Charlie Warzel

Updated at 9:35 p.m. ET on October 27, 2022Sign up for Charlie’s newsletter, Galaxy Brain, here.Journalists have been declaring Twitter dead for nearly a decade. Observers see flagging user numbers or feel an amorphous, grim vibe shift and pounce, often prematurely. But this week, everyone is fretting and monitoring. Tonight, Elon Musk reportedly took control of Twitter, firing CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives, including Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, policy, and trust.

What do you get the contrarian billionaire who has everything? Try a social network to call their own.It certainly seems like the hot new thing. Almost one year ago, Donald Trump, freshly banned from mainstream platforms, ginned up a Twitter clone called Truth Social, which he claimed would constitute the first “non-cancellable” global community. Elon Musk appears to be going through with his acquisition of Twitter.

Yesterday, the world got a look inside Elon Musk’s phone. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is currently in litigation with Twitter and trying to back out of his deal to buy the platform and take it private. As part of the discovery process related to this lawsuit, Delaware’s Court of Chancery released hundreds of text messages and emails sent to and from Musk.

The only way to shut up Alex Jones, for a moment, at least, is to place him inside a courtroom. For the past few days, the Infowars founder and conspiracy theorist has been in and out of a Travis County courthouse as one of his numerous defamation trials continues. The trial will determine how much Jones and his company must pay Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, two parents from Newtown, Connecticut, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse, was killed in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012.

Sign up for Charlie’s newsletter, Galaxy Brain, here.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not yet two weeks old and yet a dozen headlines from major media outlets now suggest that Ukraine is “winning the information war” across much of the world (Russia and China may be notable exceptions).

Sign up for Charlie’s newsletter, Galaxy Brain, here.Here is my confession: I’m traumatized by a David Letterman clip. It’s from November 1995, and Letterman’s guest is a young, bespectacled Bill Gates. The video starts with a question from the legendary late-night host: “What about this internet thing?” he asks.

Right now, there is a hole in my living room. It was not there last week. We’ve tried to cover it up, but nothing seems to work. Rearranging the furniture somehow only makes the hole grow. The space, which once radiated a hopeful glow, now feels hollow. When I stare at this hole, I begin to feel as if a light has gone out in the world. Actually, not just one, many. And that’s because they have.I am, of course, talking about my Christmas tree (RIP).

Every morning, I wake up and grab my doom machine. My phone is a piece of revolutionary technology that puts the entire world a scroll away, its every pixel an industrial miracle. It’s also a cataclysm-delivery device.I roll over and click the blue “f” logo to watch older friends and relatives grow angry and entrenched in their politics. I click on Twitter and drown in a torrent of terrible news delivered by shouting messengers.

At the bleakest moment in the pandemic, when you felt your most stressed, most scared, least centered, you probably heard some variation of the phrase This is really hard. Maybe you read it; maybe your manager said it to you; maybe you said it to yourself. But that’s the truth: Our nearly two years of living through a pandemic have been hard. And like everything else in the United States, that difficulty has not been evenly distributed.