Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos have each taken a turn as technology’s alpha dog, but none of them can claim that title now. Musk has become a polarizing figure, drained of all mystique. Zuckerberg sold us on a social-media dream that turned out to be a nightmare. Bezos self-ejected from the CEO chair at Amazon, so he could make rockets and frolic on his yacht with his fiancée. (Good for him.)
At the top of the tech world, a vacancy now looms like a missing tooth.

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.
“Hollywood is easy to hate, easy to sneer at, easy to lampoon,” Raymond Chandler wrote in The Atlantic in 1945.
Chandler, at the time already a popular author of detective fiction, had lately begun working as a screenwriter, but he still considered himself an outsider in the movie business.

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This month marks four years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. My colleague Katherine J. Wu recently published an article about what is driving the U.S. government to frame COVID-19 as being flu-like—and the problems with that approach.

This article is based on interviews and research by the Reckoning Project, a multinational group of journalists and lawyers collecting evidence of war crimes in Ukraine.
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, in the city of Enerhodar, in eastern Ukraine, is Europe’s largest nuclear facility. For decades, it has supplied electricity to millions of households, not just in Ukraine, but in Hungary, Poland, Belarus, Moldova, Slovakia, and Romania as well.

On June 3, 2021, a roughly 60-year-old man in the riverside city of Magdeburg, Germany, received his first COVID vaccine. He opted for Johnson & Johnson’s shot, popular at that point because unlike Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines, it was one-and-done. But that, evidently, was not what he had in mind. The following month, he got the AstraZeneca vaccine. The month after that, he doubled up on AstraZeneca and added a Pfizer for good measure.

Artificial intelligence can appear to be many different things—a whole host of programs with seemingly little common ground. Sometimes AI is a conversation partner, an illustrator, a math tutor, a facial-recognition tool. But in every incarnation, it is always, always a machine, demanding almost unfathomable amounts of data and energy to function.
AI systems such as ChatGPT operate out of buildings stuffed with silicon computer chips.

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No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.
But that didn’t prevent a crowded primary.