As far as I can tell, patient zero was a Swedish 24-year-old named Elsa Thora. “Why did no one tell me ranch sauce is like crack?” she posted to X earlier this month, apparently hours after landing in Indianapolis for a monthlong World Cup trip. “EUROPE WE NEED RANCH ASAP.” The post received 49,000 likes and propelled Thora to a very specific kind of fame.
Photographs by Maggie Shannon
In person, they did not seem quite real. Gathered on a blue carpet under bright lights, inside a $50 million Las Vegas venue that had been built just for them, the athletes of the Enhanced Games—colloquially known as the “doping Olympics”—looked like action figures. When they stood next to other people, the effect was different but no less uncanny; it was as if they’d been Photoshopped, blown up 25 percent compared with the rest of their species.
In retrospect, maybe the protein Pop-Tarts were a bit much. Americans, broadly speaking, are in a state of protein mania. We are eating it at breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and just about anytime in between. We like it in chips, candy, soda, water. We like protein so much, in fact, that we’ve been eating it all up.
Whey-protein prices are surging, and a shortage may be imminent. “Demand is strengthening,” the USDA warned in a recent report, and “inventories remain tight.
The good news, for me at least, is that the computer thinks I have a nice personality. According to an app called MorphCast, I was, in a recent meeting with my boss, generally “amused,” “determined,” and “interested,” though—sue me—occasionally “impatient.” MorphCast, you see, purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI. It found that my affect was “positive” and “active,” as opposed to negative and/or passive. My attention was reasonably high.
Every Olympics opening ceremony is an advertisement—for the host country, for the Olympics themselves, for the notion of a free-trading global order competing through sport, in the same place and on even ground. This year, the ceremony for the Winter Olympics, held in the Italian cities Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, was also an advertisement for the past.
This focus on the old is, well, new.
Last spring, Sweetgreen did something shocking, at least insofar as the menu adjustments of a fast-casual salad chain can be described that way: It added fries. In interviews, the company’s “chief concept officer,” Nicolas Jammet, paid lip service to “reevaluating and redefining fast food,” but I suspect that Sweetgreen was also “reevaluating and redefining” how to make money in a world that appeared poised to move on from buying what the company was trying to sell.
It is believed that in the fourth century, European followers of the still-newish religion called Christianity first formally observed the period in December leading up to the birth of Jesus Christ. They called it “the advent,” from the Latin word for “approach” or “arrival,” and it was a somber time, one for preparation and contemplation. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory composed many of the texts still associated with the advent, at least as it is practiced by Catholics.
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Alan Greenspan knows a thing or two about underpants. American history’s second-longest-tenured Fed chairman also knows a thing or many about recessions, obviously, and the two are related: Sales of men’s underwear, Greenspan once reportedly suggested, are inversely proportional to economic anxiety.
Mostly, I remember the fluffy pens. When I was in elementary and middle school, nothing could be cooler than a fluffy pen, at least until it got covered in backpack grime and started to look like an exceptionally long-tailed subway rat. And no place had fluffy pens in abundance like Claire’s, a chain that sold accessories and other trinkets and, at the time, seemed to exist in every shopping center in America.
A few years ago, during the coronavirus pandemic, Daniel Humm had an epiphany. Human reliance on animal products was cooking the planet, and, as a chef, reducing his reliance on them could be part of a solution. When his New York City restaurant, Eleven Madison Park—which had once been named the world’s best restaurant—reopened, it would be free of animal products, making it the first three-Michelin-star dining room to bear that distinction.
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Of YouTube’s many microgenres, one of the most popular and most enduring is the airplane meltdown.
The Gritti Palace was built in Venice in 1475, with no expense spared. Its chandeliers are made of handblown Murano glass, its bathrooms of polychrome Italian marble. Its terrace looks out over the Grand Canal onto a domed basilica. For years, it was home to Venetian nobility, but now it’s a luxury hotel, where suites can cost €14,000 a night.
Kim Kardashian always knows what people want to see. In the early 2010s, what people wanted was Kim, and Kim obliged. She was everywhere: on her show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians; on other people’s shows; on magazine covers; and, mostly, on the internet. There, she built an apparatus of self-surveillance out of newly available technology and newly acquired cultural hunger for unfiltered celebrity.
Katy Perry climbed aboard Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocketship with a smile on her face. She held a daisy, in tribute to her daughter, Daisy.
A young woman is at a diner with friends, being stared down by a waitress with frosted lipstick and no time to waste. What she wants is a soda—but for whatever reason, she can’t bring herself to have one. Same with the girl at the pool party, and the one at the drive-through, and the one sitting in what looks like a sorority house, and the guy at the convenience store.
When I was a child, in the 1990s, there was only one kind of salt; we called it “salt.” It came in a blue cylindrical container—you probably know the one—and we dumped it into pasta water and decanted it into shakers. I didn’t know that any other kind existed, and the women who taught me to cook didn’t seem to, either: Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and Moosewood Cookbook all call, simply, for “salt” in their recipes.
In Blaine, Washington, there is a very special Starbucks. Like every Starbucks, this one has tables and chairs and coffee and pastries and a pacifying sort of vibe. Also like (most) Starbucks, it has a bathroom, open to anyone who walks in.
As long as people have been able to dress in color, we’ve been desperate to do it better. In the mid-19th century, advances in dyeing technology and synthetic organic chemistry allowed the textile industry, previously limited to what was available in nature, to mass-produce a rainbow’s worth of new shades. The problem was, people began wearing some truly awful outfits, driven to clashy maximalism by this revolution in color.
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Sometimes, at a party or on the internet, you will encounter someone who is unimpressed by human ingenuity. The pace of technological progress has stalled, they’ll say. Our art is getting dumber. We aren’t as creative as we used to be.
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You are so tired! I can tell because I’m tired too. In a couple of days, tens of millions of Americans will get on planes or trains or highways, crunching our limbs in godless ways for hours on end, worrying if we left the stove on or packed enough layers. We will fight the crowds, brave the chaos, pay the money. And then we will get to wherever we’re going, and we’ll eat.
It happened fast. Almost as soon as Hurricane Milton bore down on South Florida last month, high winds began shredding the roof of Tropicana Field, home for 26 years to the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team. Gigantic segments of Teflon-coated fiberglass flapped in the wind, then sheared off entirely.
The biggest story in months about media and democracy wasn’t an article—it was the absence of one. The news broke yesterday afternoon: For the first time in almost 50 years, The Washington Post would not be endorsing a presidential candidate. In fact, it would be ending the practice altogether. An endorsement—of Kamala Harris—had been drafted by “editorial page staffers,” a Post article reported, but then came the decision not to publish it.
Wood, I don’t think I need to work too hard to convince you, is a fairly amazing substance. It grows out of the ground and then becomes some of the most important things in the world: pencils, baseball bats, clogs, porch swings, campfires, crucifixes, tall shelves filled with books (which are also wood, if you squint a little). Solomon’s temple was wood; so was the Mayflower. So were Kane’s Rosebud and Prince’s guitar.
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Anthony Bourdain was beloved for his openness to new experiences, for his willingness to eat anything—brains; shark; cobra heart, still beating—with anyone. But he did reserve one bias: The man hated vegetarians.
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Two years ago, I had a conversation that I have thought about almost every day since. Some pals and I were playing a board game, and—don’t worry, I will not try to explain the rules of a board game to you here. But suffice it to say, it involved naming colors.
Everyone, for so long, has been worried about the honeybees. Governments, celebrities, social-media users, small businesses, multinational conglomerates—in the two decades or so since news emerged that American honeybees were disappearing, all manner of entities with a platform or a wallet have taken up and abandoned countless other causes, but they can’t quit trying to save the bees.
In 2022, at least 18 states enacted bee-related legislation.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.You can tell a lot about a cultural moment by the words it invents. New phenomena, products, social movements, and moods require new language, and an idea without a name is unlikely to stick.
Editor’s Note: In yesterday’s keynote at Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a conference hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, Maria Ressa compared the impact of social media on our information ecosystem in recent years to that of an atom bomb: destructive, all-consuming, irreversible.
In the fall of 2019, Facebook launched a massive effort to combat the use of its platforms for human trafficking. Working around the clock, its employees searched Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram for keywords and hashtags that promoted domestic servitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. Over the course of a few weeks, the company took down 129,191 pieces of content, disabled more than 1,000 accounts, tightened its policies, and added new ways to detect this kind of behavior.
Today is Prime Day. Imagine trying to explain that to an alien or to a time traveler from the 20th century. “Amazon turned 20 and on the eve of its birthday, the company introduced Prime Day, a global shopping event,” reads Amazon’s formal telling of the ritual’s 2015 origins. “Our only goal? Offer a volume of deals greater than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members.” The holiday was invented by a corporation in honor of itself, to enrich itself.