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.
“I’m a proud crypto bro. You’re starting to become one of us, if not already,” Farokh Sarmad, a social-media influencer, said to former President Donald Trump during a livestream on X last night. According to the platform’s listener counter, more than 1 million people tuned in for the launch of World Liberty Financial, a new crypto project promoted by Trump and his family. The former president has been posting about it on social media for several weeks.
When X was blocked in Brazil on Saturday—the result of a legal skirmish between the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, and Alexandre de Moraes, a justice on Brazil’s Supreme Court—a sizable crater was left behind. More than 20 million people lost access to the site, yet the effect was about more than numbers. Brazilian users have played an unusually large role in developing the site’s well-known super-fan culture. Now they’re gone, and they’re not sure whether they’ll get to come back.
After Donald Trump was banned from Twitter in 2021, Donald Trump Jr. made a public appeal to Elon Musk for help. “Wanted to come up with something to deal with some of this nonsense and the censorship that’s going on right now, obviously only targeted one way,” he said in a video that was posted to Instagram. “Why doesn’t Elon Musk create a social-media platform?” (The video was titled “Here’s How Elon Musk Could Save Free Speech.
Lizzie: The Yuletide Blues are a real thing. Elvis had them. Charlie Brown had them. Tim Allen had them in Christmas With the Kranks and in The Santa Clause (during his custody battle). And that’s why we host holiday parties: to shoo away the blues until New Year’s, at which point we party again.When we last left you, I mentioned that I was planning a tiki-inspired holiday party. The whole thing came to fruition last weekend, minus the fruit tower and the shrimp luge.
For all of my life, I thought eating breakfast with Santa was totally normal. Every year, he would come to my church in western New York and sit in the corner of the reception hall for a few hours. (Sometimes, he was played by my dad or my cousin Frank.) The kids would eat pancakes and drink hot chocolate in his presence and work up their courage. Whenever they felt ready, they could meet the big guy and discuss whatever they needed to. And then they would get a candy cane.
Teenagers are experiencing a mental-health crisis. And though the science is messy and the matter isn’t settled, many suspect that social media is, in some substantial way, tangled up in the problem. Following this instinct, legislators and regulators at both the state and federal levels have suggested a slew of interventions aimed at protecting young people from the potential harms of social platforms.
In any war, onlookers from far outside the conflict zone have to decide what to believe about what is happening. This sounds difficult in theory, and it’s even more so in practice.This week, after a deadly explosion at the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, anybody checking social media for news would have immediately seen conflicting stories about what had happened. Initial news reports cited Gaza’s health ministry in asserting that the blast had come from an Israeli air strike.
Coca-Cola often experiments with new flavors, and they’re usually flavors you can imagine, having tasted them before: vanilla, cherry, lemon. But the latest is called Y3000, a reference to the far-off year 3000, and one that Coca-Cola says was concocted with the help of, in some way, artificial intelligence. It smells like circus-peanut candies and tastes mostly like Coke.
Around the time of the 2016 election, YouTube became known as a home to the rising alt-right and to massively popular conspiracy theorists. The Google-owned site had more than 1 billion users and was playing host to charismatic personalities who had developed intimate relationships with their audiences, potentially making it a powerful vector for political influence. At the time, Alex Jones’s channel, Infowars, had more than 2 million subscribers.
In the world of high school, every day is a battle. Recently, one of the most intimidating foes is the air. “School air,” as they call it on social media, is the latest way to explain the universal feeling of not looking your best at school. It smudges your makeup. It gives you awful hair days. It makes you look “dull” and “bad.”But it might not be so much of a problem if you watch the right videos.
Sign up for Kaitlyn and Lizzie’s newsletter here.Lizzie: One night several years ago, Kaitlyn and I and a group of other friends ended up at a party in the South Street Seaport. It was at the apartment of someone none of us knew, and I can’t say for sure how we got there. We were excited to see what kinds of people lived in this gift-shop neighborhood, and what their apartment would look like.
“DEMOCRACY INTERCEPTED,” reads the headline of a new special package in the journal Science. “Did platform feeds sow the seeds of deep divisions during the 2020 US presidential election?” Big question.
When they came up with machine-sliced bread, did we start referring to other bread as “annoying”? After the invention of the dishwasher, did we start calling our sinks “stupid”? Post-railroad, did we slander boats as “useless and embarrassing”?Obviously not. Yet after the smartphone came along, a category of product that was once known simply as “phones” became, rudely, “dumb phones.
Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them.