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For something so small and hollow, the drinking straw has become quite a potent symbol over the years.

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Presidential elections in the United States are prolonged, chaotic, and torturous. (Please, not another election needle …) But they don’t come close to rivaling what happens in India.

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There were moments in Adam Higginbotham’s new book Challenger that made me gasp and flip to the endnotes. I wasn’t looking to find the story’s denouement—I already knew what happened on the morning of January 28, 1986: The space shuttle Challenger broke apart just over a minute into its voyage, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

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In the fall of 2005, Johann Hari, then a young columnist for The Independent who was struggling with his weight, described a trip he said he’d taken to a wellness spa in the foothills of the Carinthian Alps. After spending just four days there on a cleansing diet that consisted almost entirely of drinking tea—Hari could not bear to stay a moment longer—he’d lost seven pounds.

Tech evangelists like to say that AI will eat the world—a reference to a famous line about software from the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. In the past few weeks, we’ve finally gotten a sense of what they mean.
This spring, tech companies have made clear that AI will be a defining feature of online life, whether people want it to be or not. First, Meta surprised users with an AI chatbot that lives in the search bar on Instagram and Facebook.

As recently as two and a half weeks ago, New York Governor Kathy Hochul was bragging about her conviction to stand up to “set in their ways” drivers in order to implement a congestion-pricing plan that would improve New Yorkers’ lives and save them a lot of time stuck in traffic. Yesterday, Hochul suddenly announced that the program would be “paused indefinitely.

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This week, two influential spreaders of Donald Trump’s Big Lie faced trouble. These aren’t the first glitches in the conspiracy-theory universe.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The cars always win.

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Somehow, Neil Postman saw it coming. His 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, predicted that people would become so consumed by entertainment that they would be rendered unable to have serious discussions about serious issues. Postman was worried about television; he didn’t live to see social media kick those fears into hyperdrive.

At the start of Elizabeth Hobson’s career as an ecologist, she knew to stick to one rule: Never anthropomorphize the animals you study.
For plenty of people, assigning human characteristics to another living creature feels natural enough that we do it as a matter of course. But to many scientists who study animal behavior, anthropomorphism is a cardinal sin, and suggesting that a researcher has tiptoed in that direction is tantamount to saying they’ve resorted to uninformed speculation.