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White lies can pop up pretty regularly in our everyday social lives. I myself am a recovering white liar: In my teens and early 20s, I found it much easier to fib that I wasn’t feeling well or that I had a family obligation rather than tell an acquaintance I was just too busy to see them.

A growing number of Americans are pointing to immigration as a top concern heading into the election. But a substantive debate on the issue has become impossible, given that Donald Trump and his vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, are only escalating their use of outright lies and xenophobia in lieu of anything resembling fact-based policy solutions.

Photographs by Iva Sidash
For six years, Vladimir Soldatov has been the custodian of Ukraine’s time. He oversees a laboratory in the city of Kharkiv that contains about a dozen clocks and several distributive devices: gray boxes, humming in gray racks and connected via looping cables, that together create, count, and communicate his country’s seconds. The lab is located within the Institute of Metrology, a cluster of cream-colored buildings now scarred by Russian artillery.

When the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania was decommissioned in 2019, it heralded the symbolic end of America’s nuclear industry. In 1979, the facility was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in the nation’s history: a partial reactor meltdown that  didn’t release enough radiation to cause detectable harm to people nearby, but still turned Americans against nuclear power and prompted a host of regulations that functionally killed most nuclear build-out for decades.

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In the 1940s, a man named Earl Tupper invented a product that would transform how Americans store their food. Women started selling his airtight plastic containers, dubbed “Tupperware,” to their friends and neighbors.

In conversations caught on hidden camera, New York City’s former COVID czar said that he’d organized a pair of sex parties in the second half of 2020, as New Yorkers coped with peak pandemic social isolation. “The only way I could do this job for the city was if I had some way to blow off steam every now and then,” Jay Varma told an undercover reporter with whom he thought he was on a date.

Donald Trump has been held liable for rape. He has been accused, by more than 20 women, of sexual misconduct. He has denied each charge. He has also bragged about assaulting women and getting away with it.
One might assume, then, that he would prefer to avoid sexual violence as a campaign issue.

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For a moment, the AI doomers had the world’s attention. ChatGPT’s release in 2022 felt like a shock wave: That computer programs could suddenly evince something like human intelligence suggested that other leaps may be just around the corner.

Mark Robinson is many things: the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, the Republican nominee for governor, and a bigot. But the key to understanding him is that he is a poster.
The poster is an internet creature—the sort of person who just can’t resist the urge to shoot off his mouth on Facebook or Twitter or in some other online forum (for example, the message boards on the porn site Nude Africa). These posts tend to be unfiltered and not well thought out. Sometimes they’re trolling.