Because of time’s arrow, my daughter, who was once a toddler, is now a preteen. A new question thus arises: When should I let her get a smartphone? This problem isn’t new to me. I have two older kids, now in their 20s. Back in the day, I bought each of them an iPod Touch—essentially, a smartphone without the phone—when they were about her age, and then the full device at around the start of high school. But online life was different then.
“Interviews are NOT real anymore.” So reads the opening caption of a TikTok posted in September, punctuated by the skull-and-crossbones emoji. In the video, a young woman interviews for a job on a video call. She has a smartphone propped up against her laptop screen, so she can read off the responses that an AI app has composed for her: “Um, yeah, so, one of my key strengths is my adaptability.” She’s got a point.
A college senior returning to classes this fall has spent nearly their entire undergraduate career under the shadow—or in the embrace—of generative AI. ChatGPT first launched in November 2022, when that student was a freshman. As a department chair at Washington University in St. Louis, I witnessed the chaos it unleashed on campus. Students weren’t sure what AI could do, or which uses were appropriate. Faculty were blindsided by how effectively ChatGPT could write papers and do homework.
“Wi-Fi is available on this flight,” the flight attendant announced on a recent trip I took from New York City to St. Louis. She recited her routine by rote, and Wi-Fi is among the details that now need to be conveyed, along with explaining how to use a seatbelt and enjoining passengers not to smoke e-cigarettes on board.
But when the time came to use the Wi-Fi, the service didn’t work. Eventually, enough people noticed this that the crew “rebooted” it, after which it still didn’t work.
Air travelers in America shall no more doff their chukkas, their wedges, their wingtips, their espadrilles, or their Mary Janes, according to a rule-change announced by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday. It’s been more than two decades since the Transportation Security Administration started putting people’s footwear through its scanners, after a man named Richard Reid tried and failed to detonate his high-top sneakers on a flight to Miami in December 2001.
If you have tips about DOGE and its data collection, you can contact Ian and Charlie on Signal at @ibogost.47 and @cwarzel.92.
If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens.
The start of spring semester is a hopeful time on college campuses. Students fill the quads and walkways, wearing salmon shorts or strappy tank tops. Music plays; frisbees fly. As a career academic, I have been a party to this catalog-cover scene for more than 30 years running. It looks made-up, but it is real. Every year in the United States, almost 20 million people go to college, representing every race, ethnicity, and social class. This is college in America—or it has been for a long time.
Updated at 5:49 p.m. ET on February 10, 2025
“I personally think that the post–World War II system of big research universities funded heavily by the government will not continue.” That’s how one professor at a big state research university responded when I asked how he was feeling about our shared profession. That system is the cornerstone of U.S. higher education—at Harvard or Princeton, yes, but also the University of Michigan and Texas A&M.
“Can you never do that again?” my son texted me on Monday in our family group chat. I had sent a series of photos of my flight in the tiny Cessna Caravan that had just flown my mortal being 120 miles, from Chicago O’Hare International Airport to West Lafayette, Indiana. The nine-seat aircraft, which runs on a single turboprop engine, was so small that the ground crew had to weigh luggage and passengers in order to distribute their weight evenly in the cabin.
“I’d summarize it as: fuck.” That’s what one senior university administrator told me when I asked about the chaos that erupted at the National Institutes of Health this week. Academics are in panic mode in the face of sudden new restrictions from the Trump administration. The Department of Health and Human Services has told employees of several health agencies, including the NIH, to stop communicating with the public.
Yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would end fact-checking on its platform. In the process, a partnership with the network of third parties that has provided review and ratings of viral misinformation since 2016 will be terminated. To some observers, this news suggested that the company was abandoning the very idea of truth, and opening its gates to lies, perversions, and deception. But this is wrong: Those gates were never really closed.
Bluesky, a Twitter-style, short-post social-media site, has exploded in popularity since last week, adding 1 million users in just that time. A lot of people hate X—especially if they hate Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, or Nazis, or algorithmic feeds, or shadowbanning, or impersonation, or engagement farming, or porn hustling. Can Bluesky be the fix for all those woes, and a lasting replacement for the site that once was Twitter? I really doubt it.
The New York Times is once again poking readers’ eyes with its needle. A little digital gauge, like the one that might indicate that your boiler or nuclear-power plant is about to explode, “estimates the outcome of the race in real time based on polling data,” as the Times puts it. As we write this, the needle is piercing the red “Likely” side of the gauge, indicating that the decision is “Likely Trump.
Can we talk about the cables in our lives? I’ll start: I have a circa-2020 iPhone, which features a Lightning port for charging. My monitor, laptop, and e-reader all have ports for USB-C, the connector that looks like a pill; my car has USB-A, which is the older, rectangular design that is somehow always upside-down.
The trees have a job: to blush their leaves orange or red and then drop them to the lawns and pavements below. If you are one of the many millions of Americans who own their homes, you may soon be faced with the question of what to do with all that foliage. Maybe you will rake your leaves into piles. Maybe you will let them decay into the ground. And maybe—just maybe—you will risk your hard-earned reputation by gusting them away with a leaf blower.
Yesterday, pagers used by Hezbollah operatives exploded simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least a dozen people and injuring thousands. Today brought another mass detonation in Lebanon, this time involving walkie-talkies. The attacks are gruesome and shocking. An expert told the Associated Press that the pagers received a message that caused them to vibrate in a way that required someone to press buttons to stop it. That action appears to have triggered the explosion.
The minivan dilemma: It is the least cool vehicle ever designed, yet the most useful. Offering the best value for the most function to a plurality of American drivers, a minivan can cart seven passengers or more in comfort if not style, haul more cargo than many larger trucks, and do so for a sticker price roughly a quarter cheaper than competing options. Even so, minivan sales have been falling steadily since their peak in 2000, when about 1.3 million were sold in the United States.
Today, in a streamed presentation, Apple announced the latest version of the iPhone, along with upgrades to the AirPods and the Apple Watch. As has been the case since the start of the pandemic, the presentation took the form of a prerecorded showcase, with lots of camera movement and hyper-rehearsed delivery by Apple staff.
A federal judge has declared Google a monopolist. In a 277-page decision released yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta concluded that the online-search company abused its dominance and suffocated competitors—in part by paying Apple and Samsung tens of billions of dollars a year to make Google the default search engine on mobile devices.
Does this mean curtains for Googling? Hardly.
“Democrats say that it is racist to believe … well, they say it’s racist to do anything,” J. D. Vance proclaimed during a campaign rally this week, after bringing up the need for voter-ID requirements. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too,” he said, adding, “But—it’s good.” His audience laughed, and Vance laughed before punctuating the moment: “I love you guys.”
The clip has spread widely, mostly because it seems absurd.
This year marks the tenth Prime Day, the shopping holiday that Amazon invented for itself in 2015, in honor of the company’s 20th anniversary. The marketing effort was so successful, according to Amazon, that sales exceeded those from the previous year’s record-breaking Black Friday. Early Prime Day success was also measured in Instant Pot 7-in-1 multifunctional pressure cookers: 24,000 were purchased on the first Prime Day; on the second, 215,000.
As a hamburger enthusiast, I often need directions to some burger joint I’ve never tried. Recently, my phone’s instructions sent me toward the on-ramp for the interstate. Then the app urged me, in 500 feet, to merge onto the freeway. By that time, though, what else could I have done? Did the app imagine that I might get confused, and turn around instead?
Mapping software is incredible.
Just the other day, I had to read the manual. I’d borrowed my neighbor’s hammer drill to make some holes in a masonry wall, and I didn’t know how to swap the bits. Fortunately, the drill’s carrying case came with a booklet of instructions, which I followed with great success. Many holes were thus produced. This got me thinking: I used to read the manual fairly often; now I almost never do.
If you’ve been alive between Christmas and New Years, you’ve probably read a Best of the Year list. Best movies of the year. Best albums. Art. Social-media trends. Anything, really. Last year, according to The New York Times, Víkingur Ólafsson’s recording of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” the actor Bella Ramsey, and a sushi-and-scuba video game called Dave the Diver were worthy of your time and attention.
“I am a professor! I am a professor of economics!” said Caroline Fohlin, face down, pinned to the ground by police at Emory University, in Atlanta, during campus demonstrations in late April. Her glasses had been thrown from her face, her head knocked against the concrete. While Fohlin’s words might be taken to suggest entitlement—a belief that her faculty status should confer immunity—I heard something else: an appeal to neutrality.
Columbia University shut down all in-person classes on Monday, and faculty and staff were encouraged to work remotely. “We need a reset,” President Minouche Shafik said, in reference to what she called the “rancor” around pro-Palestinian rallies on campus, as well as the arrest—with her encouragement—of more than 100 student protesters last week.
One morning in 1999, while I sat at the office computer where I built corporate websites, a story popped up on Yahoo. An internet domain name, Business.com, had just sold for $7.5 million—a shocking sum that would be something like $14 million in today’s dollars.
The dot-com era, then nearing its end, had been literally named for addresses such as this one.
I frequently ask ChatGPT to write poems in the style of the American modernist poet Hart Crane. It does an admirable job of delivering. But the other day, when I instructed the software to give the Crane treatment to a plate of ice-cream sandwiches, I felt bored before I even saw the answer. “The oozing cream, like time, escapes our grasp, / Each moment slipping with a silent gasp.” This was fine. It was competent. I read the poem, Slacked part of it to a colleague, and closed the window.
Last year, 18 percent of Stanford University seniors graduated with a degree in computer science, more than double the proportion of just a decade earlier. Over the same period at MIT, that rate went up from 23 percent to 42 percent. These increases are common everywhere: The average number of undergraduate CS majors at universities in the U.S. and Canada tripled in the decade after 2005, and it keeps growing.
Last fall, when Netflix hiked the cost of its top-tier Ultra HD plan by 15 percent, I had finally had enough: $22.99 a month just felt like too much for the ability to see Jaws in 4K video resolution. A couple of weeks later, I heard that Max was pushing up the fee of its own 4K streaming by 25 percent. Now I wasn’t just annoyed, but confused. Super-high-res televisions are firmly ensconced as the next standard for home viewing of TV and movies.