Charlie Warzel

Two hundred fifty years and two days into the American experiment, a 55-year-old bespectacled bald man from Liverpool enters a sterile hotel conference room in Atlanta, shaking his head. “It’s all gone to hell, hasn’t it?” he mutters. 
In 14 hours, the United States men’s soccer team is scheduled to play Belgium in the World Cup Round of 16, a match that ought to be a celebration of the U.S.’s triumphant, and somewhat unexpected, run in the world’s biggest sporting event.

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Elon Musk isn’t just the world’s richest man—he’s one of the most influential people alive. His companies have transformed industries, his wealth has shattered records, and his politics now shape governments and public debate.

It was all a “misunderstanding.” That’s the word that NPR Editor in Chief Thomas Evans used to describe why, today, the outlet erroneously published a report by the veteran Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg that Justice Samuel Alito had retired. According to an archived copy, available on the Wayback Machine, the 1,186-word story was published at 10:51 a.m. eastern time. In the story, Totenberg attributed her reporting to the Court itself, not to an anonymous source.

If you wanted to make an argument that we are all living in some cruel simulation, a key piece of evidence might be that the news keeps providing us with absurd, occasionally quite alarming metaphors for what it’s like to exist in 2026. To wit: The London School of Economics recently canceled an event on extreme heat because of an extreme-heat warning issued by the United Kingdom’s Met Office.

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Cory Doctorow has a refrain: “The most important thing about a gadget isn’t what it does; it’s who it does it for and what it does it to.” In this episode of Galaxy Brain, he sits down with Charlie Warzel to talk about the AI boom, making the case that the hype, vision, and dreams of endless growth are unsustainable.

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Baseball has never been synonymous with change. But in recent years, Major League Baseball has transformed radically, and this season it has embraced technology via the ABS pitch-tracking system (also known as “robot umpires”).

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How do you build a winning campaign for the era of AI? In the aftermath of the 2024 race, Democrats have been struggling to adapt to the new logic of the attention economy. On this episode of Galaxy Brain, Rob Flaherty, the deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris’s campaign, joins Charlie Warzel to talk about what went wrong and how Democrats need to embrace a new theory of attention.

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Data centers are quickly becoming the most polarizing buildings in America. On this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with the reporter Jael Holzman about the backlash to the buildings powering the AI boom. Why have data centers become controversial? What are the environmental, economic, and political impacts? How does the backlash track along left/right party lines? This episode demystifies the data-center fight.

You hear wild stuff all the time now. Like this story that Nat Friedman, a former CEO of GitHub, told recently at a conference. Friedman uses OpenClaw, an autonomous AI agent that runs on his computer, acting like a personal assistant. One day, his OpenClaw decided that he wasn’t drinking enough water, so Friedman instructed the agent to “do whatever it takes” to make sure he stays hydrated. According to Friedman, eventually the bot directed him to go to the kitchen and drink a bottle of water.

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What happens when the majority of content on the internet tips over into AI slop? On this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks to Max Spero, a co-founder of Pangram, an AI-detection company. They discuss how AI-detection tools work and how effective they can be at identifying what’s made by humans and what comes from a chatbot.

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In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks with the business writer Ed Elson about the rise of the “clip economy”—the idea that short video clips pulled from podcasts, livestreams, and other long-form content have become the dominant unit of online media, not just a promotional tool.

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In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Josh Owens, a videographer and the author of a memoir about his years working for Infowars, the media company of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Owens traces his journey from a film-school student who stumbled onto Jones’s radio show to an insider who spent four years filming, editing, and traveling for the organization.

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On this week’s Galaxy Brain episode, Charlie Warzel is joined by New York Times technology reporter Tiffany Hsu to discuss the rise of AI influencers—synthetic avatars, often indistinguishable from real people, that are flooding social-media feeds to sell supplements and promote brands. Hsu unpacks her reporting on the combination of forces converging around it, including the wellness industry, a historically fertile ground for scammers.

Seeing the Earth from space will change you so profoundly that there’s a term for it: the overview effect. The extreme minority who have had the privilege describe it similarly. You see something that you were never meant to see, namely the Earth just sitting there, with the entire universe surrounding it.

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What is Twitter’s legacy? In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel traces how Twitter, now called X, evolved from a status-update tool to one of the most culturally and politically influential—and contentious—platforms of the modern internet. Charlie is joined by early Twitter executive Jason Goldman.

On March 10, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported on a missile that had been launched from Iran. The warhead hit an open area outside Jerusalem, which Fabian confirmed by speaking with rescue services and reviewing footage of the explosion. He wrote a short post on The Times of Israel’s live blog and moved on.
Meanwhile, gamblers had wagered millions on the unfolding events of the conflict.

Chances are, you’ve seen Richard Tsong-Taatarii’s photo. Taken Wednesday in Minneapolis, it shows an unidentifiable protester face down on the ground; two Border Patrol agents are on top of him, holding him there, while a third unloads pepper spray into his face from just inches away.
Tomorrow’s front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 23, 2026
[image or embed]
— Minnesota Star Tribune (@startribune.

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In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel confronts the growing crisis around AI-generated sexual abuse and the culture of impunity enabling it. He examines how Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok is being used to create and circulate nonconsensual sexualized images often targeting women.

This weekend’s attack on Venezuela produced plenty of indelible images. The one burned into my brain was shared by President Donald Trump on Truth Social. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is sitting in front of a laptop at a makeshift command center in Mar-a-Lago. He’s monitoring the raid with a grave expression on his face, eyes intently focused on something out of frame.

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Are your parents addicted to their phone? In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel explores how technology is affecting an older generation of adults. Instead of a phone-based childhood, Warzel suggests, we may be witnessing the emergence of a phone-based retirement—one shaped by isolation, algorithmic feeds, and platforms never designed with aging users in mind.

This particularly cursed holiday week kicked off in earnest last night when my father turned his iPad in my direction. On its screen was a terribly disturbing post on X containing two images. In the first, Jeffrey Epstein was hugging and kissing a little girl. In the second, that girl was bound and gagged on a bed.
Dad was rightly outraged and disgusted. He asked me if I’d seen the photos in my time going through the Epstein files.

A friend of mine had just traveled across the country to see his family when he texted me, deeply concerned. The chaos of holiday travel is always a drag, but usually, it was offset by getting a break and watching his kids spend quality time with their grandparents. But this year was different, he said: “They were just absorbed in their phones a lot of the time, and distant.” He wasn’t talking about the kids, but the grandparents.

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Late on the Friday before Christmas, just hours before a deadline mandated by Congress, the Department of Justice released part of the trove of documents known colloquially as the Epstein files. The contents are, at different times, unnerving, enraging, banal, and heavily redacted.
At The Atlantic, we’ve been up, poring over the documents to contextualize what they mean.

Updated at 12:40 a.m. on December 20, 2025
Late on the Friday afternoon before Christmas, and just hours before a deadline mandated by Congress, the Department of Justice released part of the trove of documents known, colloquially, as the Epstein files. The contents, most of which I’ve reviewed, are, at different times, unnerving, enraging, banal, even absurd (in the case of a photo of Jeffrey Epstein posing with a giant Winnie the Pooh mascot).

It’s rude to boast, but here in 2025, you’ve got to take the wins where you can get them. This morning, Time magazine announced its Person of the Year, and it’s me. It’s you too.
If you want to get all technical about it, Time’s Person of the Year is actually not a person at all but a collection of people: the architects of AI.

This story is part of a series marking ChatGPT’s third anniversary. Read Ian Bogost on how ChatGPT broke reality, or browse more AI coverage from The Atlantic.
On this day three years ago, OpenAI released what it referred to internally as a “low-key research preview.” This preview was so low-key that, inside OpenAI, staff were instructed not to frame it as a product launch.

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In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel sits down with Eliot Higgins, founder of the open-source investigative collective Bellingcat, to examine how our public sphere slid from healthy debate into what Higgins calls “disordered discourse.” Higgins is an early internet native who taught himself geolocation during the Arab Spring and later built Bellingcat’s global community.

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In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel sits down with Eliot Higgins, founder of the open-source investigative collective Bellingcat, to examine how our public sphere slid from healthy debate into what Higgins calls “disordered discourse.” Higgins is an early internet native who taught himself geolocation during the Arab Spring and later built Bellingcat’s global community.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s X rolled out a feature that had the immediate result of sowing maximum chaos. The update, called “About This Account,” allows people to click on the profile of an X user and see such information as: which country the account was created in, where its user is currently based, and how many times the username has been changed. Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said the feature was “an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square.