Meta avoided the worst today by settling a massive lawsuit over alleged damages “to the mental and physical wellbeing of America’s youth.” The case, brought by the attorneys general of 47 states, plus U.S. territories and Washington, D.C., had been mid-trial in a federal court in California and was by far the most significant legal challenge the company has ever faced.
The videos that Instagram suggests in my never-ending “For You” feed are usually of a constellation of women. They’re strangers, but I call them “my girls.” One of them is remodeling her house; one is always cleaning and “resetting” the van she lives in; one is sampling pasta and sandwiches at various New York establishments.
There are worse things you could do than drive to a Parisian airport and mess around with a temperature sensor on the airfield—for only a few minutes! But why do that at all?
To make money, maybe. This is the scheme that some mysterious person (or persons) reportedly carried out in April to win a bet on the prediction-market platform Polymarket, which allows people to wager on the highest temperature in Paris on any given day, not unlike weather derivatives.
Sylvia Meagher was 44 years old in the fall of 1965 and lived alone, except for her cat, Allegra, named after the ballet dancer Allegra Kent. She commuted from her one-bedroom apartment in the West Village to the United Nations, where she’d been working for nearly two decades at the World Health Organization. Although Meagher was a bureaucrat, her sensibilities were bohemian. She was acquainted with many of the painters, musicians, and writers who lived near her.
The planet’s biggest sporting event, the World Cup final, will take place this summer in MetLife Stadium, which is presently known as New York New Jersey Stadium because FIFA has strict rules on corporate branding. The stadium—whatever you want to call it—is located in the marshlands of New Jersey, about nine miles from Midtown Manhattan. On the day of the final, as on the dates of seven other matches throughout the World Cup tournament, an estimated 80,000 fans will converge at its gates.
Within hours of the gunfire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night—and initial, erroneous reports that the shooter had been killed—the usual swirl of misinformation and rumor was swirling in a particular direction. The event was staged, people said.
More than 300,000 posts containing the word staged were shared on X before midday on Sunday, according to an analysis cited by The New York Times.
In a state court in Los Angeles this week, 12 jurors are hearing opening arguments in a case that has the potential to change social media—maybe even the internet—as we know it.
The trial, which began today, is a bellwether: Similar individual cases have been filed all around the country, and a massive federal case with more than 2,000 plaintiffs is expected to proceed this summer. In each case, the plaintiffs accuse social-media companies of releasing defective products.
Updated at 8:25 p.m. on January 30, 2026
Reporters, lawmakers, and ordinary Americans are poring over a deluge of new files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case today, following the latest release from the Department of Justice. This release is substantially larger than any previous ones, with 3 million pages of documents, more than 180,000 photos, and more than 2,000 videos, according to the DOJ. The website they were uploaded to—which has the elegant URL Justice.
Over the past several days, TikTok users have found themselves at a loss. Literally, I mean: They lost their audiences, and their view counts showed “0.” Some people who attempted to upload content about anti-ICE protests or the killing of Alex Pretti alleged that the platform was intentionally blocking them from doing so. Others were able to get their videos uploaded, but alleged that TikTok was not distributing them.
Before Sam Kirchner vanished, before the San Francisco Police Department began to warn that he could be armed and dangerous, before OpenAI locked down its offices over the potential threat, those who encountered him saw him as an ordinary, if ardent, activist.
Phoebe Thomas Sorgen met Kirchner a few months ago at Travis Air Force Base, northeast of San Francisco, at a protest against immigration policy and U.S. military aid to Israel.
Thirty years ago, parents everywhere were compelled to weigh the pros and cons of allowing their kids to see Titanic. At the time, it was the biggest movie ever made, a historical epic (potentially educational) about mass death (possibly traumatizing) with a romantic plotline that was maybe too exciting (you know what I mean!).
On Tuesday afternoon, three parents sat in a row before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. Two of them had each recently lost a child to suicide; the third has a teenage son who, after cutting his arm in front of her and biting her, is undergoing residential treatment. All three blame generative AI for what has happened to their children.
They had come to testify on what appears to be an emerging health crisis in teens’ interactions with AI chatbots.
The mosquitoes and the National Guard were out, but it was otherwise a perfect day in the capital. Clear and sunny, not too hot: baseball weather. The first pitch was at about 9:30 in the morning. A player waiting in the dugout yammered “Whaddaya say, whaddaya say” before nearly every pitch. Another, after working a long at-bat and winning a walk, celebrated by turning to her teammates and tossing her bat gently toward them with both hands, palms up, like she was presenting them with a gift.
“You know the LIBS are seething over this,” Joe Kinsey, an editor at the sports website OutKick, wrote on X while reposting a video of sorority girls doing a choreographed dance. Many of the girls were wearing red-white-and-blue outfits, though some were dressed as hot dogs. They waved American flags in front of a banner that read We Want You Kappa Delta. “Credit to these ladies for pumping out patriotism to kick off the 2025 school year,” Kinsley wrote.
The Trump administration had promised a bombshell. Americans, many of whom had spent years wondering over the unknowns in the Jeffrey Epstein case, would finally get their hands on the secret files that would explain it all.
The Trumps are doing phones now. This week, the Trump Organization announced its own cellphone service called Trump Mobile, as well as a gold-colored smartphone called the T1, which will purportedly be manufactured in the United States and retail for $499. It is available for preorder now and will supposedly ship in August or September, though one reporter who attempted to buy the device was left feeling unsure: His card was charged $64.
Everywhere I look on social media, disembodied heads float in front of legal documents, narrating them line by line. Sometimes they linger on a specific sentence. Mostly they just read and read.
One content creator, who posts videos under the username I’m Not a Lawyer But, recently made a seven-minute TikTok in which she highlighted the important sentences from Drake’s 81-page defamation complaint against Universal Music Group.
Déjà vu: TikTok’s time was nearly up, and then President Donald Trump stepped in to save it. This happened in January, and also earlier today, when Trump said that he will sign another executive order to delay a possible ban on the social-media app.
Out of concern about the app’s possible weaponization by the Chinese government, Congress passed a law in April 2024 that required TikTok to spin off from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or else stop operating in the United States.
In 1962, the CIA had a driver’s license made for one of its officers, James P. O’Connell. It gave him an alias: James Paul Olds. We know this because the document containing the information was released to the public in 2017—part of an effort to declassify information related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But now, thanks to an executive order from President Donald Trump calling for the release of all the classified information pertaining to the incident, we know a bit more.
In 1962, the CIA had a driver’s license made for one of its officers, James P. O’Connell. It gave him an alias: James Paul Olds. We know this because the document containing the information was released to the public in 2017—part of an effort to declassify information related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But now, thanks to an executive order from President Donald Trump calling for the release of all the classified information pertaining to the incident, we know a bit more.
Forever 21 opened in my hometown when I was in middle school, when the opening of a new store at the mall was still a big deal. When the sign first went up, nobody knew what “Forever 21” was. I remember thinking that it would be a store marketed to retirement-age women who felt young at heart—Forever 21! This was wrong, but not so far off: Do Won Chang, one of its founders, has said he chose the name because 21 is “the most enviable age.
Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he’s dead).
He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco’s untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
I love the way that people talk online. And on a good day, I genuinely think the internet has made people funnier and more creative. For instance, take this fairly anodyne post on X from 2023: “Financially, whatever happened in July can’t happen again.
The #Democrat and #Democrats hashtags, on Instagram, are affixed to a lot of low-quality content: a crying Statue of Liberty; Elon Musk with a Hitler mustache; other, worse memes that aren’t even decipherable. But for a short time last week, these posts were blocked from view. Donald Trump’s second presidency had only just begun, and suddenly—suspiciously—any platform search for #Democrat or #Democrats returned an error message: “We’ve hidden these results,” it said.
What’s going on with TikTok right now? The app was expected to be banned in the United States this coming Sunday, when the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act is set to go into effect. But several possible turns of events could save it—a last-minute sale, a surprise judgment from the Supreme Court, or intervention from the Biden administration.
My parents spend half of the year on an island off the coast of North Carolina where many of the residents speak a distinct and alienating dialect of English—the Ocracoke or “Hoi Toider” brogue, which the BBC describes as “a mix of Elizabethan English, Irish and Scottish accents, and pirate slang.” The other half, they spend around their four children, who are in their 20s and early 30s and also speak in a manner that can be perplexing.
The fad began with a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York City on a beautiful day last month. Thousands of people came and caused a ruckus. At least one of the Timothées was among the four people arrested by New York City police. Eventually, the real Timothée Chalamet showed up to take pictures with fans. The event, which was organized by a popular YouTuber who had recently received some attention for eating a tub of cheeseballs in a public park, captured lightning in a bottle.
After the 2016 elections, critics blamed Facebook for undermining American democracy. They believed that the app’s algorithmic News Feed pushed hyperpartisan content, outright fake news, and Russian-seeded disinformation to huge numbers of people. (The U.S. director of national intelligence agreed, and in January 2017 declassified a report that detailed Russia’s actions.
The World Series is the most important thing that can happen to a baseball player, and it is happening now to a bunch of them. You may have noticed that many have been conspicuously chewing things the entire time, including Yankees left fielder Alex Verdugo, who was blowing a bubble while misplaying a ball in the very first inning of Game 1.
The constant chewing is one of the weird things about baseball. Casual viewers respond to it by saying, “That’s weird.
For decades, my dad has been saying that he doesn’t want to hear a word about self-driving cars until they exist fully and completely. Until he can go to sleep behind the wheel (if there is a wheel) in his driveway in western New York State and wake up on vacation in Florida (or wherever), what is the point?
Driverless cars have long supposedly been right around the corner. Elon Musk once said that fully self-driving cars would be ready by 2019. Ford planned to do it by 2021.