be checked to her final destination. Travelers squish aside to make way for her, pressing against one another inappropriately in the process. Nobody is happy.
Updated at 8:41 p.m. ET on February 3, 2024
“I am crying,” my editor said when I connected with her via FaceTime on my Apple Vision Pro. “You look like a computer man.”
What made her choke with laughter was my “persona,” the digital avatar that the device had generated when I had pointed its curved, glass front at my face during setup. I couldn’t see the me that she saw, but apparently it was uncanny. You look handsome and refined, she told me, but also fake.
Updated at 7:33 p.m. ET on January 30, 2024
Just about everyone in America seems to be angry at higher education. Congress is angry. State governments are angry. Donors are angry. Parents are angry because schools are so expensive, and students are angry because they aren’t getting what they paid for. Just 36 percent of Americans now tell pollsters that they have significant confidence in higher education, down from 57 percent less than a decade ago.
Updated at 4:10 p.m. ET on January 4, 2024.When the conservative authors Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet accused Harvard’s Claudine Gay last month of having committed plagiarism in her dissertation, they were clearly motivated by a culture-war opportunity. Gay, the school’s first Black president—and, for some critics, an avatar of the identity-politics bureaucracy on college campuses—had just flubbed testimony before Congress about anti-Semitism on campus.
What if The Atlantic owned a train car? I wondered. Amtrak, I had just learned on the internet, allows owners of private railcars to lash onto runs along the Northeast Corridor, among other routes. “We should have a train car,” I slacked an editor. Moments later, it appeared on my screen, bright red with our magazine’s logo emblazoned in white, just like I’d ordered.
I drink the Pumpkin Spice Latte to commune with autumn. Not first for its taste, warmth or color, though also for those things. I order pumpkin spice to fuse my body with the leaves, the crisp air, the gentle reminders of death, and all the other trappings of fall. Twenty years ago this month, Starbucks brought this flavor to the world. In so doing, autumn was perfected.
You may remember the syllabus. Handed out on the first day of class, it was a revered and simple artifact that would outline the plan of a college course. It was a pragmatic document, covering contact information, required books, meeting times, and a schedule. But it was also a symbolic one, representing the educational part of the college experience in a few dense and hopeful pages.That version of the syllabus is gone.
Years ago, when I lived in Southern California, I worked with an extremely responsible project manager I’ll call Rocco. Rocco was reliable to the point of neurosis. Accountable to a fault, he was a first-guy-in-the-office guy whose shirts were always pressed and whose meetings started and ended on time. Everyone liked Rocco, but we also wished he would lighten up a little.One day, Rocco didn’t make it to a scheduled meeting. The next time we saw him, we asked what happened.
I woke up Sunday to find I had begun using the social network formerly known as Twitter. The app had updated to show the new name chosen by its owner: X. Now, underneath the friendly and familiar blue icon with a white bird, that letter alone was displayed—X—as if my iPhone was affirming that Elon Musk’s Twitter had become an error. Soon after, the bird icon disappeared, too, in favor of a white-on-black 𝕏.The change has rolled out slowly.
“Actually, we have Starry,” the counter clerk said. It was early spring of this year, and I was ordering a lemon-lime soft drink. I had asked for Sprite but was told that the establishment, a Pepsi shop, had Sierra Mist instead. But wait, it didn’t have that either, because Pepsi had just killed off its 22-year-old lemon-lime brand and replaced it with a new one: Starry. Did I want a Starry? I guessed so.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. In 2000, I got the RIM 957, my first BlackBerry. It received, in real time, emails sent to my work account. Such receipt would cause the device to flash a light and buzz, pager-style. It buzzed constantly.
Threads is here. It’s Twitter, but on Instagram. If that makes sense to you, we’re sorry, and also, you are the target audience for Threads: people who like to publish text posts on the internet but say they have ~worries~ (with tildes, just like that) about Elon Musk, the billionaire-king who now owns the bird app.
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, two computer geeks worth more than $300 billion put together, are posturing to fight each other in a mixed-martial-arts cage match.
“Vision Pro feels familiar, yet it’s entirely new.” That’s how Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, introduced the company’s new computer goggles at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday. The Vision Pro headset, which resembles a glass scuba mask with a fabric head strap, seamlessly blends the real and digital worlds, Cook said. But the product’s name, which could just as easily describe a brand of contact-lens solution, hints at a challenge.
Board games are hostage situations. “C’mon, it’s fun!” your brother or so-called friend says, and then for the next two or eight hours you’re stuck. Rules are read, cardboard chits are distributed, and rounds of wit or chance (or both) transpire. But it is fun, because the joy of gaming first involves accepting arbitrary rules just to feel the sensation of having embraced them.And yet, board games are terrible.
Many years ago, when picking up my teenage daughter from an outdoor mall, I found myself surrounded by her friends. “You’re verified,” one of them said, gushing. At first I thought this was some new youth slang term for “cool” or even “uncool.” But alas, she was referring to Twitter. I had a blue check on the service. That kind of verified.
Last fall, when generative AI abruptly started turning out competent high-school- and college-level writing, some educators saw it as an opportunity. Perhaps it was time, at last, to dispose of the five-paragraph essay, among other bad teaching practices that have lingered for generations. Universities and colleges convened emergency town halls before winter terms began to discuss how large language models might reshape their work, for better and worse.
ChatGPT, the internet-famous AI text generator, has taken on a new form. Once a website you could visit, it is now a service that you can integrate into software of all kinds, from spreadsheet programs to delivery apps to magazine websites such as this one. Snapchat added ChatGPT to its chat service (it suggested that users might type “Can you write me a haiku about my cheese-obsessed friend Lukas?”), and Instacart plans to add a recipe robot. Many more will follow.
Photographs by Peter Garritano for The AtlanticIn 2004, Steven Spielberg made an entire movie about the terror of getting stuck for months in an airport, but I might be happy never to leave the new LaGuardiaAir travel itself, the part where you are crammed like a rodent into a metal tube, is clearly miserable.
What do you get when you buy something? The thing, of course—a Big Mac, airline transit to Miami, the right to stream Bridgerton. This is the hard product. But you receive secondary goods and services as well: the box in which you can transport your burger, complimentary Wi-Fi with your SkyMiles membership, the kinship of watching a show with your family. Call this the “soft product.” If you don’t get the hard product, you’ve been swindled.
“Fudge,” I remember saying, only I didn’t say fudge, I said fuck, a word for adults. I was playing The Last of Us, a narrative video game for adults about a zombie apocalypse, and I had just died for what seemed like the thousandth time in the first room with a “clicker,” the game lore’s name for a medium-difficulty enemy.
A boyfriend just going through the motions. A spouse worn into the rut of habit. A jetlagged traveler’s message of exhaustion-fraught longing. A suppressed kiss, unwelcome or badly timed. These were some of the interpretations that reverberated in my brain after I viewed a weird digital-art trifle by the Emoji Mashup Bot, a popular but defunct Twitter account that combined the parts of two emoji into new, surprising, and astonishingly resonant compositions.
We are living through the most Twittery moment of all time. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, whose users sometimes call it a “hellsite,” tweeters have been tweeting in panic mode, as if from an aircraft about to careen into a mountainside.
It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.
Everything’s so smart now. Smartphones, smart speakers, smart lamps, smart plugs, smart doorbells, smart locks, smart thermostats. Smart things are smart not because they have smarts, but because they connect to the internet. Online connectivity allows them to be controlled, either locally or from afar—and in ways both visible and invisible.The sales pitch for smart devices typically focuses on convenience.
I’d like to drive less, exercise more, commune with nature, and hate myself with a lesser intensity because I am driving less, exercising more, and communing with nature. One way to accomplish all of these goals, I decided earlier this year, was to procure an e-bike. (That’s a bicycle with a motor, if you didn’t know.) I could use it for commuting, for errands, for putting my human body to work, and for reducing my environmental impact.