Will Gottsegen

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For the better part of 15 years, my colleague Spencer Kornhaber has been working in and around music-and-film coverage at The Atlantic, performing a service that was once, if not exactly universal, at least fairly common at newspapers and alt-weeklies across the country.

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When prices are high and global conflicts destabilize the world, some investors start looking backwards—away from an uncertain future and toward the predictability of the past. And what’s older and more dependable than gold?
Last week, amid widespread geopolitical turmoil and a weakening U.S.

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Yesterday afternoon, a federal grand jury indicted New York State Attorney General Letitia James on two charges—bank fraud and false statements to a financial institution—both connected to her purchase of a home in Virginia. The government is alleging that she saved $18,933 in all.

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Way back in 2018, before she had ever held any kind of political office, Marjorie Taylor Greene reportedly endorsed a plan to murder former President Barack Obama. “Stage is being set,” she wrote in response to one Facebook commenter’s request to “hang” Obama and Hillary Clinton. “We must be patient.

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Last week, on the first day of the still-ongoing federal-government shutdown, a curious meme appeared on New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s press-office X account.

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During prime-time football last Sunday, OpenAI debuted its biggest ad campaign yet, emphasizing three possible uses for ChatGPT: making dinner recipes, creating workout routines, and planning road trips.

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This morning, while Jews around the world settled in to observe Yom Kippur, two people were killed and three were wounded in a vehicle-ramming and stabbing attack at a synagogue in Manchester, England.

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The ascent of MAHA—the Trump administration’s movement to “Make America Healthy Again”—is part of a broader health revolution in the United States, one that venerates the past in order to carve out a purportedly healthier future.

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Standing on the United Nations General Assembly dais yesterday, President Donald Trump had a message for the global leaders and representatives in attendance: “Your countries are going to hell.”
What for? The “failed experiment of open borders,” according to the president.

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One thing we know about President Donald Trump: He loves gold. His hotels, his golf clubs, his private living quarters, his proprietary high-top sneakers and coffee grounds—all of it is to some extent coated in the same opulent shade.

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The Federal Reserve finally cut interest rates today—but that’s not likely to stop the president’s pressure campaign against the central bank anytime soon.

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For a few precarious hours last week, Elon Musk reportedly lost his title as the world’s richest man.

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Yesterday afternoon, after hearing that the conservative activist and influencer Charlie Kirk had been shot, I turned, as I often do when news breaks, to social media.

The Trumps have never been known for their subtlety: They like to do things fast, big, and loud. This is especially so in the context of cryptocurrency, a noisy and chaotic industry by nature. Remember our president’s collection of NFTs? Among the depictions on these digital trading cards is a portrait of Donald Trump in an Iron Man–inspired suit, accompanied by the caption “SUPERTRUMP.

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Right at the beginning of the second chapter of The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump declares that his “style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward.” Crucially, this was long before the invention of cryptocurrency.

Early Monday morning, the leader of the free world had a message to convey. Not about the economic turmoil from tariffs, any one of the skirmishes playing out abroad, or a surprise shake-up in his White House staff. Instead, President Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to post about something called the “$TRUMP GALA DINNER,” with a link to gettrumpmemes.com.

Donald Trump never misses a good brand opportunity. You can buy collectible Trump trading cards, limited-edition autographed Trump guitars, $499 “Trump Won” low-top sneakers, and Trump-endorsed Bibles. Long before he got into politics, Trump peddled liquor (Trump Vodka), education (Trump University), and meat (Trump Steaks). But Trump’s latest enterprise—a new cryptocurrency token named $TRUMP—might be his most brazen yet.

If there’s a single image that defines the crypto frenzy of 2021 and 2022, it’s that of the actor Matt Damon, calm and muscled, delivering the immortal proverb “Fortune favors the brave.” It was part of an ad for Crypto.com, yet it somehow captured the absurdity of what the crypto industry promised at the time: not just a digital asset, but a ludicrously magnified vision of the future.
Sam Bankman-Fried was the opposite of all that.

There was a time, not so long ago, when you actually had to show up at a concert to get ripped off. Scalping, the process of buying tickets for cheap and reselling them to desperate fans, usually on the day of a show, used to be limited to crowded stadium entranceways and sidewalk waiting areas.These days it all happens on Ticketmaster.

In the hours before Sam Bankman-Fried surrendered to police at his home on the Bahamian island of New Providence, he was still engaged in something like a last-ditch press tour: a final, desperate attempt to make amends after his $32 billion crypto empire unraveled last month. Asked during a Monday-afternoon roundtable on Twitter Spaces whether he thought the prospect of returning to the U.S. might result in his arrest, Bankman-Fried responded with a resounding no.

After losing more than $1 billion of his customers’ money, the disgraced crypto titan Sam Bankman-Fried had just one thing to say.“1) What.”That inscrutable message, posted on Twitter last weekend, followed a cataclysmic week for the 30-year-old. FTX, the cryptocurrency-trading site he’d founded and turned into a global behemoth, went insolvent. Bankman-Fried’s personal wealth plummeted from $15 billion to $0 in just one day, and the company filed for bankruptcy.

When I spoke with Sam Bankman-Fried three weeks ago, he was crypto’s golden boy. Worth about $15 billion, this quirky 30-year-old led one of the industry’s largest empires. Over the past few years, he’s palled around with Bill Clinton, graced the cover of Fortune magazine, and turned himself into a three-letter initialism: SBF. Toward the end of our rambling, 90-minute interview, Bankman-Fried dropped a casual hint at the state of his finances.

Sam Bankman-Fried, a 30-year-old co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is a $15 billion enigma. As one of the richest and most powerful men in crypto, “SBF” is already a political megadonor in the vein of Peter Thiel and George Soros: He spent millions in support of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and was one of the biggest Democratic donors in the country in the lead-up to this year’s midterm elections.

Last Monday marked one of the biggest TV events of June—Game 5 of the NBA finals. So naturally the crypto exchange Coinbase used the opportunity to air an ad poking fun at crypto’s more enthusiastic doomsayers. A series of tweets declaring “Crypto is dead”—some new, others nearly a decade old—fades in and out over a rendition of Chopin’s funeral march. Then a new slogan rises up in a harsh blue font: “Long live crypto.