During the torture ritual that was doing my taxes this year, I was surprised to find myself giddy after reading these words: “You are now chatting with IRS Representative-1004671045.” I had gotten stuck trying to parse my W-2, which, under “Box 14: Other,” contained a mysterious $389.70 deduction from my overall pay last year. No explanation. No clues. Nothing. I tapped the chat button on my tax software for help, expecting to be sucked into customer-service hell.

Somewhere over Colorado this weekend, while I sat in seat 21F, my plane began to buck, jostle, and rattle. Within seconds, the seat-belt indicator dinged as the pilot asked flight attendants to return to their seats. We were experiencing what I, a frequent flier, might describe as “intermediate turbulence”—a sustained parade of midair bumps that can be uncomfortable but by no means terrifying.

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People are more susceptible to scams than they may think—and Americans are losing more money to fraud than ever.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Donald Trump’s ego has crash-landed.
Christine Blasey Ford testifies again.
Universities have a computer-science problem.

Early in FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, the titular author (played by Tom Hollander) bursts into the palatial apartment of a high-society doyenne. “Tell me everything, from the beginning,” Truman Capote proclaims. A tearful Babe Paley (Naomi Watts) shares that her husband, the CBS impresario Bill Paley, has committed a grave indignity.

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.

It’s January 21, 2025, the first full day of the second Trump administration. Members of a right-wing paramilitary group, deputized by the president to patrol the border, have killed a migrant family. Video of the incident sparks outrage, sending local protesters swarming to ICE detention centers. Left-wing pro-immigrant groups begin arriving in border states to reinforce the protests, setting off clashes.

The gallon pot of white petunias I held on an otherwise ordinary subway train, on an otherwise ordinary Thursday in March, would have looked to anyone else like an ordinary houseplant. But I knew better. An hour before, Karen Sarkisyan, one of the plant scientists responsible for this petunia’s existence, had dropped it off at my office. He warned me that my petunia had spent a while in transit, and might not immediately put on a show. Still, I’d rushed the petunia into a windowless room.