Jacob Stern | The Atlantic

What 100 Million Volts Do to the Body and Mind

2026-03-16T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Stacy Kranitz

Updated at 11:04 p.m. ET on March 23, 2026

What does it feel like to be struck by lightning?

There is no easy analogue. A defibrillator delivers up to 1,000 volts to a patient’s heart; inmates executed by electric chair typically receive about 2,000. A typical lightning strike, by contrast, transmits 100 million volts or more. But lightning races through the body in milliseconds, and therefore often spares it. Some people black out instantly upon being struck. Others recall the moment vividly, as if in slow motion: the flash of light whiting out all vision; the sound, which many survivors say is the loudest they’ve ever heard. The pain, for some, is excruciating, yet others feel no pain at all. “It felt like adrenaline, but stronger,” one survivor reported. “I felt an incredible pulsing,” another said, “a burning sensation from head to toe.”

The severity of the resulting injury depends on, among countless other variables, how the electricity enters the body, and where, and the path the current takes through it. Direct strikes are the deadliest, but most strikes are indirect—a side flash coming off a tree, a current running through the ground, a streamer rising up from below—and most people survive these.

In some cases, the damage is immediately apparent. Lightning, in addition to being very bright and very loud, is very hot—the air around it can hit temperatures about five times hotter than the surface of the sun—and so it can singe or burn people. The shock wave from the strike can fling victims a great distance, breaking bones or causing concussions as they land. The current inscribes some victims’ skin with mysterious scarlike patterns called Lichtenberg figures, which resemble the limbs of a barren tree—or the branching structure of lightning itself.

Just as often, though, survivors manifest no burns, bruises, or scars. Even Lichtenberg figures generally vanish within a few days; no one knows exactly why. On the outside, survivors look normal. Which doesn’t mean they feel that way.

Many of the body’s essential systems—the heart, the brain, the nervous system—depend on electrical signals, and lightning can throw these thoroughly out of whack. Forgetfulness, sleep problems, sexual dysfunction, and headaches that manifest as intense pressure—like “my eyeballs are just popping out,” one person told me—are common. Some people become hypersensitive to noise; others lose their hearing entirely. A few, almost miraculously, are freed of a prior ailment: a bad leg healed; vision, once impaired, restored. Pretty much all of them feel permanently off balance. Some have to relearn simple things, things they’ve done their whole life—how to read, how to sing, how to ride a bike.

Phantom sensations are prevalent. One woman told me she often feels as though water is running down her limbs. Another, in a Facebook group for survivors, said she feels “an indescribable itching” coming from inside the back of her head. Inexplicable odors can emerge; food can taste like cardboard or glue. The symptoms can last for decades. Yet standard neurological imaging, such as MRI scans, almost never detects abnormalities, and most physicians, who understand the symptoms’ basis in only the most rudimentary sense, can offer little useful counsel. Faith in survivors’ stories—among friends, colleagues, even loved ones—can waver.

The most fundamental consequences of being struck by lightning are often metaphysical, and not easily communicable. How does falling victim to one of the most notoriously unlikely of all misfortunes reorient your sense of chance, of fate? How does it feel, when you’re trying to describe the most transformative experience of your life, to be met, routinely, with disbelief?

Last May, I attended a conference of Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International. It was held, as it often is, in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a smallish town on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains best known as the home of Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s Appalachia-themed amusement park. The town’s main drag resembles a sort of family-friendly version of the Las Vegas strip. Instead of casinos, there are dinner-show theaters, go-kart tracks, and a sprawling Margaritaville megacomplex, its central fountain inhabited by giant animatronic Brachiosaurus that roar from time to time.

The conference was staged at a Staybridge Suites just off the strip. About 30 people were there, mostly men who looked to be over the age of 60, many of them conference regulars who’d been struck long ago, though there were some women and younger attendees too. Most had brought their spouse and were making a weekend of it. They were there primarily to connect with other people who understood what they had been through.

Like senior prom, the conference always has a theme, and this year’s was Hawaii. Survivors wore leis, and pineapples adorned with sunglasses sat on every table in the Staybridge’s modest meeting room. A folding table converted into a makeshift tiki bar dispensed virgin piña coladas and hurricanes. Against this backdrop, specialists gave presentations on trauma therapies. Attendees compared notes on which treatments have worked for them and which haven’t.

Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic

Steve Marshburn Sr., the founder of the group, seated at a conference luncheon. The conference always has a theme, and that year’s was Hawaii.

In one session, a man I’ll call Matt, a young, redheaded survivor who for a year and a half after his strike could hardly feel pain, temperature, or most other sensations on much of his skin, said laser therapy had eventually restored his nerves. Having a massage therapist work on his vagus nerve had helped too. For a while, he’d slept inside a Faraday cage, to protect him from static electricity during storms. Today, to cope with intrusive thoughts about lightning, he dumps a packet of salt in his mouth because when you do that, he said, “that’s all you can think about.”

A woman I’ll call Caroline, who’d been struck on the job two years earlier, used that same strategy, she said, only with Warheads candies instead of salt. One problem she had not solved was that no matter how hot she gets, no matter how hard she exerts herself, she can’t sweat anymore. Matt said he’d had the same problem for a while. What fixed it for him was spending significant time in a sauna—up to 90 minutes three times a day.

If the discussion had a certain DIY quality to it, that reflects the paucity of medical literature on what lightning does to the body. Few systematic studies have been conducted, and most physicians have never treated a strike victim. Many survivors’ experiences defy medical explanation, so doctors have little to say.

Given the limited counsel that the medical establishment can offer them, survivors tend to be open to alternative therapies, but they’re also wary of being taken advantage of. At the conference, several attendees reminisced about the year when two “hippies” had shown up and started hawking New Age–type products. “They said they were linked in voodoo,” one survivor recalled.

Much of the group conversation focused on Caroline, whose injury was the freshest. She used to cook her family elaborate meals, but “after the accident,” she said, “I left the oven on so many times that I even ended up burning the element out.” For a while she refused to get a new one, because she worried she’d burn the house down. She leaves sticky notes everywhere to remind her of what she needs to do, but even so, she rarely has the energy to do all of it. She has to ask for help, which makes her feel bossy. She worries that others think she’s lazy.

Gary Reynolds’s experiences after he was struck in the summer of 2007 were similar. He was grabbing sodas from his family’s extra fridge, he’d told me earlier, when lightning hit him through the open garage door. For months, he could barely get out of bed. His whole body hurt constantly. He had trouble concentrating, and simple tasks that had once been second nature now seemed complex. On warm afternoons, he watched the sky warily. A therapist diagnosed him with PTSD, which by some estimates afflicts more than 25 percent of lightning-strike survivors. In 2009, just a few months shy of their 20th anniversary, Reynolds and his wife divorced. Initially she’d been sympathetic, he said, but over time she lost patience. “You’re not over this yet?” Reynolds recalled her saying. “It can’t be that bad.”

Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic

Gary Reynolds, who was first struck in 2007

“I just keep thinking, I want to wake up the next day and it’s going to be normal,” Caroline said at one point during the session. But she wasn’t even two years out from her strike. She had not yet come to the conclusion that the veteran survivors at the conference had reached long ago: that no matter what you do, no matter how many therapies you try, you still have to accept that you’ll never be the person you were before. “You still look the same and everything else, but it’s like a different person inside,” Reynolds said. “It’s a different soul.”

The odds of being struck by lightning in the United States in a given year are roughly one in 1.2 million, according to a 2019 analysis by the National Weather Service—about the same as flipping a coin and landing on heads 20 times in a row. But this is only a generic estimate. The likelihood of being struck in San Francisco is not the same as the likelihood of being struck in Orlando, last year’s urban lightning capital of America, according to Vaisala Xweather, a provider of local weather data. The likelihood of being struck for lawyers is not the same as the likelihood of being struck for roofers.

The majority of people killed by lightning—about 20 each year in the U.S.—are struck while engaging in some sort of outdoor leisure or labor. But in truth, almost anyone can be struck almost anytime. People have been struck while talking on landlines, while using computers, even while sitting on the toilet, according to the National Weather Service, because current can travel through telephone wires, electrical connections, and metal pipes. When lightning survivors insist, as many do, on unplugging their appliances in preparation for a storm, this is not tinfoil-hat mania. And the old advice about not showering during a thunderstorm? Sensible.

[Read: Almost no Americans die from lightning strikes anymore—why?]

Steve Marshburn Sr., who founded Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International in 1989, told me that he was struck at age 25 on a seemingly clear November morning in 1969. He was working as a teller at First Citizens Bank in Swansboro, North Carolina, sitting at the drive-through window, and he thinks the bolt must have passed through an ungrounded speaker. For years, he struggled not only with debilitating headaches and back problems, but also with the sheer improbability of the event that had produced them. Many of the doctors he visited didn’t believe his story. For a long time, even his parents wondered whether he was making the whole thing up.

And to some extent, Marshburn understands why. “It’s so unbelievable that it’s hard to talk about,” he said. Eventually, a doctor introduced him to another patient who had survived an electrical injury, and that experience led Marshburn to start his survivors’ group. Membership now numbers about 2,000, and in September the organization hosted its first-ever West Coast conference, in Scottsdale, Arizona. For years, most people found their way to the group via their local weather station, or after seeing it featured in news outlets or on TV. Now more find it through Facebook.

That’s how Gary Reynolds did. His second wife, Lisa, discovered the group while searching online for other people who’d been struck, people who could understand him. Doctors never had. When he first went to the emergency room, they ran a battery of tests, but the results all came back normal. After he’d been at the hospital for about nine hours, a doctor said, “I’m not really sure what to tell you,” and sent him home. Roughly the same thing happened when he visited his primary-care physician. Other doctors told him to his face that he was making the whole thing up.

Not until his first conference did he meet people who could truly empathize with him. He’d never spoken with a fellow lightning-strike survivor in person before, and he was nervous on the drive up, but when he arrived he felt almost like he was at a reunion. “You walk into that room and it’s like we’re family,” he said. After he joined the group, he felt normal for the first time in years. “It was validating,” he said. “Like, Okay, I’m not crazy.”

Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic

A walking stick used by one attendee

A poem describing the feeling of being struck, and then the aftermath, by Lisa Devine, who attended the conference with her husband, Danny, a strike survivor

In June 2008, Reynolds told me, he was struck by lightning a second time. It was 11 months after his first strike, and he’d woken up at 2 a.m. with an awful headache. Ever since the initial incident, his head had throbbed in exactly the same spot when he sensed a storm coming. As he lay beside his open bedroom window, he felt a shock go through his hand. “Not again,” he thought. Half of his hand turned bright red, he said, but he hadn’t yet paid off the previous year’s hospital bills, and this strike seemed less serious than the last, so he decided not to seek care. In the following months, though, his lingering symptoms from the first strike all worsened. He was often dizzy, and he couldn’t grip well. Reynolds ran a tree service at the time, one he’d started a few years after high school, and these were serious problems for someone whose vocation involved wielding a chainsaw. The divorce came about six months later.

In the years that followed, Reynolds pieced his life back together: He remarried, moved his family to western North Carolina, began working at a lumberyard, started attending survivors’ conferences. Then, while standing in the kitchen of his mountainside home on a June afternoon in 2016, he was struck a third time. And six years after that, a fourth, he said, this time while sitting in a leather recliner watching TV with his grandchildren. Must’ve been a streamer, he told me. Came up through the floor and hit him square in the back.

If the likelihood of getting struck once in your lifetime is one in 15,300, as the National Weather Service estimated in 2019, then statistically, the number of people in the United States today whom you’d expect to have been struck multiple times is … one. One single person. And yet the National Weather Service’s collection of about 50 lightning-survivor stories on its website includes two from people who say they’ve been struck twice and another from someone who says she’s been struck three times. Andy Upshaw, a North Carolina landscaper, says that he, too, has been hit three times. Charles Winlake, struck four times before the age of 30, added rubber soles to all of his shoes and began to wear only plastic-rimmed glasses. Linda Cooper, a former South Carolina schoolteacher, says she’s been struck six times, and so does Carl Mize, a former Oklahoma rodeo rider. One member of the Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors Support Facebook group says she’s been struck nine times, and another says she stopped counting after 13. Media reports document more multistrike cases. In all, my far-from-exhaustive search turned up more than two dozen.

Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic

Clockwise from top left: Electrical-shock survivor Rodney Burkholder and lightning-strike survivors Danny Devine, Danny “Joe” Jude, and Betsy Silby, in Pigeon Forge with their partners and caregivers

All of this, to state the obvious, is incredibly improbable. Extrapolating from the National Weather Service estimates, the likelihood of being struck six times is roughly one in 13 septillion—that’s a 13 followed by 24 zeros. If you multiplied the number of people who have ever existed on Earth by about 100 trillion, you’d expect one person among them to have been struck six times.

It can seem cruel to suggest that some lightning-strike survivors may be lying, especially when disbelief causes so much hardship for those who are not. But because relatively few lightning strikes are documented, the question often lingers. People lie for all kinds of reasons, and there can be financial incentives to claiming you’ve been struck: workers’ compensation, disability benefits. Mary Ann Cooper was an emergency-medicine faculty member at the University of Louisville when she published the first systematic study of lightning injury in 1980—instantly becoming the leading authority on the subject in doing so. Cooper served for years as an expert witness in workers’-comp cases, brought in to assess whether the claimant really had been struck. She told me that she’s encountered some frauds, identifiable because they reported inconsistent or physiologically impossible symptoms.

But the people trying to cheat their way into benefits, Cooper said, are largely not the ones attending survivors’ conferences. She believes that the overwhelming majority of the people she has met at those conferences are telling the truth about being struck, and about all the calamities that followed, at least as they understand them. Which is not to say that every statement should be taken at face value.

Like several doctors and scientists I spoke with, Cooper thinks that most people who say they’ve been struck multiple times genuinely believe that, even if they haven’t. Many survivors have flashbacks as a result of PTSD, just as combat veterans and wildfire survivors do. But when a combat veteran or a wildfire survivor resurfaces from a flashback, their surroundings verify to them that they are not, in fact, caught in the middle of a war zone or a fire. A lightning-strike flashback prompted by a storm involves no such assurance. A lightning bolt is there and gone in an instant.

What’s more, because lightning leaves the nervous system damaged, it can make people feel bursts of pain—real, excruciating, and unconnected to any physical stimulus. Together, PTSD and nervous-system damage may explain many reports of second or third or fourth strikes.

Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic

Charles O’Connor Jr., a lightning-strike survivor, attending the conference for the first time with his wife, Chrissy

Not so long ago, that explanation might have sounded far-fetched, just as some of the chronic symptoms of a lightning strike still do, to some. But the idea that trauma can alter the way people perceive the world and interpret their experience is ubiquitous now. And the emergence of long COVID, along with increased awareness of other difficult-to-diagnose chronic conditions, has created a greater respect for individual testimony, and a greater appreciation for how much the medical profession does not know. In this sense, society is finally catching up to what lightning survivors and the people who study them have long understood.

The most grinding suspicions encountered by many survivors—about whether they were ever really struck at all—may in any case be mooted in the coming years. On a recent trip to France, Cooper met with a physician who told her he’d identified a biological marker for lightning injury, which may enable doctors to determine, with a simple urine test, whether someone really has been struck. Nothing has been published on it yet, Cooper said, and no such test seems imminent, so for the moment she isn’t getting too excited. But she has an open mind to the possibility.

All of this, of course, is mostly to the good. Yet the lightning-survivor community has always defined itself by a sort of oppositional faith: There, you are doubted; here, you are believed. There, you are strange; here, you are normal. When I asked Reynolds what he made of the trauma-plus-nervous-system-damage theory of why there are so many multistrike survivors, I felt as though I was doing something almost sacrilegious, as though I was violating that ethos of mutual faith. I worried that he’d react with indignation. The notion that he might hang up on me and refuse to speak with me again did not seem unlikely. Instead, he said he thought the theory made a lot of sense.

Might then it explain his multiple strikes? I asked.

Well, he answered, not his.

What does one make of a life so fundamentally altered by an event as unlikely as a lightning strike? In Pigeon Forge, when I asked survivors whether on balance they felt lucky (for having survived a lightning strike) or unlucky (for having been struck in the first place), the question didn’t register. “I don’t think luck has anything to do with it,” Susan Deatrick told me. She doesn’t like the word providential either, she said, “but at the same time, God is in control over everything down to the minutest detail.”

This response, and others like it, initially surprised me. If lightning is a manifestation of the divine, I thought, how do people explain why it struck them? How do you make sense of a miracle that comes at your expense?

[From the July 1875 issue: Lightning and lightning-rods]

Jim Segneri, who moderated the conference’s final and most intense group discussion, has a succinct answer, one more focused on his having been spared than his having been struck. “I firmly believe that whether you worship Allah or Buddha or God or Jesus or whoever put us here, the reason we’re still here is so that we can help other people”—those who are doubted, those who are struggling.

Large numbers of survivors hold some version of this belief. Marshburn, the group’s founder, often speaks of the number of survivors—more than 20—whom he has talked out of suicide, reciting in vivid detail the conversations he’s had with people on the brink. Over her many years speaking with lightning-strike victims, Mary Ann Cooper said, “I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘I should have been dead. God must have kept me alive for a reason.’”

And yet for those survivors who hold it, the belief in destiny can cut both ways. Reynolds says that after his third strike, he felt doomed. He’d left his career, gotten divorced, gotten remarried, started a new job, moved more than 600 miles away—and still the lightning had found him. “It’s like it’s looking for me,” he told his therapist. “It’s like it’s a living, breathing creature.”

She assured him that it wasn’t, and part of him knew she was right, but he couldn’t stop thinking that he was fated to be struck again. She told him that she doesn’t believe in destiny. That there is no providence, only circumstance. That sometimes you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d believed that once. But now he can’t shake the feeling that she’s wrong.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “Struck.” It has been updated to clarify the source of the data used to determine the urban lightning capital of the U.S. last year. The data was provided by Vaisala Xweather.

Wait—Laser Guns Are Real Now?

2026-02-28T07:30:00-05:00

The headlines lately have verged on science fiction. A few weeks ago, my colleague Simon Shuster reported that the Ukrainian military had unveiled a new anti-drone laser weapon called the Sunray. On the very same day, American aviation officials abruptly shut down the airspace above El Paso, Texas, after Border Patrol agents in the area fired a laser of their own. Then, on Thursday, the U.S. military used a laser to take out a drone further down the Texas-Mexico border.

Much can be said about all of this: about the implications for the Ukrainian war effort, about the potential consequences for U.S. border policy, about the internecine conflict between the FAA and the Pentagon, and what that indicates about the distribution of power within the Trump administration. But focus too much on matters of geopolitics, and you can lose sight of something arguably even more profound: Laser guns are real now. Actual militaries are deploying actual lasers in actual combat. “This is a technology that has been under development for decades,” Iain Boyd, an aerospace engineer and the director of the University of Colorado Boulder Center for National Security Initiatives, told me. “And it’s only really now just really starting to enter the public view.”

Lasers have been a staple of sci-fi and children’s entertainment for well over a century. In H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, the Martian invaders deploy heat rays. The crew of the starship Enterprise has been firing phaser guns since the 1960s, and the plot of the first Star Wars movie (several Star Wars movies, actually) centers on the race to destroy a planet-annihilating superlaser. When Buzz Lightyear crash-lands in Andy’s room at the beginning of Toy Story, the other toys are captivated by his (fake) laser gun. “It’s not a laser,” Woody says dismissively. “It’s a—it’s a little light bulb that blinks.”

[Simon Shuster: The new laser that can take down aircraft]

And what’s the difference? Laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Light is shot into some material—it can be a solid, liquid, or gas, depending on the laser—in a way that causes the material to emit photons. A set of mirrors reflects the photons back at the material, which then emits more photons, which themselves reflect off the mirrors, and so on and so forth until that exponential cloning process creates a photon beam strong enough to pass through one of the mirrors. Put more simply, but also mysteriously, lasers exploit the quantum properties of atoms to amplify and streamline energy.

Whereas regular old light sources scatter light at all different wavelengths in all different directions, laser beams move at a single wavelength in a single direction. This property has been leveraged in mundane ways for decades. We entertain our pets with laser pointers. We use lasers to scan barcodes and survey landscapes. We drive cars assembled from laser-cut hunks of steel and aluminum, and the radios in those cars bombard us with advertisements for laser hair removal and laser eye surgery and laser skin resurfacing.

The difference between a harmless laser pointer and a deadly laser weapon is largely one of magnitude, not kind. In theory, if you combined a few hundred thousand laser pointers, you could create a weapon powerful enough to kill a person. In practice, though, the challenges of designing lasers powerful enough to do real damage has vexed engineers for the better part of a century. As early as the 1930s, the genius engineer Nikola Tesla was reported to have invented a “death ray” that could shoot down airplanes from 250 miles away. This “all-penetrating” weapon, he claimed, would fire 100 billion watts of energy at a point just one-hundred-millionth of a square centimeter in size. It would harness laws of physics that “no one has ever dreamed about.” It was preposterous—but this was Nikola Tesla. You couldn’t just dismiss him. And so during the early years of the Cold War, the United States launched a secret operation to complete Tesla’s unfinished work. Which failed. Later, the Reagan administration poured billions into its “Star Wars” program, with the goal of deploying space-based lasers to shoot incoming nukes. Which also failed. Beginning in 1996, the U.S. military spent $5 billion trying to equip 747s with missile-destroying lasers, but that project—formally known as Airborne Laser and colloquially known as the “Flying Lightsaber”—failed too.

Not until the 2000s did laser-weapons engineers start making serious progress. Earlier prototypes, Boyd said, had used massive tanks of toxic chemicals, which could generate huge amounts of power but were unwieldy for military purposes. Over time, as scientists devised ways to draw roughly commensurate amounts of power out of solid crystals, they were able to make the weapons small enough to ride aboard a truck or plane. But not so small as to allow for Star Wars–style handheld laser guns, Phillip Sprangle, a University of Maryland professor and former head of beam physics at the Naval Research Laboratory, told me. Those, he said, are still impossible given the size of the power source and cooling system you’d have to lug around.

By 2014, the technology had developed to the degree that the Navy could equip the USS Ponce with a laser weapon. But that weapon was never deployed in battle. In the years since, the laser fleet has grown, the Army has outfitted trucks with anti-drone lasers, and the Air Force has added ground-based lasers to its arsenal. Russia, China, and the United Kingdom are all developing—and in some cases already deploying—laser weapons, and last year, Israel became the first country to use a laser in combat to destroy a drone. In November, the U.S. military identified lasers as one of its six technological priorities.

Which brings us to the rollout of the Ukrainian Sunray laser and the two border incidents. In El Paso, Border Patrol officials fired their own anti-drone laser without giving the FAA sufficient notice—despite a top aviation official having warned the Pentagon that this would create “a grave risk of fatalities.” The supposed drug-cartel drone that Border Patrol shot down turned out to be a party balloon. And the “seemingly threatening” drone that the military shot down on Thursday turned out to belong to … Border Patrol.

The very real lasers now being deployed on battlefields around the world have some notable differences from most of their science-fictional forebears. They’re silent, for one thing—no pew pew sound effects—and the beam they produce is invisible. (Wells, to his credit, actually got this right in 1898.) This is why the drone in the demonstration that Shuster observed seemed to spontaneously combust, “as if struck by invisible lightning.”

[Ken Harbaugh: Ukraine’s most lethal soldiers]

Real lasers have a number of other advantages. For one thing, laser beams move at the speed of light, which is more than 200,000 times faster than the fastest bullets. The moment you fire one, it hits the target. (Impact is instantaneous, but the effects are not: Current anti-drone lasers must beam a target for a few seconds in order to destroy it.) Unlike conventional weapons, which eventually run out of ammunition, lasers are said to have an infinite magazine because all they need is a power source. This isn’t strictly true—we don’t say that electric cars have infinite batteries, after all—and although they don’t need to reload, Boyd told me, lasers give off so much heat that they regularly need to be cooled down. Still, $13 a shot is pretty good compared with the Navy’s standard missile interceptors, which cost $2 million apiece.

Another advantage of lasers is that they just keep going. Last year, Chinese scientists successfully beamed a precision non-weapon laser all the way to the moon. But infinite range is also a drawback. If a laser missed a drone, Boyd said, the beam could continue for hundreds of miles and hit, say, a commercial airliner. Hence the El Paso kerfuffle. Even if a laser beam did hit its target, Boyd said, its light could still scatter and cause all manner of collateral damage. Hit the wrong drone in the wrong place at the wrong angle, and you could end up blinding an unwitting bystander.

Novelists and filmmakers and their fictional creations never had to deal with concerns like these. Indeed, one wonders what H. G. Wells would make of laser-gun technology if he could see it now. Maybe he would be thrilled to see his vision finally realized. Or maybe he would be dismayed to find that humans had themselves created the weapons of destruction he had imagined being deployed by extraterrestrial invaders. Either way, he would surely be surprised to find them being used to shoot down balloons.

You’ve Never Seen Super Bowl Betting Like This Before

2026-02-05T16:40:00-05:00

Nothing makes Americans want to gamble like the Super Bowl. Every year, the game is reliably the biggest day for sports betting: On platforms such as FanDuel and DraftKings, people are already putting money down on which team will win the opening coin toss, how long the national anthem will be, and what color of Gatorade will be used to douse the winning head coach.

Gambling on sports has become practically inescapable. Nearly half of American men ages 18 to 49 maintain an active online sports-betting account, and Vegas odds have invaded telecasts and talk shows. During NFL games, sportsbook commercials now outnumber beer ads. Despite all of that, more than a third of adults still cannot legally gamble from home: Online sports betting remains banned in 18 states, including California and Texas.

But for the past year, thanks to a loophole, Americans have effectively been able to bet on sports no matter where they live. All they have to do is turn to prediction markets. Platforms such as Kalshi let people wager on lots of things: Who will win the Oscar for Best Actor? How much snow will New York City get this month? Prediction markets say that they are more akin to the stock market than gambling. Rather than betting on odds set by bookmakers, users trade contracts that pay out according to the outcome of a given event. This distinction may not mean much for someone betting on the Seahawks over the Patriots, but it does allow prediction markets to operate even in places where sports betting is illegal.

[Read: The company making a mockery of state gambling laws]

Now America is about to find out what it really looks like when sports betting takes over. Kalshi, one of the country’s biggest prediction markets, launched its sport-betting operation just two weeks before the 2025 Super Bowl. This year, Kalshi has already seen more than $167 million in bets on the game, and that number could conceivably crack $1 billion, Dustin Gouker, a gambling-industry analyst, told me. Some of the biggest traditional sportsbooks and fantasy-sports sites, recognizing a work-around to enter states where gambling remains illegal, are seizing the opportunity: Since September, FanDuel, DraftKings, Fanatics, PrizePicks, and Underdog have all launched their own prediction-market offerings.

In one sense, prediction markets are about a whole lot more than sports. Both Kalshi and its biggest rival, Polymarket, have turned prediction markets into big business by letting people wager on seemingly everything. As Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour put it in October, the company’s goal is to “financialize everything”—to let people bet on the outcome of virtually any event. By encouraging people to put their money where their mouth is, the thinking goes, prediction markets can forecast how the future will play out. Even if you’ve never placed a bet yourself, prediction markets’ odds about news and entertainment—not sports—are especially in your face. Both CNN and CNBC recently announced partnerships with Kalshi to incorporate the site’s predictions into their news coverage; last month, the Golden Globes displayed Polymarket’s odds throughout its broadcast.

[Read: America is slow-walking into a Polymarket disaster]

Kalshi may let you bet on topics as wide-ranging as whether Iran’s supreme leader will stay in power and who will win the next season of Survivor, but sports account for more than 90 percent of all trading volume on the site. From mid-December to mid-January, wagers on college basketball alone exceeded trading on everything other than sports. The single biggest non-sports market during this stretch—about whom President Trump would nominate as chair of the Federal Reserve—drew less activity than Italian soccer. In an email, Jack Such, a Kalshi spokesperson, told me that the categories that dominate the platform fluctuate based on what’s in the news. “During the NFL season, we are heavily tilted towards sports,” he wrote. “During the 2024 election season, we were heavily tilted towards politics. It all depends on what events are top of mind for the public.” Even though politics was big on Kalshi during the most recent presidential election, that was before the site offered sports betting.

Sports make up a smaller proportion of wagers on Polymarket, which has also yet to fully launch in the United States (although some Americans likely still access it by using virtual private networks). “At this moment in time, the use case of prediction markets, at least in the United States, appears to be the expansion of sports betting,” Gouker said. “It’s hard to come to another conclusion.”

This covert expansion of sports betting is controversial. Several states are suing Kalshi for operating an unlicensed sports-betting platform, which they argue deprives them of tax dollars. But late last month, Michael Selig, the newly appointed head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates prediction markets, indicated that he intends to help grow the prediction-market industry. All of which suggests that, in the immediate term at least, prediction markets are likely to make sports betting an even more pervasive part of American life—potentially leading to devastating consequences. Research suggests that avid sports bettors are at risk of depleting their household savings, declaring bankruptcy, and even committing intimate-partner violence.

[Read: ‘I’m treating guys who would never be caught dead in a casino’]

Not all prediction markets, for their part, are likely to be content with staying de facto sports-betting sites. After all, Kalshi and Polymarket want to harness the wisdom of crowds to forecast all kinds of real-world events, not just sports outcomes. Despite Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan’s recent proclamation that prediction markets are “the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now,” these platforms have much to prove on that front. When most bets are on sports, it’s especially hard to see what value prediction markets add. The kind of information gained by thousands of bettors laying down four-legged parlays on a Tuesday-night NBA game does not have the same utility as a more accurate hurricane forecast or election prediction. Not all knowledge, in other words, is created equal.

Perhaps prediction markets are hoping that once sports betting gets users in the door, they’ll engage with the many other markets on offer. “I think they’ve really thought that sports would just be an entry point, and then everything else would start growing,” Gouker said. But that Kalshi will be able to interest its droves of sports bettors in other markets is by no means guaranteed. In fact, it seems at least equally plausible that people might just prefer betting on the Super Bowl to betting on whether the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates. “People who are making forecasts on political and social and scientific outcomes are possibly different from people who are betting on sporting events,” John Phillips, the CEO of Aristotle, the company that runs the prediction market PredictIt, told me. “There are some commonalities there, but I think it’s a different type of activity and it attracts a different type of trader.”

If the goal of Kalshi and other prediction markets is to create something with genuine financial utility and predictive power, that’s a big problem. But this won’t prevent them from making a boatload of money along the way.

Ammon Bundy Is All Alone

2026-02-01T07:30:00-05:00

Not so long ago, Ammon Bundy was the most famous right-wing militia leader in America. His two armed standoffs with federal agents had made him the face of the Patriot Movement: a loose assemblage of anti-government extremists, Second Amendment maximalists, and more than a few white nationalists. Even some mainstream elements of the Republican Party embraced him as a modern folk hero. But Bundy’s criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown now threatens to make him a pariah within his own community.

In November, Bundy self-published a long essay titled “The Stranger,” in which he labeled the Trump administration’s treatment of undocumented immigrants a “moral failure.” “To call such people criminals for lacking official permission” to be in the country, he wrote, “is to forget the moral law of God, the historical truth of our own founding, and the Constitutional ideals that continue to define justice.” On a recent livestream following the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota, Bundy told his audience that ICE’s conduct “clearly looks like tyranny.” If the government threatened his family, he said, he would fight back by whatever means necessary.

I spoke with Bundy a few hours after federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti. “It’s sickening to me,” he told me over the phone, “just to see the parallels of history repeating itself.” (In his November essay, he had compared the administration’s treatment of immigrants to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.) He added, “When it comes to the more humanitarian side of it, I think the left has it much more correct than the nationalist right.”

[Read: Ammon Bundy has disappeared]

Bundy, to be clear, has not gone woke. He believes that Democrats, whom he calls “communist-anarchists,” are “spurred by wickedness.” (So, he says, are Republicans, whom he calls “nationalists.”) He believes that government has no business providing virtually any social services. He believes that homosexuality is a sin. And don’t ask him about vaccination requirements.

But perhaps Bundy’s central belief is the inviolability of individual liberty, and in this he has remained fairly consistent over the years. During the first Trump presidency, Bundy took heat from some of his followers for opposing the administration’s anti-immigration agenda, and when I first spoke with him a few years ago, he reiterated those views. If he has become something of an outcast, that testifies less to a transformation in his thinking than to a broader realignment on the far right. Bundy, in his relative ideological fixity, offers a stable reference point against which to measure that shift.

In 2014, Bundy and his father, Cliven, marshaled about 1,000 militiamen and other supporters to repel government agents trying to impound their cattle in Bunkerville, Nevada. (Twenty years earlier, in an effort to protect the endangered Mojave desert tortoise, the Bureau of Land Management had ordered Cliven Bundy to remove his cattle from federal lands; he ignored the directive.) The standoff turned the Bundys into the first family of the Patriot Movement and darlings of conservative media. They might not have been quite at the Republican Party’s ideological core, but they weren’t very far away from it. They were avatars of a conservative belief in the importance of individual liberty and the righteousness of resistance—even armed resistance, if necessary—to government tyranny. In a Fox News poll asking thousands of viewers whether they were “Team Cliven Bundy or Team Federal Government,” 97 percent answered “team Cliven.” Several Republican U.S. senators publicly defended the family. Sean Hannity repeatedly had Cliven on his show.

Two years later, Ammon led a six-week occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon that left one rancher dead, shot down by police officers after a backwoods car chase. From 2022 to 2023, he was embroiled in a slow-motion standoff with local and state law enforcement in Idaho stemming from his refusal to pay a $52 million judgment against him in a high-profile defamation case.

By that point, the breadth of Bundy’s support had substantially diminished. His exploits no longer garnered the attention of Fox News and its mainstream conservative viewership. And now, even some of his greatest supporters—people whom he and his family inspired to become militants in the first place—seem, in an ideological sense, to have deserted him. After Good was shot and killed, I reached out to a number of those who stood with Bundy at Bunkerville, at Malheur, or afterward. None of them would condemn ICE, and some expressed enthusiastic support.

[Robert F. Worth: Welcome to the American winter ]

When I asked Nick Ramlow, a Montana militant and member of Bundy’s People’s Rights Network, about Good’s killing, he referred me to a recent Supreme Court opinion and stressed that “a jury will make a determination of liability when a civil suit is brought.” In other words, Ramlow, who once told a sheriff that he “better keep his nose clean” because Ramlow had “a bigger army than he does,” didn’t want to comment one way or the other until the courts weighed in.

Eric Parker, who in 2014 made a name for himself by training a semiautomatic rifle on federal agents at Bundy Ranch and who is now the head of the Real Three Percenters of Idaho, had nothing but praise for the agent who killed Good. “I mostly think it’s important to note how impressive it was to get those first two shots off in under a second,” he told me, adding that Good’s wife should be criminally charged (for what, he did not say). Lee Rice, a longtime People’s Rights member and steadfast Bundy supporter who participated in the Oregon standoff, told me when I first met him in 2023 that he didn’t “believe in the government running roughshod over you.” When I spoke with him recently about ICE’s tactics in Minnesota, he said, “I’m supportive of what’s going on, because we need to get these clowns out of here.” Good deserved her fate, he added, because she’d sided with undocumented immigrants.

Some of those in Bundy’s orbit have responded favorably to his essay and video, and a few have changed their mind about ICE enforcement since the killing of Pretti, which the Trump administration has tried to justify by pointing out that Pretti was carrying a gun. “I feel completely different about this one,” Parker texted me after seeing the video of Pretti’s death. Unlike in the case of Good, he didn’t see any self-defense rationale for the shooting. “No detainment just fighting. Disarmed him then shot him.”

But, on the whole, Bundy’s former allies seem to remain solidly in favor of the masked, armed federal agents. Just the other day, Bundy told me, he had a contentious conversation with a militant who had joined him at Malheur. Bundy had always thought that he and his supporters stood for a coherent set of Christian-libertarian principles that had united them against federal power. “We agreed that there’s certain rights that a person has that they’re born with. Everybody has them equally, not just in the United States,” he said. “But on this topic they are willing to completely abandon that principle.”

Bundy finds this ideological betrayal totally baffling. He would start to say something—“I can’t understand how they think …” or “They just can’t, they can’t …”—only to abandon the thought mid-sentence. “It doesn’t make sense to me,” he told me finally. “It’s scary, actually.”

And so Ammon Bundy is politically adrift. He certainly sees no home for himself on the “communist-anarchist” left. Nor does he identify anymore with the “nationalist” right and its authoritarian tendencies. The party that embraced him and the people who supported him have, by and large, left him behind.

He feels, he told me, “a little bit alone.”

The Dream of Streaming Is Dead

2024-05-16T17:27:00-04:00

Remember when streaming was supposed to let us watch whatever we want, whenever we want, for a sliver of the cost of cable? Well, so much for that. In recent years, streaming has gotten confusing and expensive as more services than ever are vying for eyeballs. It has done the impossible: made people miss the good old-fashioned cable bundle.

Now the bundles are back. Last week, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced that, starting this summer, they will offer a streaming bundle of Disney+, Hulu, and Max. Then, on Tuesday, Comcast said that next month it will introduce a streaming bundle of its own, packaging Peacock, Apple TV+, and Netflix. This bundle, called StreamSaver, will be available only to Comcast’s broadband, mobile, and TV customers. Some smaller mini-bundles already exist, but for the most part, the streaming wars had become a battle royale—no alliances, everyone for themselves. Now the combatants have aligned in two blocs, sort of like the Avengers versus the Justice League—except that, confusingly, Marvel movies (Disney) and DC movies (Max) are now part of the same bloc.

It’s not cable, but it’s not not cable either. Streaming hasn’t quite come full circle, but it’s three-quarters of the way around. These bundles are ending an entire era of streaming, with its unsatisfying free-for-all of services. This new era may well be better than the one before it. But the dream of streaming as a cheaper, better version of cable is dead.

For a while, it did actually exist. When Netflix launched its streaming service back in 2007, the company pretty much dominated the market without much serious competition. You could watch basically everything with no ads, and for less than $10 a month. Then, beginning at the tail end of the 2010s, all of the big legacy entertainment companies tried to get in on the action. “For much of the past four years, the entertainment industry spent money like drunken sailors to fight the first salvos of the streaming wars,” the media-industry analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in November. The current streaming landscape, despite offering unprecedented abundance, is a nightmare to navigate. To watch entertainment now requires wading through a frustrating array of streaming services: Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu, yes, but also Peacock, Paramount+, AMC+, and others.

But this hasn’t brought in the types of profits that companies hoped for. Last year, Disney, Comcast, and Paramount collectively lost several billion dollars on streaming. Making and licensing shows and movies, it turns out, is not cheap. And people are willing to pay for only so many streaming subscriptions. Even when the new services managed to attract subscribers, they weren’t able to hold on to them; in industry parlance, churn was too high. Streaming services have tried to recoup their losses by raising prices, creating ad tiers, and cracking down on password sharing.

Going it alone hasn’t worked, so now they’re teaming up. Neither mega-bundle has announced details about costs, but Comcast’s StreamSaver will be sold “at a vastly reduced price” relative to individually subscribing to all three services, the company’s CEO, Brian Roberts, said during the announcement this week. Packaged together and sold at a discount, each streaming service will make less per subscription, but perhaps collectively they will be more competitive and hold on to more of their subscribers. That’s the idea, anyway.

For consumers, these bundles are probably a good thing. There’s a reason so many people rejoiced at the prospect of cutting the cord—but cable was simple. With streaming, keeping track of all your accounts and all your passwords and where to watch whatever you want to watch—that is not simple. And then, just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, one of the services you subscribe to informs you that you’ll have to shell out for the premium tier if you want to watch a certain show or movie. If you can convert three separate subscriptions into a single cheaper one, as the new deals will seemingly allow some people to do, that’s a win.

The new bundles don’t exactly restore order and sanity. The array of overlapping options is itself confusing. In addition to the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle, there is also a Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle, which does not include Max. But if you really want to watch sports, you’ll presumably go for the ESPN/Fox/Warner Bros. Discovery bundle, named Venu Sports. And if you’re a Verizon myPlan customer, you can subscribe to a Netflix/Max bundle—even though those two services are part of opposing three-service bundles, as announced over the past two weeks. Making matters even more complicated, some of the bundlers are already themselves bundles. Disney owns Hulu and ESPN. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN and Max. Bundles are bundling with bundles.

Even more bundles are likely in the works, and they may save people some money. But they will not resolve the fundamental tension in what people want out of cable, or streaming, or whatever it is that serves them up stuff to watch. On the one hand, we like having everything in one place. On the other, we don’t like paying a lot of money for things we don’t use. Cable satisfied the former desire but not the latter. Streaming, after the fleeting honeymoon period when you could find almost anything on Netflix, satisfied the latter but not the former. With the new bundles, the streamers are trying to strike a balance between the total consolidation of cable and the total chaos of streaming. That new balance may well be superior to the status quo, but the trade-off between having things in one place and paying for things you don’t need will remain. As long as it does, we’ll never feel totally satisfied.

A Critic’s Case Against Cinema

2024-05-02T12:53:00-04:00

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.

Before Pauline Kael was Pauline Kael, she was still very much Pauline Kael. When her first essay for The Atlantic ran in December 1964, she had not yet lost it at the movies. She had not yet become Pauline Kael, the vaunted and polarizing film critic for The New Yorker. She had not yet inspired a movement of imitators, the “Paulettes,” or established herself as one of the most influential film writers ever. But the stylistic verve, the uncategorizable taste, the flamethrowing provocation—they were all there. “There’s a woman writer I’d be tempted to call a three-time loser,” she wrote in her Atlantic essay. “She’s Catholic, Communist, and lesbian.”

The only unusual thing about this assault is that Kael does not name her target. Elsewhere in the essay, she doesn’t hesitate to do so. And no one is beyond reproach—not Luis Buñuel, not Michelangelo Antonioni, not Ingmar Bergman. She assails about a dozen notables in the course of a few thousand words, firing off zingers at machine-gun rate. Her appetite for pugilism and reservoir of snark are seemingly inexhaustible. Academics are cultural vampires. The critic Dwight Macdonald is a “Philistine.” The writer Susan Sontag is a “semi-intellectually respectable” critic who, unfortunately, has “become a real swinger.”

Kael’s Atlantic essay, which ran under the headline “Are Movies Going to Pieces?,” is a broad lament about the state of the industry and the art form, published at a moment when French New Wave and experimental art films were upending conventional assumptions about what a movie could or should be. Most audiences “don’t care any longer about the conventions of the past, and are too restless and apathetic to pay attention to motivations and complications, cause and effect,” she fretted. “They want less effort, more sensations, more knobs to turn.” In short, they’ve “lost the narrative sense.” Critics and art-house audiences weren’t any different. They’d been bamboozled into venerating pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumbo as high art. They’d come to accept “lack of clarity as complexity, [accept] clumsiness and confusion as ‘ambiguity’ and as style,” she wrote. “They are convinced that a movie is cinematic when they don’t understand what’s going on.”

Sixty years later, although Kael’s writing crackles as much as ever, much of her argument reads stodgy and conservative. She tries her best to preempt this charge—“I trust I won’t be mistaken for the sort of boob who attacks ambiguity or complexity”—and it’s true that her disdain for the new cinema is not uniform. She holds certain specimens in high regard, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. But even so, she sometimes sounds like another old fogey grumbling about kids these days.

Her broader prognosis, though, is spot-on. In one sense at least, movies really were going to pieces. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, a gulf was opening between mass entertainment and high art, between movies and cinema. For the latter, Kael had boundless disdain. “Cinema,” she wrote, “is not movies raised to an art but rather movies diminished, movies that look ‘artistic.’” And its rise was a tragedy, a scourge that would over time kill what she loved about the form: “Cinema, I suspect, is going to become so rarefied, so private in meaning, and so lacking in audience appeal that in a few years the foundations will be desperately and hopelessly trying to bring it back to life, as they are now doing with theater.” It would become merely “another object of academic study and ‘appreciation.’”

Kael believed in movies as pop culture, believed their mass appeal was what gave them life. She wanted them to be something about which you could have an opinion without having any special expertise, something that regular people could talk about. And so she wrote about movies like a regular person—an extremely eloquent, extremely opinionated, extremely entertaining regular person, but a regular person all the same.

Whether or not you share Kael’s view that the movie-cinema schism was a disastrous development, her predictions have largely come to pass. Sixty years later, there are the films that win at the box office, and there are the films that win at the Oscars. (Not to mention the films that critics like best, which constitute a third category entirely.) Last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon was a notable exception, but the overall trend is clear. This year, the Golden Globes codified the divide with the introduction of a new award for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement—an award reserved for movies because the standard categories now primarily recognize cinema. And Kael saw it all coming back in 1964.

Every Tech Company Wants to Be Like Boston Dynamics

2024-05-01T16:12:00-04:00

The robot is shaped like a human, but it sure doesn’t move like one. It starts supine on the floor, pancake-flat. Then, in a display of superhuman joint mobility, its legs curl upward from the knees, sort of like a scorpion tail, until its feet settle firmly on the floor beside its hips. From there, it stands up, a swiveling mass of silver limbs. The robot’s ring-light head turns a full 180 degrees to face the camera, as though possessed. Then it lurches forward at you.

The scene plays out like one of those moments in a sci-fi movie when the heroes think for sure the all-powerful villain must be done for, but somehow he comes back stronger than ever. Except it’s a real-life video released last month by the robotics company Boston Dynamics to introduce its new Atlas robot. The humanoid machine, according to the video’s caption, is intended to further the company’s “commitment to delivering the most capable, useful mobile robots solving the toughest challenges in industry today.” It has also freaked out many people, and the video has garnered millions of views. “Impressive? Yes. Terrifying? Absolutely,” wrote a reporter for The Verge. Terminator and I, Robot memes abounded. Elon Musk suggested that it looked like it was in the throes of an exorcism.

You might think that such reactions would concern Boston Dynamics, that it would seem bad for the public to associate your product with dystopian sci-fi. But the company is used to this. Over the past decade-plus, Boston Dynamics has become arguably America’s most famous robotics company by posting unnerving viral videos that elicit a predictable cascade of reactions: things like “Could you imagine this thing chasing you?” and “We’re doomed.” When the company posts a video like the one of the new Atlas, and viewers get worked up, it all appears to be part of the plan.

Even if you don’t know Boston Dynamics by name, there is a good chance you have seen one of its videos before. Clips of robots running faster than Usain Bolt and dancing in sync, among many others, have helped the company reach true influencer status. Its videos have now been viewed more than 800 million times, far more than those of much bigger tech companies, such as Tesla and OpenAI. The creator of Black Mirror even admitted that an episode in which killer robot dogs chase a band of survivors across an apocalyptic wasteland was directly inspired by Boston Dynamics’ videos.

The company got into the viral-video game by accident. Now owned by Hyundai, Boston Dynamics was founded in 1992 as a spin-off of an MIT robotics lab, and for years had operated in relative obscurity. In the 2000s, someone grabbed a video off the company’s website and uploaded it to YouTube. Before long, it had 3.5 million views. That first YouTube hit is when “the light went on—this matters,” Marc Raibert, the founder, has said. (Boston Dynamics did not provide an interview or comment for this story.) In July 2008, the company created a YouTube channel and began uploading its own videos. Almost every one topped 1 million views. Within a few years, they were regularly collecting tens of millions.

Many of Boston Dynamics’ videos seem engineered to fuel people’s most dystopian fantasies, such as the one in which it dressed its humanoid robot in camo and a gas mask. But the company is careful not to lean too far in this direction. Alongside videos of the robots looking creepy or performing incredible feats, it has offered ones in which the robots failed spectacularly, were bullied by their human makers, or did silly dances; in response, people professed to feeling “sorry for” or “emotionally attached to” these robots. The company’s recent farewell video for its old Atlas model, retired days before the new one was released, included clips of the robot toppling off a balance beam and tumbling down a hill. “What we’ve tried to do is make videos that you can just look at and understand what you’re seeing,” Raibert told Wired in 2018. “You don’t need words, you don’t need an explanation. We’re neither hiding anything nor faking anything.”

Boston Dynamics has not said much publicly about how it trains its robots. But when viewers watch videos of the recently retired hydraulic Atlas doing parkour, they might well assume that if it can execute such complex maneuvers, then it can do pretty much anything. In fact, it has likely been programmed to perform a handful of specific tricks, Chelsa Finn, an AI researcher at Stanford University, told me last year. As I wrote then, robots have lagged behind chatbots and other kinds of generative AI because “the physical world is extremely complicated, far more so than language.” The company posted its first video of Atlas doing a backflip in 2017; more than six years later, the robot still is not commercially available. “The athletic part of robotics is really doing well,” Raibert told Wired in January, “but we need the cognitive part.”

The actual business of Boston Dynamics is comparatively mundane. Currently, its humanoid robots are purely for research and development. Its commercial products—a large robotic arm and a small robotic dog—are used mainly for moving boxes and workplace safety and inspections. “The perception of how far along the field is that we get from these highly curated, essentially PR-campaign videos … from different companies is a bit distorted,” Raphaël Millière, a philosopher at Macquarie University, in Sydney, whose work focuses on artificial intelligence and cognitive science, told me. “You should always take these with a grain of salt, because they’re likely to be carefully choreographed routines.”

The company, for its part, has gestured at the limits of its robots in press releases and YouTube descriptions. But it still keeps posting dystopian videos that keep freaking people out. “They probably made a calculated decision that actually this is not bad press,” Millière said, “but rather, it makes the videos more viral.” The company recognizes that we love fantasizing about our own demise—to a point—and it supplies regular fodder. The strategy has paid off. Now pretty much all the top robotics companies post video demonstrations on YouTube, some of which are more advanced than Boston Dynamics’. Its video introducing the new Atlas robot garnered more than twice as many views as this frankly far more impressive video from the lesser-known robotics company Figure.

In recent years, AI companies seem to have taken a page out of the Boston Dynamics playbook. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talks about the existential threat of superhuman AI, he is in effect deploying the same strategy. So, too, are the other executives who have invoked the “risk of extinction” that AI poses to humanity. As my colleague Matteo Wong has written, AI doomerism functions as a fantastic PR strategy, in that it makes the product seem far more advanced than it actually is.

Boston Dynamics is poised to benefit from the revolution those companies have delivered. Hardly a week after the launch of ChatGPT in late November 2022, the company announced the creation of a new AI Institute. Last month, it posted a video about using simulations and machine learning to teach its robot dogs how to move through a range of real-world environments. And the press release for the new Atlas robot explicitly talked up the company’s progress in AI and machine learning over the past couple of years: “We have equipped our robots with new AI and machine learning tools, like reinforcement learning and computer vision, to ensure they can operate and adapt efficiently to complex real-world situations.” In normal English, Atlas might soon not just look but actually be, in a certain sense, possessed. Now that would really be scary.

A Chess Formula Is Taking Over the World

2024-04-19T14:20:00-04:00

In October 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created his first viral site: not Facebook, but FaceMash. Then a college freshman, he hacked into Harvard’s online dorm directories, gathered a massive collection of students’ headshots, and used them to create a website on which Harvard students could rate classmates by their attractiveness, literally and figuratively head-to-head. The site, a mean-spirited prank recounted in the opening scene of The Social Network, got so much traction so quickly that Harvard shut down his internet access within hours. The math that powered FaceMash—and, by extension, set Zuckerberg on the path to building the world’s dominant social-media empire—was reportedly, of all things, a formula for ranking chess players: the Elo system.

Fundamentally, what an Elo rating does is predict the outcome of chess matches by assigning every player a number that fluctuates based purely on performance. If you beat a slightly higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a little, but if you beat a much higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a lot (and theirs, conversely, goes down a lot). The higher the rating, the more matches you should win.

That is what Elo was designed for, at least. FaceMash and Zuckerberg aside, people have deployed Elo ratings for many sports—soccer, football, basketball—and for domains as varied as dating, finance, and primatology. If something can be turned into a competition, it has probably been Elo-ed. Somehow, a simple chess algorithm has become an all-purpose tool for rating everything. In other words, when it comes to the preferred way to rate things, Elo ratings have the highest Elo rating.

The simplest way to rank chess players, or players in any competitive game, really, is by wins and losses. But that metric is obviously flawed: For one thing, a mediocre player could amass an undefeated record by beating up on newbies while a grand master wins some and loses some against other grand masters. For another, a simple win-loss tally indicates more about how good a player has been than about how good a player is now. Even before Elo, chess had a rating system that was more complex than just wins and losses, but in the mid-1950s, a 13-year-old chess prodigy named Bobby Fischer broke it. He had gotten so good so fast that the rankings—which didn’t sufficiently account for the quality of a player’s opposition—couldn’t keep up. Apparently in response, the U.S. Chess Federation convened a committee to correct these deficiencies, and in 1960 adopted a system devised by a Hungarian American chess master and physics professor named Arpad Elo. The International Chess Federation followed suit a decade later.

More than 50 years later, Elo’s is still the go-to ranking system. It has been modified over time, and different chess governing bodies use slightly different versions (some, for example, are more or less “swingy” to wins and losses), but all of them are still close variations on the original. Elo has become the most important number in chess. “Whenever anyone finds out you play chess, the immediate question is always, ‘What’s your rating?’” Nate Solon, a chess master and data scientist who writes a weekly chess newsletter, told me.

But Elo ratings don’t inherently have anything to do with chess. They’re based on a simple mathematical formula that works just as well for any one-on-one, zero-sum competition—which is to say, pretty much all sports. In 1997, a statistician named Bob Runyan adapted the formula to rank national soccer teams—a project so successful that FIFA eventually adopted an Elo system for its official rankings. Not long after, the statistician Jeff Sagarin applied Elo to rank NFL teams outside their official league standings. Things really took off when the new ESPN-owned version of Nate Silver’s 538 launched in 2014 and began making Elo ratings for many different sports. Some sports proved trickier than others. NBA basketball in particular exposed some of the system’s shortcomings, Neil Paine, a stats-focused sportswriter who used to work at 538, told me. It consistently underrated heavyweight teams, for example, in large part because it struggled to account for the meaninglessness of much of the regular season and the fact that either team might not be trying all that hard to win a given game. The system assumed uniform motivation across every team and every game.

Pretty much anything, it turns out, can be framed as a one-on-one, zero-sum game. You may well have been evaluated by an Elo rating without even knowing it. Elo ratings can be used to grade student assessments and inspect fabric. They can be used to rank venture-capital firms and prioritize different kinds of health-care training. Until a few years ago, Tinder used Elo scores to rate users by desirability and show them potential matches with similar ratings. Computer scientists have begun keeping an Elo-based leaderboard of large language models. Primatologists use Elo ratings to model social-dominance behaviors. At least one person has used them to decide which of their T-shirts to chuck.

The allure of Elo is clear: People are obsessed with data and statistics and ranking things, and Elo provides a sense of quantitative rigor, of objective meritocracy. “The good thing about it in chess is that you have this single number that captures your ability pretty accurately,” Solon told me. Of course on some level you’d want something similar in other aspects of life. “But then the dark side of that is that it can determine your standing within the chess world and even your self-worth … It’s sort of a curse for a lot of players because they’re just fixated on that number.” The great thing about Elo ratings is that you know exactly where you stand relative to everyone else, and the terrible thing about Elo ratings is that you know exactly where you stand relative to everyone else.

In truth, though, Elo doesn’t guarantee anything. The rankings are only as good or meritocratic as the underlying competitions. There’s nothing magic about them: However sophisticated your formula, if your inputs are junk, your outputs will be too. Last summer, someone built a website called Elo Everything, which does exactly what you’d think it would. When you visit the site, it serves up two things and asks, “Which do you rank higher?” A few example face-offs include the U.S. government versus spiders, testosterone versus crispiness, and the One Ring from Lord of the Rings versus the death of Adolf Hitler. Your selection affects the Elo score of the two things in contention, and that in turn affects the overall leaderboard. Currently atop the standings are: (1) The universe, (2) water, (3) knowledge, (4) information, and (5) love. Language, matter, and the “female body shape” were, as of this afternoon, locked in a three-way tie for 24th.

Elo himself understood the limitations of his invention. In his conception, its function was quite narrow: “It is a measuring tool, not a device of reward or punishment,” he once remarked. “It is a means to compare performances, assess relative strength, not a carrot waved before a rabbit, or a piece of candy given to a child for good behavior.” Inevitably, that is what it has become.

The Most Hated Sound on Television

2024-04-15T08:45:00-04:00

When American viewers flipped open the July 2, 1966, edition of TV Guide, they were treated to a bombshell story. This was the first installment of a two-part series on “the most taboo topic in TV,” the industry’s “best-known and least-talked-about secret,” the “put-on of all time”: the laugh track.

At the time, almost every comedy on air was filmed live in front of a studio audience—or at least pretended to be. Pretty much all of the biggest shows used a laugh track—The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres. Savvy viewers might have figured out that not all of the giggles and guffaws were real, but few people outside the industry understood the extent of the artifice. Even shows filmed live added some artificial laughs, sometimes to supplement the audience and sometimes because the laugh track sounded more authentic than the real thing. Behind the scenes, “Laff Boys” played their “Laff Boxes” like magic instruments, calling forth rounds of applause or squeals of delight with the press of a button.

Viewers scorned the laugh track—prerecorded and live chortles alike—first for its deceptiveness and then for its condescension. They came to see it as artificial, cheesy, even insulting: You think we need you to tell us when to laugh? Larry Gelbart said he “always thought it cheapened” M*A*S*H. Larry David reportedly didn’t want it on Seinfeld but lost out to studio execs who did. The actor David Niven once called it “the single greatest affront to public intelligence I know of.” In 1999, Time judged the laugh track to be “one of the hundred worst ideas of the twentieth century.” And yet, it persisted. Until the early 2000s, nearly every TV comedy relied on one. Friends, Two and a Half Men, Everybody Loves Raymond, Drake & Josh—they all had laugh tracks.

Now the laugh track is as close to death as it’s ever been. The Big Bang Theory, the last major laugh-track show, ended in 2019, and nothing has taken its place. Half of the live comedies on the big-four American TV networks still use laugh tracks, but half of those appear to be ending this year. More tellingly: Can you name a single one? The laugh-track haters had to wait more than 50 years, but finally, they can rejoice.

In a sense, TV episodes are just short movies beamed into your living room. But movies never used laugh tracks, not even in the early, silent days, when it would’ve been easy to layer the sounds of a delighted audience over Charlie Chaplin’s buffoonery. There was simply no need: Every movie had its own live audience right there in the theater, so why bother simulating one? Early TV shows were not so much short movies as radio shows acted out onstage. And because radio shows were recorded in front of a live studio audience for people tuning in at home, TV shows were too. The point of the laugh track was to re-create the communal experience you would have in person, Ron Simon, a curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media, told me. It was necessary, one production executive thought, “because TV viewers expect an audience to be there.”

Live-audience laughter had long been sweetened for radio and TV broadcasts, but around 1950, Bing Crosby’s radio show took things a step further, dispensing with the live audience altogether and adding in the laughs later. TV executives soon took a lesson out of Crosby’s book. With the creation of the Laff Box, in the early ’50s, canned laughs proliferated to the point that even shows without the slightest pretense of having been performed for a live studio audience used laugh tracks. Even The Flintstones and The Jetsons did. Some shows were still filmed in front of a real audience, but even they sometimes relied on canned laughs.

Not that the viewers warmed up to the laugh track. There remained a dissonance between viewers’ stated and demonstrated preferences: People railed against the laugh track, but they adored shows that used it. Every so often, the networks would try a show without a laugh track, but none of them lasted long. It’s nice to think that we’re above laugh tracks, that we don’t need them to know what’s funny, but “those social cues help you understand the meaning of comedy,” Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London who has studied laugh tracks, told me.

By the late 1980s, though, the dominance of the laugh track was starting to erode. Dramedies such as Hooperman and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd got people accustomed to laughing without any cue, Simon told me, and in the early ’90s, shows such as Dream On and The Larry Sanders Show demonstrated the viability of the unsweetened sitcom. In 1998, a not-yet-famous Aaron Sorkin insisted to ABC executives that adding a laugh track would ruin his first-ever TV show, Sports Night. If he were forced to add one, he said, he’d “feel as if I’d put on an Armani tuxedo, tied my tie, snapped on my cufflinks, and the last thing I do before I leave the house is spray Cheez Whiz all over myself.” The show started out with a laugh track but scrapped it for Season 2.

The laugh track remained a force, though, even as the tides turned against it. In 2003, The New York Times wrote that “pretty much nobody likes laugh tracks, perhaps because they’re such obvious fig leafs for the embarrassment of weak punchlines, perhaps because they make us feel bossed and condescended to, perhaps because they dehumanize one of the most human actions imaginable.” At the time, Friends was the most popular comedy on TV.

Within a few years, though, a new breed of sitcoms was supplanting the old, first with the arrival of Arrested Development, then with The Office and 30 Rock, and a few years later with Parks and Recreation and Modern Family. Laugh-track shows were coming to seem not just condescending but also stiff and fusty. People began making videos in which they removed the laugh tracks from classic sitcoms to show that they weren’t actually funny. “Living in L.A., you sometimes hear coyotes eating cats, and to me, that’s the sound of a multi-cam laugh track,” Steve Levitan, one of the creators of Modern Family, said a few years into the show’s run. “I just can’t take it anymore.”

Last month, CBS green-lighted a new comedy about two young parents in Texas. It’s a spin-off of The Big Bang Theory and, like the original, will have a laugh track. In short, despite the repeated proclamations of its demise, the laugh track remains. You can still find shows that have it, both on TV and on streaming services, but there is an undead quality to it now. Bob Hearts Abishola, (probably) The Conners, and (probably) Extended Family are ending this year, likely to be replaced by more laugh-track-less shows. And many of those that remain are clear nostalgia plays, such as Netflix’s That ’90s Show, Paramount+’s Frasier revival, and CBS’s The Big Bang Theory spin-off.

Networks and streamers are going to keep swinging, and as long as they do, the laugh track will live on. The older audiences who grew up and spent most of their adult life watching classic laugh-track comedies are still around, and they watch more TV than any other age group. Plus, conventional sitcoms, when they really connect, are more lucrative than any other type of show. But the laugh track simply is not at the center of culture anymore. A laugh-track show hasn’t won the best-comedy Emmy in almost 20 years. If you could once flip through channels and hear laugh track after laugh track, now you can power up your smart TV; toggle among the top shows on Netflix, Hulu, Max, and Amazon Prime; and not hear a single audience reaction.

Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, compares the state of the laugh-track sitcom to that of a much older medium: the fresco. “You could still get people to respond to beautiful paintings like Michelangelo painted on the ceiling,” he told me. “It’s just that people aren’t painting that way anymore.” Tourists still come from across the world to see the Sistine Chapel, and millions of people still watch Seinfeld and Friends on streaming services. But they may never lay eyes on a new fresco—or get into a new laugh-track comedy.

That might seem like reason to rejoice. But the death of the laugh track is not—or at least not just—something to celebrate. For all the ire it incurred, for all the bad jokes it disguised, the laugh track was fundamentally about reproducing the experience of being part of an audience, and its decline is also the decline of communal viewership. The era of the family gathering around the living-room TV is over. We don’t all watch the same shows on the same networks, and whatever we watch, we watch on our own personal devices. We don’t go to theaters as often. The laugh track was never more than the illusion of community, but now even the illusion has lost its luster.

There was always something a little dark about the illusion. But there’s arguably something even darker about its loss of appeal. Whether they realized it or not, viewers found comfort in the pretense that they were part of an audience. Now we are content to laugh alone.

Zyn Was 100 Years in the Making

2024-03-29T11:01:54-04:00

For something that isn’t candy, Zyn nicotine pouches sure look a lot like it. The packaging, a small metal can, looks more than a little like a tin of mints. The pouches come in a wide variety of flavors: citrus, cinnamon, “chill,” “smooth.” And they’re consumed orally, more like jawbreakers or Warheads than cigarettes.

America has found itself in the beginnings of a Zyn panic. As cigarette and vape use have trailed off in recent years, Zyn and other nicotine pouches are gaining traction. The absolute pouch-usage numbers are still not that high, but sales have more than quadrupled from late 2019 to early 2022. Although only adults 21 and older can legally purchase them—a fact that the product’s website directly points out—they are reportedly catching on with teens. “I’m delivering a warning to parents,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in January, calling for a crackdown, “because these nicotine pouches seem to lock their sights on young kids.” Earlier this month, a group of plaintiffs filed a class-action lawsuit accusing the tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI), which also makes Zyn, of purposefully targeting kids. (“We believe the complaints are without merit and will be vigorously defended,” a PMI spokesperson told me over email, adding that Zyn offers “adult-orientated flavors.”)

On their surface, nicotine pouches seem to be a fad like any other, but they are the end result of a century of nicotine marketing and development that began with cigarettes and has now moved beyond. “It’s basically part of the long history of the candification of nicotine,” Robert Proctor, a Stanford historian who has written multiple books on tobacco, told me. Over the years, the tobacco industry has gradually introduced more and more products flavored and packaged like sweet treats. Now, with Zyn, the industry has finally devised a near-perfect one.

[Read: The easy way for Joe Biden to save lives]

Once, nicotine wanted to be the opposite of candy. In the 1920s, weight loss—or “reducing,” as it was then known—became a major craze, and the tobacco industry moved to market its products as a healthier alternative to candy. “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet!” read one ad. Candymakers were understandably aggrieved about this slight, but the industries made nice in 1930, when Lucky’s maker dropped “instead of a sweet!” from its slogan. Candy and cigarettes had commonalities. Both relied on sugar—candy because, well, obviously, and cigarettes to cut the bitter taste of tobacco. Both were placed near the checkout register, to encourage impulse purchases. Soon, the makers of both products established joint trade journals and labor unions, at least one of which exists to this day. (Yes, some of the workers who make Ghirardelli chocolate and Marlboro cigarettes are represented by the same union.)

Around this time, tobacco companies warmed up to the potential of cigarettes made out of chocolate, bubblegum, or pure sugar. Candy cigarettes, they seem to have realized, were free advertising, a gateway for kids into the world of smoking. (“Just Like Daddy!” read the slogan on one brand’s boxes.) The more similar the candy replicas looked to the real deal, the better. By the 1950s, most of the top cigarette brands—Lucky Strike, Chesterfield, Philip Morris—had their candy equivalent made by other companies, with packaging that very closely matched the real thing.

This was roughly the equivalent of a modern apple-juice maker packaging its product in a Jack Daniel’s bottle. These tobacco companies claim never to have encouraged this, but as Proctor details in his 2011 book, Golden Holocaust, they did nothing to discourage it either. The goal, he writes, was to “create Philip Morris in the minds of our future smokers.” (That Philip Morris and the current Philip Morris International are not technically the same company, having since rebranded and then split apart.)

Over time, cigarettes themselves became more and more candylike—and the government has responded by cracking down. Menthol cigarettes went big in the 1950s and ’60s, and starting in the ’70s, companies introduced a wider range of even more candylike flavors: chocolate, strawberry, Twista Lime, Warm Winter Toffee. Flavored cigarettes were eventually banned in 2009—with the exception of menthol—because of their disproportionate popularity among kids. But flavored e-cigarettes such as Juul took their place just a few years later and quickly became the most popular tobacco product among American youth—until they, too, were mostly banned in 2020.

Now, with products such as Zyn, the candification of nicotine is pretty much complete. Pouches don’t just taste like candy; they’re also packaged like candy and consumed like candy (don’t swallow them, though). Proctor told me he’s talked with people for hours before realizing they had a nicotine pouch in their mouth. “It’s the ultimate merger of two of the leading hazards of modernity,” he said. Other companies such as Velo and Lucy are selling nicotine pouches too. Lucy even calls one of its special pouch lines “Breakers” (which sounds suspiciously close to Icebreakers, though a spokesperson for the company told me in an email, “They are in no way intended to resemble ice breakers the mints or any other type of candy.”). And it’s not just pouches: Nicotine chewing gum and lozenges have become available in wide varieties of flavors and are packaged in candy-colored pastels. Nicotine gummies have been on the rise as well.

[Read: Gummy vitamins are just candy]

Unlike with cigarette-shaped candies or candy-flavored cigarettes, both of which were uncomplicatedly bad, there actually is a legitimate, good-faith argument to be had about the merits of Zyn and similar flavored products. On the one hand, they do not contain tobacco and are not smoked, which is largely what makes cigarettes so deadly. The tobacco industry has positioned these products as a way for adults to wean themselves off of cigarettes, and they sure seem to be much safer than cigarettes, which kill more than 480,000 Americans each year—more than the combined deaths from COVID and car-crash fatalities in 2021. So the more people popping flavored pouches or gummies rather than smoking cigarettes, the better. On the other hand, they are addictive, and flavored products have been shown to play a major role in hooking kids. The PMI spokesperson told me, “If you’re worried about your health, the best thing is to never start using nicotine or”—if you already do—“stop using it.”

Whether the increase in the number of kids using nicotine is worth the decrease in the number of adults using cigarettes is hotly debated. There’s a dark irony to the fact we’re having this debate at all. A hundred years ago, tobacco companies invoked the idea, if not the specific language, of harm reduction when they marketed their cigarettes as a healthy alternative to candy. Now they’re making their own nicotine products more candylike and marketing them as a healthy alternative to cigarettes. The harm reducer has become the harm to be reduced.

After all this, flavored nicotine pouches might end up banned, just like flavored cigarettes and vapes before them. But in the cat-and-mouse game that the tobacco industry has been playing with regulators, Zyn may have a better chance of persisting than anything before it.

Of Course America Fell for Liquid Death

2024-03-14T07:00:00-04:00

When you think about it, the business of bottled water is pretty odd. What other industry produces billions in revenue selling something that almost everyone in America—with some notable and appalling exceptions—can get basically for free? Almost every brand claims in one way or another to be the purest or best-tasting or most luxurious, but very little distinguishes Poland Spring from Aquafina or Dasani or Evian. And then there is Liquid Death. The company sells its water in tallboy cans branded with its over-the-top name, more over-the-top melting-skull logo, and even more over-the-top slogan: “Murder your thirst.”

Liquid Death feels more like an absurd stunt than a real company, but it’s no joke. You can find its products on the shelves at Target, 7-Eleven, Walmart, and Whole Foods. After the great success of its plain canned water, it has branched out into iced tea and seltzer, with flavors such as Mango Chainsaw, Berry It Alive, and Dead Billionaire (its take on an Arnold Palmer). On Monday, Bloomberg reported that the company is now valued at $1.4 billion, double the valuation it received in late 2022. That would make it more than one-tenth the size of the entire no- and low-alcohol-beverage industry. All of this for canned water (and some edgily named teas).

But not really. Liquid Death is not a water company so much as a brand that happens to sell water. To the extent the company is selling anything, it’s selling metal, in both senses of the word: its literal aluminum cans, which it frames as part of its environmentally motivated “Death to Plastic” campaign, and its heavy-metal, punk-rock style. Idiosyncratic as all of this might seem, the company’s strategy is not a departure from modern branding. If anything, it is the perfect distillation.

Liquid Death isn’t just an excuse for marketing. Metal cans probably do beat plastic bottles, environmentally speaking, but both are much worse than just drinking tap water. You can nurse a can of Liquid Death at a party, and most people will probably mistake it for a beer. But there are lots of canned nonalcoholic drink options. Even the company’s CEO, Mike Cessario, has acknowledged that the water is mostly beside the point: He worked in advertising for years before realizing that if he was ever going to get to make the kinds of ads he wanted to make, he’d have to create his own product first. “If you have a valuable brand,” he told Bloomberg this week, “it means that people have a reason to care about you beyond the small functional difference” between Liquid Death’s water and any other company’s.

That’s how you end up with a company that makes double-entendre-laced videos featuring porn stars and that partners with Fortnite, Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon, and Steve-O, of MTV’s Jackass. On Instagram and TikTok, it is the third-most-followed beverage, behind only Red Bull and Monster; Liquid Death takes social-media comments trashing the product and turns them into songs with names such as “Rather Cut My Own D**k Off” and absurd taste-test commercials in which contestants are made, in one instance, to lick sweat off a man’s back.

All of this, in one way or another, is about building the brand, because the brand is what’s important; the brand is all there is. Plenty of companies sell branded T-shirts or hoodies, but Liquid Death has gone all in. It offers dozens of different T-shirt and hoodie designs, plus beach chairs and watches and neon signs and trading cards and casket-shaped flasks and boxer briefs.

Liquid Death, Cessario likes to say, is by no means unique in its focus on marketing. “Like every truly large valuable brand,” he told The Washington Post last year, “it is all marketing and brand because the reason people choose things 98 percent of the time is not rational. It’s emotional.” He has a point. And in recent years, marketing has become ever more untethered from the underlying products. As I previously wrote, many companies have begun deploying meta-advertisements: advertisements that are about advertisements or refer explicitly to the fact that they’re advertisements.

Think of CeraVe’s Super Bowl commercial in which Michael Cera pitches an ad featuring him at his awkward, creepy best to a boardroom full of horrified executives. Or the State Farm commercial that also aired during the Super Bowl, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger struggles to enunciate the word neighbor while playing “Agent State Farm” in an ad within the ad. Think of the Wayfair commercials in which characters say things like “Are we in a Wayfair commercial?” or the Mountain Dew commercials in which celebrities decked out in biohazard-green Mountain Dew gear discuss “how obvious product placement is.”

The appeal of these ads is that they make no appeal at all—at least no traditional appeal, no appeal having to do with the product they’re ostensibly selling. They wink at the viewer. They say: We know that you know what we’re trying to do here, so we’re just gonna cut the crap and be straight with you. They flatter the viewer, make them feel like they’re in on the joke. The marketing strategy is to renounce marketing strategies. As with most advertising, it’s hard to know for sure whether this actually works, but companies seem to think it does; after all, more and more of them are sinking millions into meta-ads.

You can think of Liquid Death as the apotheosis of meta-advertising. It doesn’t just say Forget the product for a moment while you watch this ad. It dispenses with the product entirely. The advertisement is the product. What Liquid Death is selling is not so much purified water as purified marketing, marketing that has shed its product—the soul without the body. The company writes the principle straight into its manifesto: “We’re just a funny beverage company who hates corporate marketing as much as you do,” it reads. “Our evil mission is to make people laugh and get more of them to drink more healthy beverages more often, all while helping to kill plastic pollution.”

It’s easy to dismiss Liquid Death as a silly one-off gimmick, but the truth is that many of us routinely fall for just this sort of appeal. The same thing is happening when we respond to the Visible phone service Super Bowl commercial in which Jason Alexander rehashes his “Yada yada” bit from Seinfeld and declares, “I’m in an ad right now.” And how could it not? Marketing is virtually inescapable. Brands are clamoring for our attention at every moment. It’s nice to feel, for a moment, like we’re not being advertised to—like Liquid Death is just a good bit and not, as it now is, a billion-dollar business.

Pfizer Couldn’t Pay for Marketing This Good

2024-03-06T16:36:00-05:00

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. Things only accelerated from there: In January 2022, he received at least 49 COVID shots.

A few months later, employees at a local vaccination center thought to themselves, Huh, wasn’t that guy in here yesterday? and alerted the police. By that point, the German Press Agency reported, the man had been vaccinated as many as 90 times. And still he was not done. As of November, he said he’d received 217 COVID shots—217!

That’s according to a new paper published in The Lancet. After German researchers learned of the man from newspaper articles, they managed to contact him via the public prosecutor investigating the case. He was “very interested” in participating in a study, Kilian Schober, an immunologist at Uniklinikum Erlangen and a co-author on the paper, said in a statement. They pieced together his vaccination timeline through interviews and medical records, and collected blood and saliva samples to examine the immunological effects of “hypervaccination.”

The man’s identity hasn’t been revealed, and in the paper he’s referred to only as “HIM” (seemingly an acronym, though what it stands for is not specified). He is hardly the world’s only hypervaccinated person. A retired postman in India had reportedly received 12 shots by January 2022 and told The New York Times, “I still want more.” A New Zealand man, meanwhile, allegedly racked up 10 in a single day. But pause for a moment and consider the sheer logistics of HIM’s feat. In all, he received his 217 vaccinations over the course of just under two and a half years, which comes out to an average of seven and a half shots a month, although the distribution was far from even. For several weeks in early 2022, he received two shots nearly every day. He seems to have had a strong preference for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but he also got at least one shot of AstraZeneca and Sanofi-GSK and, of course, Johnson & Johnson.

Why? you might wonder. The paper itself elides this question, saying only that he did so “deliberately and for private reasons.” Perhaps the most obvious explanation would be extreme, probably pathological COVID anxiety. News reports from April 2022 offer another possible explanation: that he did so to sell the vaccination cards. But German prosecutors did not bring charges once HIM’s scheme was uncovered, and he continued getting unnecessary shots.

Getting 217 COVID shots is very much not the public-health guidance in Germany or anywhere else. Yet the strategy seemingly panned out: HIM has never contracted COVID, researchers concluded based on antigen tests, PCR tests, and bloodwork. “If you ask immunologists, we might have predicted that it would be not beneficial to do this,” Cindy Leifer, an immunologist at Cornell University who wasn’t involved with the Lancet study, told me. They might have expected the constant action to exhaust the immune system, leaving it vulnerable to actual viral threats. But such worries came to nothing.

Still, immunologists cautioned against inferring any strong causal connection. He avoided the virus; he got vaccinated 217 times. He did not necessarily avoid the virus because he got vaccinated 217 times. In fact, the authors wrote, although hypervaccination seems to have increased the quantity of antibodies and T cells that HIM’s body produced to fend off the virus—even after 216 shots, the 217th still produced a modest increase—it had no real effect on the quality of the immune response. “He would have been just as well protected if he had gotten a normal number of three to four vaccinations,” Schober told me.

Nor did hypervaccination lead to any adverse effects. By shot 217, one might have expected to see some of the rare side effects associated with the vaccines, such as myocarditis, pericarditis, or Guillain-Barré Syndrome, but as far as researchers could tell, HIM was completely fine. Remarkably, he didn’t even report feeling minor side effects from any of his 217 shots. On some level, this makes total sense: As Schober reasonably pointed out, HIM probably would not have gotten all those shots if each one had knocked him out for a day. Fair, but still: 217 shots and no side effects? How?

If nothing else, HIM is one hell of an advertisement for the vaccines. Worried about side effects from your third booster? Well, this guy’s gotten more than 200, and he’s a-okay. Travis Kelce has been called Mr. Pfizer, but he’s got nothing on HIM. Scientifically, things are somewhat murkier. The results of the HIM study were largely unsurprising, researchers told me, but the mysteries at the margins—such as the absence of any side effects—are a good reminder that four years after the pandemic began, immunology is still, as my former colleague Ed Yong wrote, “where intuition goes to die.”

At the end of the paper, the authors are very clear: “We do not endorse hypervaccination as a strategy to enhance adaptive immunity.” The takeaway, Leifer said, should not be the more shots, the better. Schober told me he even tried to personally convey this message to HIM after his 216th shot. “From the bottom of my heart as a medical doctor, I really told him that he shouldn’t get vaccinated again,” Schober said.

HIM seemed to take this advice seriously. Then he went and got shot No. 217 anyway.

Did Apple Just Make a Gambling App?

2024-03-02T07:00:00-05:00

On Tuesday, I downloaded the new Apple Sports app just before watching basketball on TNT, and soon noticed something strange: The scores on the app were ahead of the telecast. Presumably the game between the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers was appearing on my TV in near-real time, but it was still behind the app’s ticking game clock.

Launched last week, the Apple Sports app is mostly sleek and mostly intuitive, as Apple products tend to be. But it’s also something of a misnomer. Apple Scores would be a better name for the app, because it does almost nothing else. Unlike ESPN and the many other major sports apps you can download to track scores and follow games, it offers no highlights. There is no news. The app doesn’t even show what channel or streaming service the games are airing on. Nor does it show the results of any game more than a day ago, or any team’s schedule more than a single game in advance. And yet what it does show you is betting odds, prominently displayed in the home screen.

Click on a specific game, and you’ll get detailed betting odds, such as odds for the total number of points that will be scored in a game, all provided by the sports-betting juggernaut DraftKings. You can hide these details in your iPhone’s general settings, and the app doesn’t link to DraftKings, where you can actually put money down. But this seems to be the crux of the app. It’s the beginning of a betting app.

Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment on the app, but it’s hard to rationalize the app’s purpose in any other way. If you look at Apple Sports as an ESPN competitor, it pales in comparison. No news? No highlights? If you are a die-hard soccer fan, the app is essentially unusable: Along with the MLS, you can track the top five European men’s soccer leagues, but not the super-popular UEFA Champions League or any matches between national teams. It allows you to follow your favorite teams and leagues—if you don’t select any, you’ll see nothing when you open the app—but does not include NFL or college football. Though Apple has promised that these will be available by the start of their respective seasons, it has made no such promises about tennis or golf, which the app doesn’t include either.

Nor does it make much sense as part of Apple’s broader push into sports streaming. In 2022, Apple began airing Friday-night Major League Baseball doubleheaders on its streaming service, Apple TV+. The following year, it became the exclusive broadcaster of Major League Soccer, and now it may be readying a bid of up to $2 billion for the rights to Formula 1 racing. And yet the Apple Sports app seems ill-equipped to advance its grand sports-streaming ambitions. Though it launched the same day as the start of the new MLS season, the app doesn’t even tell you that you can watch upcoming games on Apple TV+.

In terms of betting, it makes a lot more sense. What little the app does, it does well. It loads extremely fast, and stays constantly up to date. This is a marked improvement over, say, the ESPN app, which in my experience refreshes only intermittently and is usually a few minutes behind the action. Maybe you don’t care much whether your scores app lags by two seconds or two minutes. Otherwise you’d probably be watching the game on TV—or, if necessary, secretly streaming it on your iPhone under the table. But if what you care about is betting during a game, then the difference between a two-second lag and a two-minute lag can mean everything. In those two minutes, the star quarterback for the team you’re betting on could have thrown an interception or been sidelined with a concussion—information you’ll sure wish you had. All of which suggests that Apple Sports is less useful as a sports app, or even really a scores app, than as a sort of quasi-betting app.

And eventually, it could become something like an actual betting app. Apple hasn’t ruled out allowing users to click through to DraftKings or some other sportsbook. “Whether we let you tap on it to go to DraftKings or not … we’ll decide that later,” Eddy Cue, the Apple executive leading the sports push, told CNET last week. “We just decided right now we just want to show the odds and see.” Apple, he added, is “not against” betting.

Even the idea that Apple would flirt with betting is curious, because the company has traditionally been pretty averse to anything that could be construed as a vice. Its extensive rules prohibit apps that encourage the use of “tobacco and vape products, illegal drugs, or excessive amounts of alcohol.” The same is true of anything promoting the “illegal or reckless use of weapons and dangerous objects.” And also overtly sexual or pornographic content—no surprise from the famously prudish company. “While it’s a cliché, I don’t think Steve Jobs would have signed off on showing betting odds in the Apple Sports app,” Joe Rossignol, a senior reporter for MacRumors who has covered Apple since 2008, told me via email. “Even nowadays, however, I don’t see Apple ever allowing users to place wagers directly in the app.” It just doesn’t seem to align with the spirit of the company.

If Apple doesn’t see sports gambling as a vice, though, maybe that’s because America no longer sees it as a vice. Only in 2018 did the Supreme Court let states allow online sports betting. Now it has become so normalized that commentators regularly discuss betting lines, throwing around lingo about “parlays” and “prop bets.” Entire TV shows and podcasts are devoted to gambling. ESPN has its own betting service. Sports betting has eaten sports alive, and not without consequence: Calls to gambling-addiction hotlines are way up since 2018. Even before releasing the Sports app, Apple has quietly abetted this. It has allowed sportsbooks to create apps that have made placing a bet easier than ever. In an article for The Conversation, Meredith Ginley, a specialist in gambling addiction, wrote about how betting apps deploy in-game push notifications to encourage risky behavior.

If the sports app really is a nascent sports-betting venture—still a big if—that would be the final confirmation of gambling’s acceptance into mainstream American culture, and a move that would mainstream gambling even more. Apple Sports, despite such limited functionality, is already high on the App Store charts. It could become a default, like the weather app or the camera app, potentially putting sports betting a touch-screen tap away from the world’s 1.5 billion iPhone users. Sports betting, which has grown bigger than almost anyone could have imagined in 2018, would grow bigger still than almost anyone can imagine now.

Your Phone Has Nothing on AM Radio

2024-02-21T11:54:00-05:00

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There is little love lost between Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Rashida Tlaib. She has called him a “dumbass” for his opposition to the Paris Climate Agreement; he has called her and her allies “shills for terrorists” on account of their support for Palestine. Lately, though, the right-wing Cruz and the left-wing Tlaib have found a cause they can both get behind: saving AM radio.

In recent years, a number of carmakers—BMW, Volvo, Tesla—have stopped offering AM radio in at least some models, especially electric cars. The problem is that their motors cause electromagnetic interference on the same frequency bands in which AM radio operates, in some cases making the already fuzzy medium inaudible. Carmakers do have ways to filter out the interference, but they are costly and imperfect—all to maintain a format that is in decline anyway. AM radio was eclipsed by the superior-sounding FM in the late ’70s, and the century-old technology can seem akin to floppy disks in the age of Spotify and podcasts. According to Ford’s internal data gathered from some of its newer vehicles, less than 5 percent of all in-car listening is to AM radio. Which is perhaps why Ford decided last year to drop AM from all of its vehicles, not just EVs.

Because so much listening happens in the car, the Ford news seemed like the beginning of the end for the whole medium. But just a few weeks after announcing that decision, the company reneged in response to political pressure. Before Ford’s reversal, Cruz and Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, had introduced the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act, which would require exactly what its title suggests. (Bernie Sanders and more than 40 other senators have joined them as co-sponsors, along with Tlaib and 208 other representatives in the House.) Not everyone supports the bill: In December, Senator Rand Paul at least temporarily delayed its passage on the grounds that it constituted regulatory overreach. In the interim, Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey announced new steps last month intended to ramp up the pressure on carmakers to preserve AM radio. The year is 2024, and somehow, AM radio still matters.

For Republicans, it’s the home of conservative talk radio. In a speech on the Senate floor, Cruz framed AM radio as a bastion of free speech and invoked such hallowed right-wing names as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, all of whom got their start on its airwaves. By some accounts, conservative talk radio is still the most important medium for right-wing discourse, more even than podcasts or social media. Of the top-10 most-listened-to talk-radio shows, nine are right-leaning, according to the trade journal Talkers. Hosts have come out in force to defend AM: “The automobile is essential to liberty,” the conservative-talk-show host Mark Levin told his listeners last year. “The control of the automobile is about the control of your freedom … They finally figured out how to attack conservative talk radio.”

But AM is about more than owning the libs on your way home from the office. It hosts all manner of foreign-language stations relied on by immigrants across the country, including some 700 Spanish-language stations. It hosts Black stations and hyperlocal news and sports stations. It hosts the agricultural stations important to many rural communities and provides information to communities so remote that other modes of communication struggle to reach them. “There are formats on AM radio that are lifelines to people,” Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers, told me. Its audience is aging, but roughly 80 million Americans still listen to AM radio each month—more than watched any NFL game this season, with the exception of the Super Bowl.

All of this does not necessarily mean that Congress should come to AM radio’s rescue. The primary argument in favor of the latter, from both Democrats and Republicans, hinges on an appeal to public safety. In a House hearing last year, a FEMA deputy administrator testified that AM radio remains “critically important” as a means of disseminating public information during emergency situations (flash-flood warnings, tornado warnings—the same information you probably receive via those blaring text-message alerts). Think of those signs on the side of the highway that tell you what station to tune in to for information.

According to a study by the Consumer Technology Association (which did not respond to a request for comment), just 1 percent of Americans heard a test of the nation’s emergency-alert system on AM radio. But in a true emergency, seven former FEMA administrators wrote in a letter to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, the signals that power AM radio are more reliable than FM, phone service, and internet connection. Most of the 75-odd stations with backup communications equipment and generators that allow them to broadcast in a crisis are AM stations, and AM radio covers 100 miles or more, far more territory than FM or any other widely accessible alternative. Gottheimer wrote a letter urging the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to require companies that manufacture cars without AM radio to include stickers reading Warning: No AM Radio. Vehicle Unsafe in Certain Emergencies.

This whole episode is a good reminder of how technology can remain narrowly, forgettably essential even as, in most ways, it becomes obsolete. Just as how arguably the safest place to keep your passwords is still on paper in a secure location. Or how Russian security services have reportedly reverted to using typewriters to prevent spying. Consumer technologies trend over time toward greater ease and utility—not necessarily toward greater safety and security.

Even Harrison, who’s been working in the industry in one form or another since he joined Hofstra University’s student station in 1967, recognizes that “radio is not forever.” Five or 10 years from now, Harrison said, if some alternative means of emergency communication comes along, carmakers might finally jettison AM radio. Some stations would certainly jump ship to FM, but making that leap is no simple thing. Many stations would get lost in the shuffle.

For the moment at least, AM is likely sticking around. And even setting aside the very real arguments about safety and security, there is something just about this outcome. “The radio has played a major role in giving prominence, glory, and magic to the car industry,” Harrison told me. It helped transform the car from a mere mode of transportation into a place for leisure, and in doing so helped create car culture. It’s been along for the ride ever since. And the ride, it seems, is not quite over yet.

A Fake Yellow Line Changed Football Forever

2024-02-08T07:00:00-05:00

Football is a complicated sport. Offensive players can move around before the quarterback calls hike, but only certain ones at certain times in certain directions. A defender can rough up a receiver within five yards of the line of scrimmage, but only if he remains in front of the receiver and the contact is continuous; after that, the defender can still make some contact, but only as long as it does not “significantly hinder” the receiver from catching the ball—whatever you interpret that to mean. And that’s without getting into what constitutes a “catch,” a seemingly basic question that the NFL rule book turns into a matter of great metaphysical complexity.

At least one thing in football is not complicated—that is, if you’re watching on TV: the yellow first-down marker. The virtual line, convincingly projected onto the field during every major football telecast through augmented reality, makes the sport immediately more digestible. Football, the cliché goes, is a game of inches, and even the most die-hard fans benefit from the clarity and drama that the yellow marker provides. For the uninitiated, it’s a lifeline. What’s going on? Well, one team is trying to get the ball to the yellow line, and the other is trying to stop them. Simple.

The yellow line is refreshingly straightforward, uncomplicatedly great, and massively influential. Each week during football season, hundreds of millions of viewers tune in and see it; so integral has the yellow line become to the experience of watching football that most of them probably no longer even pay much attention to it. Not only has the yellow line revolutionized the experience of watching football, it can quite plausibly be understood as the grandfather of the new Apple Vision Pro and other such goggles. The first-down marker was one of the first kinds of augmented-reality technology that spectators had ever encountered, and to this day, it is perhaps the most widely viewed use of it ever.

The technology behind the yellow line did not have an auspicious beginning. In 1994, Fox, which had just acquired the rights to broadcast National Hockey League games, wanted a way to make the puck more visible to TV viewers. And so, a team within the company designed a system that would make the puck appear to glow blue. When its speed broke 70 miles an hour, the glow would turn red, and a comet tail would appear. Fox hailed the glowing puck as “the greatest technological breakthrough in the history of sports.” But hockey fans rejected it as a gimmicky distraction; David Letterman mocked it in a skit in which a glowing blue dot circled his head. In 1998, Fox scrapped the glowing puck.

That same year, though, the team responsible for the glowing puck broke off to found its own company, Sportvision, and introduced the virtual yellow first-down line. It was a near-instant success, Chad Goebert, a professor at Kennesaw State University who studies augmented reality in sports, told me: simple and unobtrusive, its utility self-evident. The yellow-marker system effectively turned the field into a green screen, so that the line would appear on top of the grass (but not on top of players when they passed over it) and remain fixed as the camera moved around. The technology earned Sportvision an Emmy—the first of 10 the company would go on to win. When Fox tried to drop the yellow line from its broadcasts in 2001, fans revolted. “I need the line,” one fan wrote on a site that Sportvision set up to gather viewer input. “Everybody needs the line.” Another fan called it “the best thing you came up with since color TV!”

Twenty-six years after the yellow line delivered augmented reality to the masses, it looks basically the same now as it did then. Many broadcasts have added the line of scrimmage in blue, or a line indicating the edge of field-goal range in green, but the yellow line remains. If anything, football has become nearly unthinkable without it. Goebert has heard of fans showing up to their first in-person football game and discovering, to their surprise, that the yellow line isn’t real.

[Read: Why it’s never been more fun to watch sports]

The yellow line has spawned a whole lineage of so-called digital overlays in other sports that have come to seem about as normal as the original one. Pretty much every broadcast of Major League Baseball these days includes a virtual strike zone. Golf broadcasts use augmented reality to display the ball’s flight path. On NBC’s Olympic-swimming telecast, a virtual world-record line allows you to track how a swimmer is faring against not just their immediate competitors but also the all-time mark. Other sports-overlay uses have met a more lukewarm reception. All sorts of broadcasts now use AR to superimpose real-looking advertisements onto courts and fields. The Los Angeles Clippers and a company called Second Spectrum pioneered a system that, among other things, dramatized three-pointers with lightning bolts and defense with actual fences.

The digital overlays that have caught on, though, are the ones that learned the lessons of the glowing puck and the first-down line, Goebert told me. Whereas the glowing puck made the telecast look like a video game, the first-down line looked as though it were painted onto the field, same as the other lines. It became part of reality. The virtual strike zone, the golf-ball flight path, and the swimming world-record line don’t quite blur into reality the way the first-down line does, but they similarly render visible things that viewers are already trying to imagine. These overlays are like the astronomy apps that highlight constellations when you point your phone at the night sky. They augment reality rather than dilute it with fantasy; they provide information that most people seem to want in a way that is relatively unobtrusive to those who don’t. “They’re complementary to what’s going on, rather than distracting from what’s going on,” Goebert said.

Now, however, much of the point of AR is to distract you from reality, not to blend into it. In Pokémon Go, one of the most popular AR games of the past decade, the digital overlays—that is, the Pokémon—are the main event. Football broadcasts, empowered by the fact that not everyone has to watch the same one anymore, have also taken this principle to heart. In recent years, the NFL has aired games on Nickelodeon in which the end zone is turned into the “slime zone.” This season, the league introduced the Toy Story Funday Football game, in which an entirely animated version of a matchup between the Atlanta Falcons and the Jacksonville Jaguars was played in Andy’s room, with Buzz and Woody looking on. Slinky Dog served as the first-down marker. This weekend, Nickelodeon will air its first live Super Bowl telecast—with SpongeBob SquarePants serving as the announcer. “The future is generally going to revolve around choice,” Goebert told me. “People are almost going to be able to choose their own adventure, as far as the viewing modes go.”

And they’ll have the yellow first-down line to thank for it. The ultimate irony of the line is that it was made for a world without customization, and yet it made possible a world of infinite customization. It succeeded because it was perfectly calibrated to an era in which everyone watched one broadcast, but it helped inaugurate one in which everyone can watch their own broadcast, whether regular, Toy Story, or SpongeBob. Now the Vision Pro will take things a step further: It will fragment our experience of actual life. In the same way that the NFL offers multiple ways to watch a game, the Vision Pro and other AR headsets will offer multiple ways to see the world. This weekend, millions of people will turn on the Super Bowl and see the yellow line projected onto the field—whether on their TV or through the Vision Pro strapped to their head.

AI in Politics Is So Much Bigger Than Deepfakes

2024-01-31T14:25:00-05:00

Last week, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, some of the state’s voters received a robocall purporting to be from President Joe Biden. Unlike the other such prerecorded calls reminding people to vote, this one had a different ask: Don’t bother coming out to the polls, the voice instructed. Better to “save your vote for the November election.”

The message was strange, even nonsensical, but the voice on the line sure did sound like the president’s. “What a bunch of malarkey!” it exclaimed at one point. And caller ID showed that the call came from a former chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, according to the Associated Press. But this robocall appears to have been AI-generated. Who created it, and why, remains a mystery.

Although the stunt likely had no real effect on the outcome of the election—Biden won, as anticipated, in a landslide—it vividly illustrated one of the many ways in which generative AI might influence an election. These tools can help candidates more easily get out their message, but they can also let anyone create images and clips that might deceive voters. Much of what AI will do to politics has been speculative at best, but in all likelihood, the world is about to get some answers. More human beings will have the chance to vote in 2024 than in any single year before, with elections not just in the U.S. but also in the European Union, India, Mexico, and more. It’s the year of the AI election.

Up to this point, much of the attention on AI and elections has focused on deepfakes, and not without reason. The threat—that even something seemingly captured on tape could be false—is immediately comprehensible, genuinely scary, and no longer hypothetical. With better execution, and in a closer race, perhaps something like the fake-Biden robocall would not have been inconsequential. A nightmare scenario doesn’t take imagination: In the final days of Slovakia’s tight national election this past fall, deepfaked audio recordings surfaced of a major candidate discussing plans to rig the vote (and, of all things, double the price of beer).

Even so, there’s some reason to be skeptical of the threat. “Deepfakes have been the next big problem coming in the next six months for about four years now,” Joshua Tucker, a co-director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics, told me. People freaked out about them before the 2020 election too, then wrote articles about why the threats hadn’t materialized, then kept freaking out about them after. This is in keeping with the media’s general tendency to overhype the threat of efforts to intentionally mislead voters in recent years, Tucker said: Academic research suggests that disinformation may constitute a relatively small proportion of the average American’s news intake, that it’s concentrated among a small minority of people, and that, given how polarized the country already is, it probably doesn’t change many minds.

Even so, excessive concern about deepfakes could become a problem of its own. If the first-order worry is that people will get duped, the second-order worry is that the fear of deepfakes will lead people to distrust everything. Researchers call this effect “the liar’s dividend,” and politicians have already tried to cast off unfavorable clips as AI-generated: Last month, Donald Trump falsely claimed that an attack ad had used AI to make him look bad. “Deepfake” could become the “fake news” of 2024, an infrequent but genuine phenomenon that gets co-opted as a means of discrediting the truth. Think of Steve Bannon’s infamous assertion that the way to discredit the media is to “flood the zone with shit.”

AI hasn’t changed the fundamentals; it’s just lowered the production costs of creating content, whether or not intended to deceive. For that reason, the experts I spoke with agreed that AI is less likely to create new dynamics than to amplify existing ones. Presidential campaigns, with their bottomless coffers and sprawling staff, have long had the ability to target specific groups of voters with tailored messaging. They might have thousands of data points about who you are, obtained by gathering information from public records, social-media profiles, and commercial brokers—data on your faith, your race, your marital status, your credit rating, your hobbies, the issues that motivate you. They use all of this to microtarget voters with online ads, emails, text messages, door knocks, and other kinds of messages.

With generative AI at their disposal, local campaigns can now do the same, Zeve Sanderson, the executive director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics, told me. Large language models are famously good mimics, and campaigns can use them to instantaneously compose messages in a community’s specific vernacular. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has used AI software to translate his voice into languages such as Yiddish, Spanish, and Mandarin. “It is now so cheap to engage in this mass personalization,” Laura Edelson, a computer-science professor at Northeastern University who studies misinformation and disinformation, told me. “It’s going to make this content easier to create, cheaper to create, and put more communities within the reach of it.”

That sheer ease could overwhelm democracies’ already-vulnerable election infrastructure. Local- and state-election workers have been under attack since 2020, and AI could make things worse. Sanderson told me that state officials are already inundated by Freedom of Information Act requests that they think are AI-generated, which potentially eats up time they need to do their job. Those officials have also expressed the worry, he said, that generative AI will turbocharge the harassment they face, by making the act of writing and sending hate mail virtually effortless. (The consequences may be particularly severe for women.)

In the same way, it could also pose a more direct threat to election infrastructure. Earlier this month, a trio of cybersecurity and election officials published an article in Foreign Affairs warning that advances in AI could allow for more numerous and more sophisticated cyberattacks. These tactics have always been available to, say, foreign governments, and past attacks—most notably the Russian hack of John Podesta’s email, in 2016—have wrought utter havoc. But now pretty much anyone—whatever language they speak and whatever their writing ability—can send out hundreds of phishing emails in fluent English prose. “The cybersecurity implications of AI for elections and electoral integrity probably aren’t getting nearly the focus that they should,” Kat Duffy, a senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me.

How all of these threats play out will depend greatly on context. “Suddenly, in local elections, it’s very easy for people without resources to produce at scale types of content that smaller races with less money would potentially never have seen before,” Sanderson said. Just last week, AI-generated audio surfaced of one Harlem politician criticizing another. New York City has perhaps the most robust local-news ecosystem of any city in America, but elsewhere, in communities without the media scrutiny and fact-checking apparatuses that exist at the national level, audio like this could cause greater chaos.

The country-to-country differences may well be even more extreme, the writer and technologist Usama Khilji told me. In Bangladesh, backers of the ruling party are using deepfakes to discredit the opposition. In Pakistan, meanwhile, former Prime Minister Imran Khan—who ended up in jail last year after challenging the country’s military—has used deepfakes to give “speeches” to his followers. In countries that speak languages with less online text for LLMs to gobble up, AI tools may be less sophisticated. But those same countries are likely the ones where tech platforms will pay the least attention to the spread of deepfakes and other disinformation, Edelson told me. India, Russia, the U.S., the EU—this is where platforms will focus. “Everything else”—Namibia, Uzbekistan, Uruguay—“is going to be an afterthought,” he said.

The bigger or wealthier countries will get most of the attention, and the flashier issues will get most of the concern. In this way, attitudes toward the electoral implications of AI resemble attitudes toward the technology’s risks at large. It has been a little more than a year since the emergence of ChatGPT, a little more than a year that we’ve been hearing about how this will mean the mass elimination of white-collar work, the integration of chatbots into every facet of society, the beginning of a new world. But the main ways AI touches most people’s lives remain more in the background: Google Search, autocomplete, Spotify suggestions. Most of us tend to fret about the potential fake video that deceives half of the nation, not about the flood of FOIA requests already burying election officials. If there is a cost to that way of thinking, the world may pay it this year at the polls.

Gummy Vitamins Are Just Candy

2024-01-22T15:40:00-05:00

These days, the options for dietary supplements are virtually limitless. And whatever substance you want to ingest, you can find it in gummy form. Omega-3? You bet. Vitamin C? Absolutely. Iron? Calcium? Zinc? Yes, yes, and yes. There are peach collagen rings and strawberry-watermelon fiber rings. There are brambleberry probiotic gummies and “tropical zing” gummy worms that promise to put you in “an upbeat mood.” There are libido gummies and menopause gummies. There are gummies that claim to boost your metabolism, to reinforce your immune system, to strengthen your hair, your skin, your nails. For kids, there are Transformers multivitamin gummies and My Little Pony multivitamin gummies.

I could go on. A simple search for gummy vitamins on the CVS website turns up more than 50 results. This is the golden age of gummies, and that can seem like a great thing. Who wouldn’t rather eat a peach ring than pop a pill? But if the notion that something healthy can taste exactly like candy seems too good to be true, that’s because it is.

Gummy supplements are a relatively new phenomenon, but gummy candies are not. Starch-based Turkish delight has been around since the late 18th century. In 1860s England, some of the earliest gummies were popularly known as “unclaimed babies” (because they were shaped like infants, many more of which apparently were unclaimed back then). In the 1920s, the German confectioner Hans Riegel founded Haribo and created the gelatin-based gummy bears still consumed around the world today. It would be another 60 years, though, before Haribo gummies arrived on American shores. In the decades that followed, gummy sweets became ubiquitous, taking almost every shape imaginable: worms, frogs, sharks, snakes, watermelons, doughnuts, hamburgers, french fries, bacon, Coke bottles, bracelets, Band-Aids, brains, teeth, eyeballs, genitalia, soldiers, mustaches, Legos, and, as in days of old, children.

Only in the late 1990s and early 2000s, though, did the supplement industry begin experimenting with gummies. The driving principle was not a new one: As Mary Poppins put it, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” Flintstones multivitamins have been around in their hard, chewable form since 1968; even if superior to pills, they basically taste like sweet, vaguely chemical chalk.

Gummy vitamins, on the contrary, are virtually indistinguishable from the treats they’re modeled on. You could pop men’s multis at the movies the same way you could Sour Patch Kids. (Or Starburst gummies, or Skittles gummies, or Jolly Rancher gummies—pretty much every non-chocolate candy now comes in gummy form.) Which is probably why they’ve become so popular, says Tod Cooperman, the president of ConsumerLab, a watchdog site that reviews supplements. When he founded ConsumerLab in 1999, gummy supplements hardly existed. Adult gummy vitamins didn’t hit the market until 2012. Now, Nina Puch, a scientist who formulates gummies for the food and pharmaceutical consulting company Knechtel, told me, three-quarters of the gummies she designs are supplements rather than candies. Gummy supplements are everywhere. They’re a rapidly expanding $7 billion–plus industry, and by 2027 that figure is projected to double.

But what makes gummy supplements appealing also makes them concerning. The reason they taste as good as candy, it turns out, is because on average, they can contain just as much sugar as candy does. The earliest gummy supplements, Cooperman told me, were basically just candy with vitamins sprayed on. They’ve come a long way since then: The active ingredients are now carefully integrated into the gummy itself by scientists such as Puch, and done so in a way that preserves as much of the gummy’s flavor and consistency as possible. But the nutritional essentials haven’t changed much—the average gummy vitamin contains about the same amount of sugar in a serving as one Sour Patch Kid does.

A little extra sugar is not the end of the world. But there’s also the danger of overdoses. Especially for children, it’s important that medicines and supplements not taste too good, Cora Breuner, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington, told me. Consumed in excess, many of the vitamins and nutrients delivered in supplements can be toxic. They have to strike an appropriate balance, neither tasting so bad that kids refuse to take them nor so good that they’ll want too much. Most gummy supplements seemingly fail the latter test, and not without consequences. Annual calls to Poison Control for pediatric melatonin overdoses have risen 530 percent over the past decade, in part, experts suggested to me last year, because of the hormone’s increased availability in gummy form. The overdose numbers are also up for multivitamins.

The risk of overdose can be greatly mitigated by simply taking care to store gummies where kids can’t get them. The more significant problem, Cooperman told me, is that gummies are simply a less reliable delivery mechanism than the alternatives. Vitamins and many other compounds degrade far faster in gummies’ half-liquid, half-solid state than in traditional pill or capsule form, he said, because gummies offer less protection from heat, light, moisture, and other contaminants.

To compensate, supplement makers will in many cases load their products with far more of a substance than advertised on the packaging. Some overage is to be expected with all supplements, but the margins for many gummy supplements are gargantuan. “Gummy vitamins were the most likely form to contain much more of an ingredient than listed,” ConsumerLab wrote in its 2023 review of multivitamins and multiminerals. Of the four gummy supplements reviewed, three contained nearly twice as much of the relevant substance as they were supposed to, and the fourth contained only around three-quarters as much.

A recent analysis of melatonin and CBD gummies yielded similar results: Some contained as much as 347 percent the amount of those substances stated on the label. Because the FDA generally does not regulate supplements as drugs, such wild variability is accepted in a way that it isn’t for actual pharmaceuticals. (In 2020, the FDA granted the first-ever Investigational New Drug Application for a gummy medication, though no such product appears to have come to market.) “If you have something that you need a specific amount of every time you take it, gummies are not the way to go,” says Pieter Cohen, a doctor at Cambridge Health Alliance, in Somerville, Massachusetts, and the lead author of the melatonin-CBD research. Taking too much of a supplement is generally not as dangerous as taking too much of a prescription drug, but, as Breuner noted, many supplements taken in sufficient excess can still be toxic. When I asked Cooperman what advice he had for people trying to navigate all of this, his answer was simple: “Don’t buy a gummy.”

Perhaps the rise of gummy supplements was inevitable. The supplement industry has become so big in part because it can promote its products as, say, boosting the immune system or supporting healthy bones, without subjecting them to the strict regulatory demands imposed on pharmaceuticals. Supplements blur the line between food and drug, and gummy supplements—designed and marketed on the premise that healthy stuff can and should taste as good as candy—only intensify that blurring. Cohen, for one, thinks the distinction is worth preserving. Calcium supplements should not go down as easy as Haribos. That may be a bitter pill to swallow, but not everything can taste like candy.

Substack Was a Ticking Time Bomb

2024-01-12T15:52:55-05:00

When the writer Ryan Broderick joined Substack in 2020, it felt, he told me, like an “oasis.” The email-newsletter platform gave him a direct line to his readers. He did not have to deal with the chaos and controversy of social media. Substack was far from perfect, he knew—COVID conspiracies flourished, and on at least one occasion, trans writers on the platform were doxxed and harassed—but compared with the rest of the internet, he found the conditions tolerable. Until they weren’t. On Wednesday, he sent out an edition of his newsletter titled “It’s Time to Leave Substack.”

Substack now finds itself in the middle of a crisis. In late November, an investigation in The Atlantic turned up “scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack.” Because the site takes a cut of subscription revenue, this meant that Substack was making money off extremists. In response, nearly 250 Substack writers demanded in an open letter that the site explain why it was “platforming and monetizing Nazis.” Meanwhile, an opposing group of nearly 100 writers published its own open letter rejecting calls for greater moderation. Last month, a Substack co-founder, Hamish McKenzie, responded with a blog post articulating the company’s position: “We don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.”

After several of the site’s highest-profile writers either left or threatened to leave, Substack reversed course earlier this week. Several Nazi publications would be shut down, the company said, but going forward, it would proactively remove only “credible threats of physical harm.” This resolution has not been received warmly. Broderick’s departure was followed by another on Thursday evening: The prominent Substack writer Casey Newton announced that he, too, would soon leave the service.

[Read: Substack has a Nazi problem]

The most obvious thing to say about all of this is, well, obviously. Virtually all major platforms on the internet—Facebook, X, Reddit, YouTube—have dealt with some sort of moderation controversy, if not several of them. “Sooner or later, everyone has to face this question,” J. M. Berger, a senior fellow at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey who studies extremism and social media, told me, adding that “it doesn’t take a deep knowledge of online platforms to see this coming.” There was never any reason to think Substack would be different.

Except that Substack did try to frame itself as different. When the site launched in 2017, there was considerable ambiguity about what it even was. A media company trying to pioneer a new model of journalism? A social-media company trying to correct the ills and excesses of its predecessors? A modest software for sending out email newsletters? In terms of policing content, Substack opted for that last option: There would be no heavy-handed, top-down moderation. (Or, more cynically, few pesky editorial standards or values to adhere to.) Each newsletter writer would be responsible for moderating their own subcommunity. Substack promised to stay out of writers’ way, to be “pure infrastructure,” as Newton wrote last week in his newsletter, Platformer. That is part of what has made the site so popular—more than 17,000 writers earn money from their newsletters. The most widely read ones bring in millions in subscription revenue.

And yet from the beginning, Substack clearly aspired to be more than just “pure infrastructure.” It actively courted big-name writers, including Newton. It offered them advances, as a publishing house might, and experimented with a program that offered some legal counsel, as a newspaper might. “We started Substack because we were fed up about the effects of the social-media diet,” McKenzie told The New Yorker in 2020. The company wanted to have it both ways: to exert the cultural influence of a major media company without shouldering any more responsibility (or economic burden) than is expected of a mere service provider, such as Gmail. (Substack did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Read: If there are no stupid questions, then how do you explain Quora?]

If there once was some doubt, Substack has over the years leaned harder and harder into its identity as a social-media company. It has introduced a Twitter replica, Substack Notes, along with recommendations, digest emails, and a “Follow” button. In other words, rather than allowing readers and writers to remain in their own private fiefdoms, Substack pushed them to coexist in one shared space. Sign up for a newsletter on Substack and the site will urge you to sign up for others it thinks you might like. That has been advantageous for writers—Newton reported that he gained 70,000 free subscribers in 2023, in large part because of these tools—and also a liability. “If Substack can grow a publication like ours that quickly, it can grow other kinds of publications, too,” Newton wrote in the post announcing his departure. This shift from an amorphous, uncategorizable service provider to a no-question-about-it social-media company may have sealed Substack’s fate, but a moderation conflict was always in the cards.

Because these days, hardly anything on the internet is “pure infrastructure,” whether or not it has grander aspirations. Or at least hardly anything gets treated that way. When it was brought to the attention of Mailchimp—an email-marketing platform with no discernible aspirations to be a social-media powerhouse—that it hosted the newsletter of the white-supremacist podcaster Stefan Molyneux, the company shut down his account the next day. Amazon’s self-publishing arm has come under fire for offering extremists and neo-Nazis unprecedented access to publishing tools. And in 2017, the website-builder Squarespace cut off several white-supremacist sites, apparently in response to an online petition.

Even more Substack writers may soon leave the site, turning to alternatives such as Ghost and Beehiiv. Not that doing so guarantees they won’t have to deal with this again. If another platform manages to amass anything like the stable of writers that Substack did, it will face the same problems. Broderick, for his part, is feeling pretty good about his decision to leave, as are his readers, many of whom have “been treating this like a public holiday.” “Announcing I’m leaving Substack feels very similar to when I announced that I was going to Substack,” Broderick said. “There’s a real feeling of giddiness and scared excitement.” Which makes sense, in a way: Substack has become what it aspired to replace.

If There Are No Stupid Questions, Then How Do You Explain Quora?

2024-01-09T07:47:25-05:00

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Every day or two for the past seven months, I’ve received a “personalized” email containing a bunch of recent, user-generated questions from the website Quora. Here are some examples:

“I caught my son playing his Xbox at 12:00 in the morning on a school night. As a result, I broke his console and now he won’t talk to me. How can I tell him that it is his fault?”

“My husband accidentally pushed our 4-year-old daughter off the 40th story window out of anger. How do I prevent my husband from being sentenced to jail? He doesn’t need that hassle.”

“Was Hitler actually a nice guy in person?”

If I ever signed up to get these emails, I don’t remember. In fact, I didn’t even know I had a Quora account to begin with. This is apparently a common experience: In 2018, when the site informed users that their personal information may have been compromised in a data breach, a common response was, Wait, I’m a user? Even easier to forget is the fact that Quora, now more than a dozen years old, was once lauded as the future of the internet. Serious people proclaimed that it would be the biggest thing since Facebook and Twitter, that it would eclipse Wikipedia as an online reference source, that it was the modern-day Library of Alexandria. Today, perusing the site feels more like walking through a landfill.

A large number of the questions are junk. Many are not really questions at all; they’re provocations. On those occasions when users do seem to be in search of useful answers, the ones they receive are, to put it mildly, uneven. Whatever scant kernels of quality exist on the site are tough to sift from the mountains of inanity—at least in part because Quora tends to place the inane front and center, as in the so-called digest emails I receive. Perhaps the most common question type in these is the request for personal advice on how to handle some outrageous scenario contrived for maximum shock value. Other popular topics include college admissions, narcissism, and, yes, Hitler.

Last month, I posted my own question to the site: What the hell happened here?

I’m not the only Quora user asking. A quick search of the site reveals that, over the past five years, a version of this question has been posed many times in one form or another (“Why has Quora turned to crap lately?”; “Why do so many of the questions on this thing feel fake?”) and answered with varying degrees of helpfulness. My own post was met, by turns, with expressions of agreement, an exhortation to stop being “a lazy sack of shit” and read the previous responses to queries like mine, and a handful of genuine attempts to explain the site’s changing nature. But no one disputed the premise: that Quora had once been great and no longer was.

Quora emerged during a boom time for internet Q&A sites. From the late aughts through the mid-2010s, people could try to crowdsource information on brand-new forums such as Aardvark and Blopboard. They could go to recently rebranded mainstays such as Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves) and Pearl.com (formerly JustAnswer.com). Or they could post to the beloved Stack Overflow, the more exclusive Ask MetaFilter, or the unadulterated chaos of Yahoo! Answers. Some of these other sites “were a mess, but they were still popular,” Adam D’Angelo, one of the co-founders of Quora, told WIRED in 2011, the year after his site became available to the public. “That told us that we were onto something.”

[Read: The story behind that 9,000-word Quora post on airplane cockpits]

Quora proposed to do much the same thing, only better. It would be free, general interest, and high quality. It would be like Facebook to the other Q&A sites’ MySpace and Friendster. And for a time, D’Angelo and his co-founder (both of whom had worked at Facebook themselves) seemed ready to make good on their promise. The community they built had an intimate, neighborhood feeling about it. A user would ask, “What does [Facebook co-founder] Dustin Moskovitz think of the Facebook movie?” and Moskovitz himself would drop in to supply the answer. Quora was providing smart, knowledgeable answers from bona fide experts, The Guardian wrote in 2011, in describing how the site was helping to push social media “away from pure search to more intelligent information systems.”

Venture-capital money poured in accordingly. “Rock-star team with a rock-star product” was the verdict from one major Silicon Valley funder. By 2014, the company had raised more than $80 million and was fast approaching a $1 billion valuation; Barack Obama was logging on to answer questions about the Affordable Care Act. Within a matter of months, though, some members of the tech press were describing Quora in the past tense, as a site that had “failed.” Not in the sense that the business was foundering or that its user base was contracting, but in the sense that it was maybe not the intelligent information system its founders had set out to create.

The site grew more cluttered with ads as the years went by, Suman Kalyan Maity, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT who has studied Quora since 2013, told me. Provocative content started to take over, perhaps because it led to more engagement and then, in turn, to more advertising revenue. Dipto Das, an information scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who has published multiple papers on Quora, noticed something similar. As clickbait-type questions proliferated, he told me, the highest-quality users—including the “tech insiders and pundits” over whom The Guardian had earlier marveled—were discouraged from contributing at all. The introduction of the Quora Partners Program in 2018 only made things worse. In response to a shortage of posted questions, the company started paying users to come up with them. This system, which was discontinued last year, provided users with more topics on which they might weigh in. But not everyone appreciated the output: The program created “a giant factory for absolute crap questions,” as one longtime user put it. (In a blog post a few years ago, D’Angelo defended the program: “By all of our internal metrics, questions asked by partners are on average higher quality than questions by non-partners.”)

[Read: Stop trying to ask “smart questions”]

How exactly these developments affected Quora’s traffic and revenue is hard to know, because the company doesn’t typically share those numbers. The company has no backup or export tools and no public interface that would allow for queries from external software. It is one of relatively few social-media sites that prohibits the Internet Archive from keeping a record of its pages. Maity told me that Quora had threatened him with legal action if he and his collaborators shared the data they’d collected from the site.

A current executive at the company who spoke on its behalf but refused to be named acknowledged that Quora’s efforts to surface high-quality content sometimes falter. “We work very hard to sort the good stuff from the bad stuff,” he told me. But as the site has grown—and traffic levels are higher than ever, he said, more than 100 times what they were in the early days—this has gotten harder to do: “So it is accurate to say that the average quality of what’s written is lower than in the early days, even as the absolute amount of good content has increased.” Part of the challenge is striking the proper balance between quality and engagement. It’s a trade-off, and if you put too much stock in the former, the latter suffers. “You’ll get a very boring experience of the service,” he told me. It’ll be like an encyclopedia, or worse, a restaurant that serves only healthy food.

In its current form, Quora certainly doesn’t serve a lot of healthy options—but at least it’s still in business. In the years to come, the company may be serving something else entirely. D’Angelo, who is still Quora’s CEO, has sat on the board of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, since 2018, and over the past year, his company has focused on developing its own in-house chatbot service, Poe. For now, at least, Poe is not actually a large language model unto itself. You simply type your query in a search box and choose an existing chatbot or image generator—ChatGPT, Google-PaLM, DALL-E-3, etc. Poe is a separate site from Quora proper, but Quora now also offers answers written by ChatGPT alongside those written by humans. “Most of Quora’s energy right now is going to Poe,” D’Angelo said at a recent event.

What that means for the long-term future of Quora is not entirely clear. For the moment, though, the site is likely to remain in a state of thriving failure: Traffic is up; excitement is down. This is perhaps a natural phase in the life cycle of any social-media company, when users are still numerous but all of the initial hype has drained away. Quora once encapsulated a central premise of the internet, that connecting people with questions and people with answers across the globe would create an exchange of information unlike anything before it; that rather than seeking answers from a friend or in a library, you could put your query to … everyone. Today, the website spams my inbox with questions such as “Has your husband ever shared you with another woman?”

Fourteen years into its run, Quora now provides an answer to one fundamental question: How has the internet evolved? From idealism to opportunism, from knowledge-seeking to attention-grabbing, from asking questions to shouting answers.

America’s Most Dystopian Halftime Show

2023-12-07T12:00:13-05:00

At halftime of college football’s Big 12 Championship last weekend in Arlington, Texas, two students met on the field for a competition that would have, in its way, higher stakes than the game itself. It was time for the Dr Pepper Tuition Giveaway.

The promotion has been held at major conference championship games since 2008. It works like this: Students wearing Dr Pepper–branded jerseys have 30 seconds to lob as many Dr Pepper–branded footballs as possible into a giant Dr Pepper–branded can with a circular hole cut into its side; whoever sinks the most wins $100,000 for tuition or to help pay off student loans. The announcer then asks the winner what this means to them, and the winner thanks some combination of their friends, their family, God, and Keurig Dr Pepper Inc. The runner-up gets $20,000, and third-place finishers, who are eliminated the day before in a preliminary round of football-tossing in an empty stadium, receive $2,500 in tuition money. They are not mentioned on the telecast.

As an exercise in corporate branding, this is fairly standard. Basketball games have their sponsored half-court heaves; hockey games have their center-ice shots; baseball games have a truly bewildering array of inter-inning promotions. The Dr Pepper Tuition Giveaway appears to be well liked by fans, and students who participate are not inclined to have regrets. But still there’s something dark about this entertainment. More than 40 million Americans have student-loan debt, amounting to at least $1.6 trillion in all. That burden may affect their choice of when to marry, have children, or buy a home. A tuition giveaway—with students’ futures set against each other on national TV—turns this crisis into a spectacle.

This year’s Big 12 edition pitted Ohio State’s Gavin White, who’d use the money to pursue a degree in meteorology, against the University of Pennsylvania’s Ryan Georgian, who needed it to launch a career as an entrepreneur working “to help address social inequalities.” They aren’t quite the anonymous fans picked out of the stands who might win some halftime cash if they’re really lucky. The tuition giveaway’s contestants are defined by need: Students apply to participate in the promotion by uploading a 60-second video explaining how the prize would enable them to pursue their goal of becoming a teacher or a pediatrician or a scientist at NASA.

On game day, the announcer then shares the finalists’ backstories with the crowd, just before the competition starts. They might ask a student what the prize would mean to him, and the student might reply, “This tuition money would take a huge financial burden off my family.” (That exchange, from the 2019 SEC edition of the giveaway, has stuck in my mind.) It’s all a bit grotesque, the way students’ dreams and desperation are leveraged for our entertainment.

Any tuition money is a boon, even when it comes from an utterly inane but high-stakes contest for the casual enjoyment of spectators and, by extension, the enhancement of the Dr Pepper brand. When I spoke with past winners of the event, they had nothing but positive feelings to share. Reagan Whitaker, who won last year’s SEC edition of the giveaway, told me that she still keeps in touch with both of her co-finalists, and with the Dr Pepper reps she met at the event. (She used the money to help pay for her enrollment at Vanderbilt University, where she is studying to be an audiologist.) This year, the company arranged for Whitaker to go see the SEC Championship again, even though she wasn’t competing for financial aid. A representative for Dr Pepper declined to comment on the ethics of the event, saying only in an email that the company “has awarded over $17.5M in tuition to deserving students over the past 30 years and has a vibrant alumni network that the brand continues to keep in touch with.”

This line was straight out of the company’s promotional materials (and, seemingly, the script given to the announcer at each tuition giveaway), which emphasize that Dr Pepper is in the business of giving money to “deserving students.” The competition’s official rules do not specify any standards for determining which students deserve to be finalists beyond an evaluation of their videos. As for which finalists are deserving of $2,500 and which are deserving of $100,000, that’s a question of who can throw the most footballs into a giant Dr Pepper can in 30 seconds.

The participants have weeks to prepare for the toss. Because time is of the essence and the giant cans are only five yards away, the chest-pass technique is the most popular, though you’ll occasionally see a classic overhand throw or even an underhand toss. White told me that he spent an hour every day perfecting the technique for his toss (a chest pass capped off by a flick of the wrists, though he tried one-handed, underhand, and overhand throws as well) and transfer (better to keep your eyes fixed on the target and grab the next football blind than to look into the bin as you do so). His opponent, Georgian, practiced in his backyard with a detached basketball rim. Whitaker said she built her own giant-can replica from PVC pipes and a hula hoop. She spent more than 40 hours training.

When the shot clock hit zero at the Big 12 Championship on Saturday, White and Georgian were tied at 10. “Oh my goodness! Are you kidding me!?” the announcer said. “We get overtime from Dr Pepper here!” Remarkably, even after the 15-second overtime, the contestants remained deadlocked—16 all. Which meant a sudden-death double-overtime shootout. White won the Dr Pepper–branded–coin toss and went first, but he missed his shot, and Georgian sank his for the win.

Or so it seemed. Almost immediately, viewers began pointing out online that the referees had made a counting error in the first overtime period. They’d given Georgian an extra point, meaning that White should have been the out-and-out winner there and then. The competition never should have gone to a shootout. Fans demanded #justiceforgavin, and that afternoon, the company, presumably realizing that a La La Land–Moonlight–style rescinding of Georgian’s title would not be a good look, awarded both contestants the full $100,000. Georgian walked away with an extra $80,000 in tuition money—probably good for at least a couple of semesters at a private college—because of a counting error.

Ammon Bundy Has Disappeared

2023-11-30T06:30:00-05:00

Photographs by Cole Barash

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Two weeks before chaos hit St. Luke’s hospital in Boise, Idaho—before Ammon Bundy showed up with an armed mob and the hospital doors had to be sealed and death threats crashed the phone lines—a 10-month-old baby named Cyrus Anderson arrived in the emergency room.

The boy’s parents, Marissa and Levi, knew something wasn’t right: For months, Cyrus had been having episodes of vomiting that wouldn’t stop. When he arrived in the ER, he weighed just 14 pounds, which put him in the .05th percentile for his age. Natasha Erickson, the doctor who examined him, had seen malnutrition cases like this in textbooks but never in real life. Cyrus’s ribs were clearly visible through his chest. When he threw up, his vomit was bright green.

Erickson hooked the baby up to an IV and a feeding tube, and he slowly started to gain weight. But Levi and Marissa were anxious to leave. They were members of an anti-government activist network that Bundy, the scion of America’s foremost far-right family, had founded, and they shared his distrust of medical and public-health authorities. To Marissa—whose father, Diego Rodriguez, is himself an extremist leader and Bundy’s close friend—the hospital was a “lion’s den.”

By the next evening, Levi and Marissa were demanding to take their baby home, but hospital staff said it wasn’t yet safe. They left a few days later, with instructions to bring Cyrus in for follow-up appointments. When they failed to show up for a scheduled weigh-in at a local clinic the following week—Marissa was feeling sick herself and decided to postpone it—a nurse there referred the case to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. Cyrus missed another appointment that afternoon at St. Luke’s, and another nurse contacted the detective on the case. Someone had to see the infant right away, she said.

That night, officers pulled the family over at a gas station in nearby Garden City. Marissa begged for Bundy’s help by phone. “They’re trying to take my baby. They’re trying to take my baby,” she kept telling him, until she was out of breath. Police lights were flashing all around her as a crowd began to gather. She couldn’t understand how things had escalated so fast.

Bundy put out a call for help from his group, the People’s Rights Network, which claimed to have more than 50,000 members, and told Marissa to livestream what was happening on Facebook. When a police officer demanded that she hand Cyrus over, she pleaded with him. “Do you understand what happens when the state takes custody of babies?” she said. “I’ve seen this so many times. I can’t be that next person—I can’t.” While Bundy was driving to the gas station, he learned that both Levi and Marissa had been arrested, and Cyrus was on the way to another St. Luke’s branch, an ER about 10 miles away in Meridian. Bundy and his supporters headed there.

Within an hour, a small crowd was blocking the ambulance bay, forcing the hospital to divert patients elsewhere. Protesters shouted that the hospital staff were kidnappers and child molesters. Some followed nurses to their cars as they left the building. Bundy himself was arrested for trespassing on hospital property, and Rachel Thomas, the lead doctor in the ER that night, feared that the crowd would break down the doors and try to take the baby.

Protesters gather outside St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center in downtown Boise, Idaho, in March 2022. (Darin Oswald / Idaho Statesman / AP)

In the early hours of the next morning, after getting out of jail, Bundy posted a video urging more of his followers to join the protest. “It’s just sickening, sickening, sickening,” he said. “These people believe they have the authority to take our little babies. They are wicked.”

By that time, it was clear to Dr. Thomas that the child had to be moved back to the hospital in Boise as quickly as possible for security reasons. She wrapped Cyrus in a blanket and carried him through the bowels of the hospital to an ambulance at a back entrance. Security officers led the way, searching each area for intruders before giving the “all clear” and letting her enter. She felt like she was in a cheap action movie. To avoid the crowd, the ambulance jumped the median as it made a U-turn and sped east on I-84.

Dr. Erickson met Cyrus on his arrival. He looked even sicker than he had the week before. His weight now put him below the .02nd percentile. As doctors reinserted the IV and the feeding tube, Bundy sent out a new People’s Rights alert redirecting the crowd to the Boise campus. Protesters arrived with Free Baby Cyrus signs. Bundy told his followers to call St. Luke’s, and soon threats were pouring in by the hundreds.

“The parents of a child have all the rights,” one caller said. “I need you to remind everybody who works there before we come and lop off your fucking head, bitch. We will fucking kill you.” Rodriguez, Marissa’s father, began holding regular rallies at the hospital and at one of them called on God to “crush the necks of those that are evil.” Three days into this ordeal, the FBI and state authorities warned St. Luke’s that some of Bundy’s followers were planning to storm in and take the baby by force. About 30 Boise police officers were called in. Hospital workers constructed a barricade of furniture to block access to the children’s wing.

As the protest escalated, Health and Welfare workers spirited Cyrus to a secret location, where they babysat him in shifts. A few days later, and about a pound heavier, he was returned to his parents. The protesters dispersed, and Bundy and Rodriguez celebrated. Cyrus’s return home, Bundy said, was nothing short of “a miracle.”

In the months that followed, Bundy pleaded guilty to misdemeanor trespassing at the hospital and avoided time in jail. But the protests he and Rodriguez had fomented with their false accusations of child trafficking resulted in a civil suit against them. This past August, after a weeklong trial that Bundy and Rodriguez skipped, a judge assessed $52 million in damages, almost certainly more than their combined net worth.

Bundy has promised to hold firm. If the county sheriff ever showed up on his property to collect, he told one interviewer, he’d “meet ’em at the front door with my friends and shotgun.”

In early August, I flew out to Idaho to visit Bundy. But at 3:11 a.m. the night before we were scheduled to meet, he texted me to cancel. He was on the verge of financial ruin, he said, and it was getting harder and harder to shield his children from the effects. The message went on for some 230 words about how a man described as one of America’s most dangerous right-wing extremists was “fighting a lot of emotional anxiety.”

If he did confront the sheriff, it wouldn’t be the first time his family had done battle with the law. In 2014, about a thousand militiamen and other supporters helped his family repel government agents trying to impound their cattle in Bunkerville, Nevada. Bundy’s followers still speak with awe about how officers Tasered him three times, and three times, with the help of the crowd behind him, he ripped out the Taser darts and stood his ground. His father, Cliven, led that battle, but when the Bundys clashed with government agents again in 2016, Ammon was in charge. His six-week occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge left a rancher dead, shot down by police officers after a backwoods car chase.

Left: An armed man stands guard as Bundy supporters arrive at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016. Right: Early morning at the front-gate guard post during the occupation. (Alex Milan Tracy / AP; Jeffrey Schwilk / Alamy)

In 2020, with the start of the pandemic, Bundy found a new purpose. One of the first meetings of his People’s Rights Network, held in April of that year, was to plan an Easter service in defiance of local COVID-19 restrictions. At another early demonstration, members gathered outside a health commissioner’s home in Montana and burned masks on a grill. In August 2020, Bundy was arrested and jailed after leading a contingent of supporters, some with guns, as they stormed the Idaho statehouse, pushing officers and shattering a glass door, during a special legislative session on public-health precautions.

When People’s Rights members started telling Bundy about how the government was unjustly separating children from their parents, that became another cause. Instances of actual overreach by Child Protective Services became, for them, evidence supporting QAnon-style conspiracy theories about “government subsidized child trafficking,” as Rodriguez put it, which were proliferating in extremist circles and beyond. By the time Cyrus was taken, People’s Rights members had already staged protests on behalf of supposedly “kidnapped” children in Missouri, Oregon, and Washington. But none of those had escalated like the one at St. Luke’s.

Despite his late-night text, Bundy did in the end agree to see me, for what was supposed to be a quick hello but stretched into a day-long visit. I’d spend more time with him in the weeks that followed, and speak with him regularly on the phone. We discussed many aspects of his life, but most of all we talked about the judgment against him, and what would happen if the government tried to take his home.

“I feel like I’m not supposed to yield,” he told me at one point. If he were killed, he said, his friends and followers would avenge him: “They’ll go take the life of the judge and the sheriff and St. Luke’s CEO and the head attorney and all the most culpable people.” He delivered these words with an unnerving lack of menace—less like a threat than like a weather forecast.

Ammon Bundy in his auto-repair workshop

Bundy’s home sits on a five-acre property at the edge of Idaho’s Emmett Valley, just across the road from Last Chance Canal. If he could choose any place in the world to live, he told me, it would be here.

When I showed up, I found him pacing around his auto-repair workshop, looking for parts. His beard is almost fully gray, and at 48, he has a bit of a belly, which he finds embarrassing. As always, he wore a chocolate-brown cowboy hat and a mechanic’s jacket with the logo of the fleet-maintenance company he once ran. He’s worked on cars ever since he was a teenager, when his father told him that the family ranch could not sustain him and his siblings.

Ammon was the fourth of six children of an unhappy marriage. Cliven was often away, working construction jobs in Las Vegas. Ammon’s mother, Jane Marie, resented the lonely domesticity she’d been consigned to, he told me. When he was 5 years old, she left. One night soon after, a huge storm took down a tree in the yard. The next morning, as he and his siblings played in the wreckage, he remembers thinking, Where’s Mom? She had not said goodbye.

With their mother gone and their dad away, the Bundy children mostly raised themselves. Instead of doing homework, Ammon and his brothers hunted rabbits in the hills and built Quonset huts. After high school, he went on his Mormon mission to Minnesota and then started a truck-repair business. A couple of years later, he married Lisa Sundloff, a student at Southern Utah University whom he met through his secretary, and they moved to Arizona.

Their first apartment was tiny, but as Bundy’s business took off, they moved into a house in the Phoenix suburbs, then a bigger one with a stone fireplace and a swimming pool, a home he still speaks of with pride. He didn’t drink or smoke; he had five kids and avoided trouble with the law. He leaned libertarian, but he was no militant: In 2010, he took out a $530,000 loan from the Small Business Administration.

It isn’t easy, now, to reconcile that law-abiding suburban dad, his growing business supported by a federal loan, with the man he has become. Thirteen years and two standoffs later, Ammon believes the proper functions of government are limited to preventing violent crime, protecting private property, and defending the country from foreign threats. He says that abortion is murder and homosexuality is an abomination, but also that the government doesn’t have any business outlawing gay marriage (though it should prohibit same-sex couples from raising children). He opposes a border wall and views Trumpian policies as insufficiently compassionate, a position for which he has been criticized by other prominent right-wingers. He thinks it would perhaps be best if the country were divided in half before a partisan civil war breaks out.

At one point, he asked about my faith, and when I said Jewish, he remarked on how interesting it is that Jews hold so many positions of power in government, media, and finance. Somehow this didn’t sound like conspiracism, the way he said it. More like: Well played, Jews, from our small religious minority to yours.

Invariably, though, conversation turned back to his current predicament. He ranted for hours about the corruption of the government, the corruption of medical institutions, the corruption of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The courts, he said, are simply a “playbox” for the rich and powerful, a place for them to justify their misdeeds. Though he’d been cleared of any crime associated with the standoffs in Oregon and Nevada, the final legal victory came after he’d already spent nearly two years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, he said. By the time he was released, his business had all but collapsed, and he’d missed those years of his children’s lives. “That changed me,” he said. It taught him that even when you win, the process is the punishment.

I asked Bundy what he thinks motivates his many enemies, and how he accounts for so much wickedness. He reached for the Book of Mormon, put on his glasses, and began to read aloud. The passage he’d chosen told the story of Jared, a prince who devises a scheme to have his father beheaded and seize the throne for himself. The conspirators form “a secret combination,” which is “most abominable and wicked above all, in the sight of God,” and their scheme succeeds.

That is what Ammon Bundy believes is happening in America. His enemies, motivated by the desire for power, have formed secret combinations, which threaten, as the Book of Mormon warns they will, to “overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries.”

Ammon Bundy with one of his sons in Emmett

That night, I tagged along with Bundy to a barbecue hosted by Scott Malone, a friend of his who runs a dietary-supplement business and lives just down the road. About 30 people, many of them members of the LDS Church and most of them members of People’s Rights, sat at picnic tables with checkered tablecloths eating burgers and hot dogs and peach cobbler. After dinner, we played cornhole.

“I’m pretty much into conspiracy theories,” Malone told me. A sprawling web of nefarious forces is undermining our freedom, he explained, at the center of which are the Freemasons. In Gem County, where he and Bundy live, the sheriff and his deputies are all Masons. Malone knows this because he rents office space directly below the Masonic lodge, and he says he sometimes catches evil spirits wandering around the office on his security cameras. To cast them out, he performs exorcisms. “We think the basement has some kind of an underworld connection,” he said. “Crazy things, but we take it in stride.”

When Ammon launched the People’s Rights Network in early 2020, Malone was an early member. The group is sometimes described as a paramilitary organization—a sort of “Uber for militias.” That description is not wholly inaccurate, but it is misleading. People’s Rights’ membership does overlap with that of militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, and it serves in part to connect groups like these around the country. But it’s much bigger than those other groups, and it draws in people who would never join a traditional paramilitary organization. Most of its activities are mundane. Some members use the network to trade and barter; others organize workshops with naturopathic doctors. When one member’s truck broke down in early August, he put out a call via People’s Rights for someone to pick him up. In that sense, the group is less of a militia than a mutual-aid organization, where the aid sometimes takes the form of armed resistance to perceived despotism.

[From the November 2020 issue: Mike Giglio on the pro-Trump militant group that recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans]

Which is not to say that it doesn’t pose a threat. In addition to the protest at St. Luke’s and other instances of potentially dangerous intimidation, one member got into a shootout with police after a traffic stop in 2020. And its leaders have stated plainly that bloodshed is not only justified but necessary for resisting tyranny. “There is no silver bullet to securing liberty,” Bundy himself wrote on the People’s Rights website. “It is going to take unity, suffering and the willingness to use violence in defense.” The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which monitors extremist organizations such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, ranks Bundy’s group “at the top of our threat matrix.”

Beyond some basic tenets and anxieties of extreme libertarianism, those in Bundy’s group don’t agree on much. Some are fans of Donald Trump; others aren’t. Few would say that they support the police. Each seems to have his or her own peculiar origin story. While visiting Bundy, I met a onetime Ron Paul delegate who’d grown disillusioned with the Republican Party and stepped away, only to be drawn back in by the imposition of pandemic-era “Sharia law.” I met a former foster child turned chain-smoking Hempfest organizer who tried to live as a hermit before deciding that the only answer to government tyranny was active resistance. I met a Black kickboxing champion who has an on-screen credit in a Mad Max movie and, over the course of a decade, went from protesting the gentrification of Boise’s historically Black neighborhoods to sketching a portrait of Barack Obama with swastika-pupils.

And I met Malone, who may well be Bundy’s most loyal supporter. “He’s a good man, and I love him as a brother,” Malone told me. “I told my wife, ‘If I die with him, I die with him … I’m 72, and if this is how I end my life, then that’s how it ends. It couldn’t happen in a better way.”

By 9 o’clock, the party was winding down. The group prayed for me, just as they had when I’d arrived. (“We’re also grateful for our new friend, Jacob. Please bless him and help him on his journey and on his way.”) A grandmotherly woman who seemed genuinely concerned for my health warned me to stay away from the COVID vaccine. Another told me to be very careful driving home at this hour. A kid who’d recently returned from his Mormon mission invited me to go fishing the next day. Over the course of the evening, several people joked about the media calling them a militia. A militia?! they seemed to say. Just look at us!

As the sky darkened, everyone gathered in a circle to sing hymns. Bundy sat with his youngest son on his lap, the sunset at his back.

The next day, I met with Rachel Thomas, the ER doctor who’d ferried baby Cyrus to the back exit of the Meridian hospital as the mob pressed in. We sat at a small round table in a Boise coffee shop while her 6-year-old son ate a chocolate-chip muffin and watched Minions on his iPad for the dozenth time.

As we talked, Thomas noticed that a user named “Wolf Man” had just left a series of comments on her Facebook profile calling her a criminal and a perpetrator of “vile,” “disgraceful and appalling” acts. The comments linked to a new YouTube video Bundy had posted about the St. Luke’s case that very morning. “See, this is the problem with people like Rachel Thomas,” he says to the camera, after offering a litany of examples of her alleged dishonesty. “They are revered by the public because they are doctors and professionals, but they have no scruples. They are liars.”

With each new post like this, Thomas told me, the harassment ramps up again. “This is my life,” she said. “The second I feel like I can take a breath, they come after us again.” She pointed at her son, oblivious and chocolate-smeared behind her. “He didn’t sign up for this.”

For Natasha Erickson, the St. Luke’s pediatrician who first saw Cyrus, the threats and abuse began immediately and never stopped. Diego Rodriguez posted her photo and hospital bio on his website under the heading “Child Trafficker Profile.” “It is obvious she has a ‘god complex,’” he wrote, “and loves to threaten families using CPS as a weapon.” Bundy posted a video of his own calling Erickson “a wicked person for instigating this.” They said that she’d run unnecessary tests on Cyrus in order to profit off him and that she’d misdiagnosed his mild dehydration as life-threatening malnutrition. Commenters asked her how she’d feel if her kids were stolen.

Supporters gather on Bundy’s property after a judge issued a misdemeanor warrant for his arrest for contempt-of-court charges in April 2023. (Kyle Green / AP)

Erickson was less worried that large numbers of people would end up believing these claims than that a delusional person would take it upon himself to exact justice. She attached an emergency whistle to her purse, and her husband started carrying his handgun around whenever they were in public. She forbade her kids from playing in the front yard or answering the door, no matter who they thought was on the other side. The locks stayed bolted at all times.

For a while, Erickson was obsessed with what Bundy and Rodriguez were saying about her. She’d check their websites two or three times a day. At the grocery store, she was constantly afraid of who might be in the next aisle over. She took to wearing sunglasses whenever she could. Almost every time she saw a new patient, she worried that the parents might have seen her “Child Trafficker Profile,” and that they might genuinely believe it. So much of her job had been about forging personal connections with the “kiddos”: You like unicorns? My children love unicorns. But now even that felt fraught. When one child’s father asked her how old her kids were, she froze, retreated to the nurses’ station, and broke down sobbing. She considered leaving medicine entirely.

Both she and Thomas testified in the defamation case against Bundy and Rodriguez; so did a nurse who had seen Cyrus for a checkup and then coordinated his care for weeks after. But whereas Erickson and the nurse were named as plaintiffs, Thomas was not, because at the time St. Luke’s filed the lawsuit, she hadn’t yet been doxxed. She wound up getting the worst of both worlds: all of the harassment, none of the money.

This past summer, as she was driving with her son, he asked her out of the blue if “that Ammon Bundy guy” was gone yet, and whether he might hurt them. “No, buddy, we’re going to be okay,” she told him. By that point, the family had already taken steps to ensure their safety. In September, they packed up for New Zealand. They plan to stay for at least a year.

In between my trips to Bundy’s land in Idaho, I made a stop in Bunkerville, Nevada, to visit his father at the family ranch. When I got there, Cliven Bundy was sitting in a black leather recliner beneath a portrait of him by Jon McNaughton, the realist painter famous for his hagiographic renderings of Donald Trump. In the portrait, titled “Pray for America,” Cliven rides on horseback and raises an American flag. In the flesh, he chuckled a lot in a folksy-grandpa sort of way and held forth for some three and a half hours in his high-pitched rasp about faith, politics, biodiversity, and his decades-long conflict with the U.S. government.

If you were to tell the complete story of that conflict, you could begin in 1844, with the murder of Joseph Smith. Or you could begin in 1877, with the arrival of the Bundy family’s ancestors in Utah’s Virgin Valley. Or in 1934, with the Taylor Grazing Act. Or even in 1976, with the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. But you could not begin any later than 1989, with the Mojave desert tortoise. That year, the tortoise was given an emergency endangered-species designation, and as part of its recovery plan, the Bureau of Land Management told Bundy and his fellow Clark County ranchers a few years later that they would have to limit their use of public lands for grazing cattle. At the same time, the county struck a deal with the Fish and Wildlife Service that allowed real-estate developers to expand the Las Vegas metropolitan area into the tortoises’ habitat. The ranchers got squeezed in favor of the city.

Almost all of the roughly 50 ranchers in Clark County took a buyout from the government. Cliven refused. He continued grazing his cattle the same way he always had, and his herd fanned out into the lands vacated by his former neighbors. For 20 years, this remained the uneasy status quo: Bundy’s fines soared into the seven figures, but no one tried very hard to collect. Finally, a federal judge ordered Bundy—now calling himself “the last rancher standing” in the valley—to remove his cattle. He ignored the judge, and so in early 2014, the BLM came in to do it for him. The next day, Cliven’s wife, Carol, posted on the family website: “Range War begins tomorrow.”

Left: Cliven Bundy speaks during a news conference near his ranch in April 2014. Right: Protesters gather at the Bureau of Land Management’s base camp, where the Bundys’ cattle were being held. (David Becker / Getty; Jim Urquhart / Reuters)

The climactic standoff took place at a sandy underpass beneath Interstate 15, near the spot where the BLM was keeping the impounded cattle. Federal agents were outnumbered and outgunned by Cliven’s militiamen supporters, and within a couple of hours, they’d released the herd. A group of armed vigilantes—cowboy heroes, they believed, in their own modern Western—had prevented the U.S. government from enforcing the law. And they seemed to be facing no repercussions.

Almost overnight, the Bundys were the “first family” of the Patriot Movement, with Cliven as its public face. Republican senators fawned over him; Sean Hannity had him on Fox News again and again. And then, at a public meeting less than two weeks later, Cliven self-destructed. “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said, before wondering aloud whether Black people were maybe “better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things,” than they were on the dole.

[Ta-Nehisi Coates: Polite society can condemn Cliven Bundy and ignore the American racism that remains]

That was the end of Cliven Bundy’s brief stint as a Republican darling. Ammon took over as the family spokesman. He was good in front of a camera, with a soft-spoken polish that none of his siblings could match. A few weeks earlier, he’d been a successful businessman in Phoenix, living a comfortable, suburban life. He hadn’t been particularly political, and was certainly not a militant—an early BLM threat assessment had labeled him the least dangerous of the Bundy men—but now he was angry, and he saw the federal government as his enemy. Less than two years later, at Cliven’s urging, he went to Oregon to stage a standoff of his own.

To this day, Cliven’s cattle continue to graze on public lands, the courts be damned. At dusk on the evening of my visit, he rose from his recliner, and Ammon’s brother Ryan drove us up into the desert hills to see them. On the way, Cliven and Ryan explained their not-entirely-scientific theory of the mutually beneficial relationship between cattle and tortoises. “A cow never conflicted with a tortoise ever,” Ryan said.

The Mojave desert tortoise is extremely rare, but we’d been driving for only a few minutes, when, sure enough, we came face-to-face with one. Ryan stopped the car and we all got out. The animal looked prehistoric, its mud-colored shell weathered and chipped in places, its scales the same dusty black as the stones around it. Cliven walked over and started knocking on its shell. “Hey! Hey!” he said. The tortoise retreated inside. “Go on. Go on then!” Cliven said. It did not go on.

“You’re not gonna make him move,” Ryan said. Cliven reached down to try to overturn the tortoise, but it squirmed and hissed at him. After a few tries, he gave up. “He’s protecting himself,” Ryan said. “Imagine having to live in the rocks like he does. What a life, huh?”

On a Friday evening near the end of summer, six sheriff’s deputies arrested Ammon Bundy at a fundraiser for his son’s high-school football team. This was not the dreaded standoff, not the government coming for his land. But there had been a warrant out for Bundy’s arrest on contempt-of-court charges since April, and the sheriff seized his chance.

The officers marched into the hall just as people were finishing dinner. Bundy did not resist. He just put on his cowboy hat and placed his hands behind his back. Some people shouted and booed as the officers led him outside. Some sat quietly and looked away. “Nobody knows what they’re going to do to him!” his wife yelled. “They will abuse him!” Her voice broke. “This is our son! We’re here to support our boy! Come on! Come on, you guys, rally together! Help us!” She was sobbing now. Nobody moved.

When I went out to Emmett a few days later, I again found Bundy in his workshop, this time lying on his back beneath a ’67 Chevy Nova with his phone beside him. He’d posted bond Sunday morning, and now he had his father on speaker. “I feel like you shouldn’t have bailed out,” Cliven said. “You should’ve made a process of it.”

“I was going to, but the last time I did that, when they sent me to Ada County, they literally about killed me,” Ammon told him, referring to time he’d served as a result of the 2020 statehouse protest. “They call it the cold box. It’s an extremely cold cell. No pads, all concrete. And then they strip you. So all you’ve got is your underwear. No shoes, no nothing”—the jail says this isn’t accurate—“and it literally is torture, and that’s what they do. I just couldn’t think about going through that again.”

“I understand. I’ve been there before,” Cliven said. “But I don’t know.”

There was no sympathy in his voice. And perhaps one shouldn’t expect any from a man who, during the trial that followed the Bunkerville standoff, at the age of 71, had spent an extra month in prison rather than be released on house arrest, because he would accept nothing short of unconditional freedom. I know it’s hard, he seemed to be telling his son, but you’ve gotta suck it up.

That day, Ammon seemed more resigned, more circumspect than he had a week earlier. He told me that he’d decided to contest the legal case against him. “Not because I have a whole lot of faith in the courts,” he said. But he’d already started mourning the loss of his home, and he wasn’t sure it made sense to hold his ground. “There’s many ways to fight, and I may very well go down that route,” he told me, “but it just gets tiring to fight those battles. Alone, almost. Least it feels that way.”

This was a strange admission from the leader of a national network of rights-defending citizens, a network designed for just this sort of situation. “Maybe I shouldn’t say, but I think in his mind he was really hoping that People’s Rights would back him,” Cliven would later tell me. “But when it gets right down to it, I don’t know. He claims he has, like, 70,000 or more followers, but does he have one that would actually stand and fight with him?” Many of the People’s Rights members I put that question to were noncommittal. They’d have to see how the situation played out.

I visited Bundy one last time in mid-September. “The dog seems to always be chasing me,” he’d told me during our very first conversation, and now it seemed it might finally catch him. He didn’t have a lawyer, so he’d been staying up all night writing his own legal motions. Sometimes he lost track of what day of the week it was. At one point, I watched him try and fail to navigate a CAPTCHA prompt six times in a row as he attempted to access a legal document. The courts had frozen his assets and forbidden him from continuing to make false accusations against St. Luke’s and its staff.

Bundy’s co-defendant, Diego Rodriguez, had already moved, in 2022, to Florida, where he lives with Levi, Marissa, and Cyrus, who celebrated his second birthday in May. (Rodriguez declined to be interviewed for this story.) The baby’s vomiting problem has not gone away entirely, Marissa told me, though he is doing much better now. As of this month, she said, Cyrus is in the 28th percentile on the growth chart. (Though Levi was arrested at the gas station, he was never charged with a crime; charges against Marissa were dropped last December. The medical staff at St. Luke’s have said this didn’t seem like a case of intentional abuse or neglect but rather that Levi and Marissa did not appear to appreciate the gravity of their baby’s health problems.)

Just a few weeks earlier, Bundy told me, he’d nearly given up and fled the state too. This whole saga could devour years of his life, he’d realized, and so rather than let it, he’d go elsewhere, start fresh. The kids had been upset at first, but they’d come around. The boxes were packed. The mover was scheduled. And then, as Bundy lay in bed on the morning they were supposed to leave, he thought he heard the voice of God. The Lord wanted him to stay and fight.

How long? He didn’t know. Fight how? He couldn’t say. But he trusted that this would all become clear in time. “I have to believe that the things going on here are going to mean something,” he said in a video about his decision. It was hard not to hear these words as a sort of desperate self-exhortation, the sort of thing you whisper to yourself over and over in the hope that repetition will make it so.

Emmett, Idaho

One morning a few weeks ago, Scott Malone arrived at the Bundy property to find it deserted. He’d come to pick up some pots and stoves he’d lent to Ammon for the apple harvest, and he found those in the driveway. Otherwise there was nothing. The trucks were gone. The house was cleaned out. The workshop was stripped. Bundy hadn’t even said goodbye—a noble act, Malone believed, meant to protect friends from being implicated.

A few days after they left, Lisa posted a farewell message on Facebook (“It’s not goodbye, it’s ‘I’ll see you later’”), but she and Ammon stopped answering my messages and calls. When I finally managed to get in touch with Ryan Bundy, he told me that his brother had tried to muster a group to fight with him, “but when it come down to it, only about half of ’em are willing to stand.” And so now, Ryan said, Ammon was a “refugee.”

Malone says he has no idea where Bundy is. Lawyers for St. Luke’s have heard that the family is in southern Utah, hardly an hour’s drive from where Cliven lives, and from where the family staged its first standoff nearly a decade ago. But Bundy seems to have kept his plan a secret, even from his father. “I don’t know why he quit,” Cliven told me a few days later. “My way of thinking is you can’t give up on something like this. You got a battle going, and it’s a terrible one, and you know”—he trailed off, seemingly at a loss—“I don’t know.”

Ammon Bundy still faces an ever-growing list of contempt-of-court charges, and there is still a warrant out for his arrest, with bail set at $250,000. For Rachel Thomas and Natasha Erickson, the news of his flight delivered both relief and frustration: relief because it meant that, for the moment at least, they would not have to testify in the scheduled contempt trial; frustration because, once more, he had escaped accountability. Seeing him behind bars wouldn’t have undone the pain of the past year and a half—Erickson was still considering leaving medicine, and even in New Zealand, Thomas’s son was still asking, “Mommy, that Ammon Bundy guy can’t come here, can he?”—but it would have brought a degree of closure, a feeling that justice had been served.

Law enforcement could still come looking for Bundy in Utah, or wherever he is, and bring him back to Idaho. And if that happens, he could face months or even years in jail. Even if it does not, St. Luke’s will soon claim possession of the home he left behind.

Standing there alone on the deserted property, Malone felt his own mix of emotions. He, too, was relieved: Had Bundy stayed and fought, the sheriff and his deputies would have gunned him down, Malone was sure of it. He, too, was frustrated: People’s Rights could have done more; people weren’t prepared to lay down their lives for freedom the way they used to be. And he was also heartbroken: The others may have been afraid, but he really would have died by his friend’s side. And now Ammon Bundy was gone. The specific era of American extremism that had begun a decade earlier at Bundy Ranch was, in some sense, over.

Ammon never returned my calls, but he did eventually send me a brief message via an encrypted app. “I have always told the truth,” he said, “and God will be my judge.”

His note called to mind something he’d once told me about his enemies. “I think most people over the years come to think that they’re doing what should be done,” he said. “And it doesn’t change the fact that what they’re doing is not right.”

Online Betting Has Gone Off the Deep End

2023-10-13T10:26:45-04:00

As a young boy growing up in East London, Paul Krishnamurty and his friends would bet on pretty much everything: what song would come on the radio next, what show would be on TV that night, which of the two people walking ahead of them would reach the top of the hill first. These wagers were, of course, informal. U.K. bookmakers at the time would offer the odd novelty bet—will it be a white Christmas? Will the royal baby be a boy or a girl?—but mostly they stuck with the standard fare: football, cricket, snooker.

Some 40 years later, the bookies have finally caught up. These days, you can bet on pretty much anything. You can bet on flight delays and COVID variants and gas prices. You can bet on whether the government will shut down and whether a natural disaster will strike San Francisco and whether Oppenheimer will win Best Adapted Screenplay. You can bet on the 2024 Republican vice-presidential nominee and the next James Bond. You can bet on which celebrity will start an OnlyFans account (money’s on Kim Kardashian) and which will be abducted first if aliens attack (money’s on Elon Musk). You can bet on whether McDonald’s will, at long last, restore onion nuggets to its menu. For some reason, you can even bet on the lottery. “We were way ahead of the game on this,” Krishnamurty, now a gambling writer and consultant for two overseas betting sites, BetOnline and Betfair, told me.

The road to where we are today began in 1986, when Las Vegas oddsmakers started taking bets on whether the Chicago Bears’ defensive tackle William “The Refrigerator” Perry would score a touchdown in that year’s Super Bowl. This is believed to have been the American gambling industry’s first formal prop bet—a wager that is not directly contingent on the final score of a sporting event. The phenomenon quickly caught on among football fans during the regular season. How many yards did so-and-so pass for? How many fumbles did the defense recover? And come Super Bowl time, they could bet on events that had no relation to the action on the field, such as which song the half-time performer would play first, how many times the TV cameras would pan to Gisele Bündchen, or what color Gatorade the victors would dump on their coach.

The latter sort of bets, referred to as “novelty bets” within the industry, are not always, strictly speaking, all that legal. With rare exceptions, regulated American sports books take bets only on stats that appear in a box score or on propositions whose outcomes are determined by some official, established arbiter (such as a sports league, or perhaps the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences). Jason Logan, a senior betting analyst for the online sports-betting publication Covers, told me that, as a general practice, those sports books tend to avoid bets on subjects where the outcome could be up for debate (are Kim and Odell dating or just “hanging out”?), or where certain bettors might have inside knowledge. When you see +3000 odds that the aliens take Jennifer Aniston first, that betting market is almost certainly hosted by an unofficial gambling outfit outside the U.S. “That’s not Vegas,” Logan said. “That’s a strip mall in Costa Rica with a backroom where guys are just kind of throwing odds against a wall.”

[Read: Sports betting won]

Those backroom operators and their wacky propositions really took off about a decade ago, says Adam Burns, a sports-book manager who has designed thousands of novelty bets for BetOnline. Companies like his realized they had no reason to limit the silliness to Super Bowl Sunday, or to any other single day or subject. Why not make novelty bets for anything, at any time? The zaniest ones—wagers over OnlyFans accounts and alien invasions and onion nuggets—would be all about publicity, Burns told me. These markets are not big moneymakers, but they could help a semi-obscure Panamanian company like BetOnline get attention.

To this end, sports books have been quick to capitalize on cultural moments, Logan told me. Of late, the rumored romance between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce has made them the subject of more than a few novelty bets. Will the couple make it to Valentine’s Day? What portmanteau will the Daily Mail assign them? What style of facial hair will Kelce sport this Halloween? Oddsmakers typically put limits on the size of these markets, in part because of the inside-knowledge problem. (What if Kelce confided to his inner circle that he planned to wear a goatee?) Still, if enough people come over to a betting website just to gawk at its novelty bets, some may end up placing their money into larger, more legitimate markets.

Novelty bets can be more than just PR stunts, though. Oscars-betting markets, for example, could draw in a different clientele than those for traditional sports outcomes. (Indeed, they are now sanctioned by gambling regulators in a handful of states.) Political betting might also get mainstreamed. The 2020 U.S. presidential election was one of BetOnline’s biggest events ever—roughly on the scale of a Super Bowl, Burns said. And if Trump is the nominee, 2024 could be even bigger. Burns estimates that Trump’s involvement in a campaign increases the volume of political betting by a factor of five or even 10. It’s the same phenomenon you see in sports betting: When there’s drama in a matchup, more people put their money down.

A couple of companies have tried to introduce a limited version of legal political betting to American audiences. PredictIt, an academic venture launched by economists at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, and run by the software company Aristotle Industries, handles tens of millions of dollars in annual trades but is now locked in a legal battle with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which last year revoked the no-action letter that had allowed PredictIt to operate. Meanwhile, the CFTC rejected a bid by another company, Kalshi, to include elections in its wider-ranging prediction market that allows users to bet on politics, culture, the economy, the climate, and just about anything else. Despite these obstacles, Logan thinks legal political betting in the U.S. will likely become a reality before long. There’s simply too much money on the table for it not to. “It would be bigger than the Super Bowl,” he told me. “It would blow the World Cup out of the water.”

Whatever happens, novelty bets are not going anywhere. Sports books will keep metabolizing cultural moments into betting opportunities. People will keep laying money down on them. And legislators and regulators will decide whether this behavior is legal or illegal, for whatever that’s worth.

*Photo-illustration sources: Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty; Christopher Polk / NBC; Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures; Daniele Venturelli / WireImage.

An Unsettling Hint at How Much Fraud Could Exist in Science

2023-08-02T11:39:48-04:00

Updated at 5:24 p.m. ET on August 2, 2023

Two years ago, an influential 2012 study of dishonesty co-authored by the social psychologist and best-selling author Dan Ariely came under scrutiny. A group of scientists argued on their blog that some of the underlying data—describing the numbers of miles that a car-insurance company’s customers reported having driven—had been faked, “beyond any shadow of a doubt.” The academic paper featuring that study, which described three separate experiments and had five co-authors in all, was retracted not long after. At the time, Ariely said that the figures in question had been shared with him by the insurance company, and that he had no idea they might be wrong: “I can see why it is tempting to think that I had something to do with creating the data in a fraudulent way,” he told BuzzFeed, “but I didn’t.”

Had the doctoring been done by someone from the insurer, as Ariely implied? There didn’t seem to be a way to dispute that contention, and the company itself wasn’t saying much. Then, last week, NPR’s Planet Money delivered a scoop: The company, called The Hartford, informed the show that it had finally tracked down the raw numbers that were provided to Ariely—and that the data had been “manipulated inappropriately” in the published study. Reached by NPR, Ariely once again denied committing fraud. “Getting the data file was the extent of my involvement with the data,” he said.

That an expert on dishonesty would be accused of dishonesty was already notable. Paired with last month’s allegations that the Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino—who also studies lying and is a frequent co-author of Ariely’s—is associated with falsified data for the very same 2012 paper, it’s downright bizarre. The analysis of insurance data from The Hartford appeared as “Experiment 3” in the paper. On the preceding page, an analysis of a different dataset—the one linked to Gino—was written up as “Experiment 1.” The scientists who say they discovered issues with both experiments—Leif Nelson, Uri Simonsohn, and Joe Simmons—dubbed the apparent double fraud a “clusterfake.” When I spoke with the scientific-misconduct investigator and Atlantic contributor James Heathers, he had his own way of describing it: “This is some kind of mad, fraudulent unicorn.”

Given reports (contested as they may be) that such an extraordinary beast exists, certain questions arise. For example, if the fraud is real, could this be a case of data-tampering in cahoots, or might it be nothing more than an odd and ironic coincidence? When I reached out to Ariely, he said he has never engaged in any research misconduct. “For more than 25 years and alongside dozens of esteemed colleagues and collaborators, I have conducted research that has resulted in more than 100 peer-reviewed papers,” he told me via email. “To be explicitly clear, I have never manipulated or misrepresented data in any of my work and have never knowingly participated in any project where the data or conclusions were manipulated or misrepresented.” Gino initially declined requests for comment. Since this article’s publication, her attorneys have filed a $25 million lawsuit alleging defamation against Harvard University, Nelson, Simonsohn, and Simmons; and Gino posted a new statement on LinkedIn. “I want to be very clear: I have never, ever falsified data or engaged in research misconduct of any kind,” it says.

If the mad, fraudulent unicorn is real—if two different scientists really did fabricate data for separate experiments that were published in the same paper—the scenario might well be unprecedented. Neither Heathers nor any other experts I spoke with could recall a single example of this kind. (Ivan Oransky, the editor in chief of Spectrum and a co-founder of Retraction Watch, told me that he thinks it has happened in the past, but he couldn’t recall anything specific.) If the 2012 paper on dishonesty does represent a case of coordinated misconduct, that would certainly be unnerving. But there’s no evidence it does, and a coincidental, overlapping fraud would, in a way, be cause for even greater concern. It suggests that scientific fraud is much more common than the number of known cases might lead one to believe.

[Read: The Harvard expert on dishonesty who is accused of lying]

The actual rate of scientific fraud writ large is mysterious, but there are some clues. One laborious review of more than 20,000 biomedical research papers found that 3.8 percent contained images with “problematic” data, more than half of which showed signs of “deliberate manipulation.” And according to a meta-analysis of 18 anonymous survey-studies conducted from 1985 to 2005, just under 2 percent of scientists admit to having fabricated, falsified, or modified data. That said, one can hardly expect every fraudster to self-identify as such, even anonymously. Why contribute to a result that could promote greater scrutiny of behavior like your own?

Further data on the problem are hard to come by, in large part because scientists rarely look for fraud in a systematic way, Heathers said. Nelson, one of the three psychologists who reported finding signs of tampering in the studies from the 2012 paper, told me that even delving into data from a single paper can be very time-intensive. His group, which investigates suspicious research for a blog called Data Colada, does this work not on behalf of any formal body, but rather as a sort of pro bono side hustle. (The Data Colada contributor Simonsohn co-authored a paper with Gino in 2013.)

The lack of interest from scientific institutions in identifying fraud has both led to and been reinforced by some starry-eyed assumptions, said Nick Brown, a psychologist whose own investigations of suspect research have led to numerous corrections and retractions. “There seems to be this idea that once you have a Ph.D., you are somehow a saint,” he told me. Then evidence of scientific misconduct emerges, and people act as though the unthinkable has happened.

A more skeptical posture has served Brown well in his own work as a data detective, as it has for the scientists behind Data Colada. When they set about reviewing Ariely’s work on the 2012 paper, a few quirks in the car-insurance data tipped them off that something might be amiss. Some entries were in one font, some in another. Some were rounded to the nearest 500 or 1,000; some were not. But the detail that really caught their attention was the distribution of recorded values. With such a dataset, you’d expect to see the numbers fall in a bell curve—most entries bunched up near the mean, and the rest dispersed along the tapering extremes. But the data that Ariely said he’d gotten from the insurance company did not form a bell curve; the distribution was completely flat. Clients were just as likely to have claimed that they’d driven 1,000 miles as 10,000 or 50,000 miles. It’s “hard to know what the distribution of miles driven should look like in those data,” the scientists wrote. “It is not hard, however, to know what it should not look like.”

One can apply a sort of mirror-image reasoning to the possibility of a double fraud in the dishonesty paper. The numbers of miles driven didn’t look the way the scientists assumed they should, so the scientists concluded that the data had been faked. Similarly, the number of fishy datasets in a single published paper doesn’t really fit with expectations. But in the latter case, it would be our assumptions that are off. If fraud is really very rare—if, say, less than 2 percent of scientists ever committed it even once in their careers—then an overlap in 2012 would be an implausible anomaly. But imagine that scientific misbehavior is a good deal more common than is generally acknowledged: If that’s the case, then “clusterfakes” might not be so unusual. Mad, fraudulent unicorns could be everywhere, just waiting to be found.

The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003

2023-07-23T08:00:00-04:00

The new media technology was going to make us stupid, to reduce all human interaction to a sales pitch. It was going to corrode our minds, degrade communication, and waste our time. Its sudden rise and rapid spread through business, government, and education augured nothing less than “the end of reason,” as one famous artist put it, for better or for worse. In the end, it would even get blamed for the live-broadcast deaths of seven Americans on national television. The year was 2003, and Americans were freaking out about the world-altering risks of … Microsoft PowerPoint.

Socrates once warned that the written word would atrophy our memory; the Renaissance polymath Conrad Gessner cautioned that the printing press would drown us in a “confusing and harmful abundance of books.” Generations since have worried that other new technologies—radio, TV, video games—would rot our children’s brains. In just the past 15 years alone, this magazine has sounded the alarm on Google, smartphones, and social media. Some of these critiques seem to have aged quite well; others, not so well. But tucked among them was a techno-scare of the highest order that has now been almost entirely forgotten: the belief that PowerPoint—that most enervating member of the Office software suite, that universal metonym for soporific meetings—might be evil.

Twenty years later, the Great PowerPoint Panic reads as both a farce and a tragedy. At the time, the age of social media was dawning: MySpace and LinkedIn were newly founded, and Facebook’s launch was just months away. But even as the polarization machine hummed to life, we were fixated on the existential threat of bullet points. Did we simply miss the mark? Or, ridiculous as it may seem today, were we onto something?

Sixteen minutes before touchdown on the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. As the broken shuttle hurtled toward Earth in pieces, it looked to its live TV viewers like a swarm of shooting stars.

The immediate cause of the disaster, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board determined that August, was a piece of insulating foam that had broken loose and damaged the shuttle’s left wing soon after liftoff. But the report also singled out a less direct, more surprising culprit. Engineers had known about—and inappropriately discounted—the wing damage long before Columbia’s attempted reentry, but the flaws in their analysis were buried in a series of arcane and overstuffed computer-presentation slides that were shown to NASA officials. “It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,” the report stated, later continuing: “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

PowerPoint was not then a new technology, but it was newly ubiquitous. In 1987, when the program was first released, it sold 40,000 copies. Ten years later, it sold 4 million. By the early 2000s, PowerPoint had captured 95 percent of the presentation-software market, and its growing influence on how Americans would talk and think was already giving rise to a critique. A 2001 feature in The New Yorker by Ian Parker argued that the software “helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world.” Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the internet,” took to quipping that “power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

By the start of 2003, the phrase death by PowerPoint had well and truly entered the popular lexicon. A Yale statistician named Edward Tufte was the first to take it literally: That spring, Tufte published a rip-roaring broadside titled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, including his analysis of the software’s role in the recent Columbia disaster. Its cover page, a political cartoon that Tufte designed himself, shows a photo of army battalions, standing in perfect columns, before a giant statue of Joseph Stalin in the center of Budapest. A speech bubble comes from one soldier’s mouth: “There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list!” Another calls out: “But why read aloud every slide?” Even Stalin speaks: “следующий слайд,” he says—“Next slide, please.”

The pamphlet’s core argument, channeling Marshall McLuhan, was that the media of communication influence the substance of communication, and PowerPoint as a medium had an obfuscatory, dumbing-down effect. It did not necessarily create vague, lazy presentations, but it certainly accommodated and sometimes even disguised them—with potentially fatal consequences. This is exactly what Tufte saw in the Columbia engineers’ slides. “The cognitive style of PP compromised the analysis,” he declared months before the NASA investigation report reached a very similar conclusion.

[Read: The Gettysburg Address as a Powerpoint]

Radical as Tufte’s position was, people took him seriously. He was already famous at the time as a public intellectual: His traveling one-day class on information design was more rock tour than lecture circuit. Hundreds of people packed into hotel ballrooms for each session. “They come to hear Edward R. Tufte,” one writer remarked at the time, “in the way the ancient Greeks must have gone to hear Socrates or would-be transcendentalists cut a path to 19th century Concord.” So when “the da Vinci of data” decided to weigh in on what would soon be called “the PowerPoint debate,” people listened.

Wired ran an excerpt from his pamphlet in September 2003, beneath the headline “PowerPoint Is Evil.” A few months later, The New York Times Magazine included Tufte’s assessment—summarized as “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb”—in its recap of the year’s most intriguing and important ideas. “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation,” the entry read, noting that Colin Powell had just used the software to present evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to the United Nations.

A few pages on was another notable entry in the magazine’s list of exciting new ideas: the social network. Even as PowerPoint was being linked with reality distortion and the rise of what Americans would soon be calling “truthiness,” the jury was still out on Friendster, LinkedIn, and other such networks. Maybe by supercharging social connection, they could alleviate our “profound national loneliness,” the write-up said. Maybe they would only “further fracture life into disparate spheres—the online and the offline.” Or maybe they wouldn’t be all that transformative—at least not compared with a technology as pervasive and influential as PowerPoint.

Tufte is now 81 years old and has long since retired. The “E.T. Tour,” which garnered, by his final count, 328,001 attendees, is over. These days, he mainly sculpts. But he is still himself: He still loathes PowerPoint. He still derives a kindergartner’s delight from calling it “PP.” And if you visit edwardtufte.com, you can still purchase his Stalin cartoon in poster form for $14.

In May, I emailed Tufte to ask how he thought his critique of PowerPoint had aged. True to form, he answered with a 16-page PDF, compiled specially for me, consisting of excerpts from his books and some blurbs about them too. He eventually agreed to speak by phone, but my first call to him went to voicemail. “In a land where time disappeared, E.T. is not available,” he incants in his outgoing message, with movie-trailer dramatics. “Your key to communication is voicemail. Or text message. Do it!” Beep.

When I finally reached E.T., I asked him whether, after 20 years of steady use, PowerPoint had really made us stupid. “I have no idea,” he said. “I’ve been on another planet. I’m an artist now.” In some sense, he went on, he’s the worst person to ask, because no one has dared show him a PowerPoint presentation since 2003. He also claimed that he hasn’t been “keeping score,” but he was aware—and appreciative—of the semi-recent revelation that his work helped inspire Jeff Bezos to ban the use of PowerPoint by senior Amazon executives.

Bezos was not the only one to see things Tufte’s way. Steve Jobs also banned PowerPoint from certain company meetings. At a 2010 military conference in North Carolina, former National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, then an Army general, described PowerPoint as an internal threat; he had prohibited its use during the assault on the Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005. “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” General James Mattis said at the same conference. And in 2011, a former software engineer in Switzerland formed the Anti PowerPoint Party, a (sort of) real political party devoted to fighting slide-deck tyranny.

[Read: Is Google making us stupid?]

Tufte’s essay has faced its share of criticism too. Some accused him of having engineered a controversy in order to juice his course attendance. Others said he’d erred by mixing up the software with the habits of its users. “Any general opposition to PowerPoint is just dumb,” the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker told The Wall Street Journal in 2009. “It’s like denouncing lectures—before there were awful PowerPoint presentations, there were awful scripted lectures, unscripted lectures, slide shows, chalk talks, and so on.” Gene Zelazny, the longtime director of business visual presentations at McKinsey, summed up Tufte’s argument as “blaming cars for the accidents that drivers cause.”

The problem with this comparison is that our transportation system does bear some responsibility for the 30,000 to 40,000 car-crash deaths that occur in the U.S. every year, because it puts drivers in the position to cause accidents. PowerPoint, Tufte told me, has an analogous effect by actively facilitating bad presentations. “It’s convenient for the presenter,” he said, “and it’s inconvenient and harmful to the audience and to the content.”

But if all of those bad presentations really led to broad societal ills, the proof is hard to find. Some scientists have tried to take a formal measure of the alleged PowerPoint Effect, asking whether the software really influences our ability to process information. Sebastian Kernbach, a professor of creativity and design at the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, has co-authored multiple reviews synthesizing this literature. On the whole, he told me, the research suggests that Tufte was partly right, partly wrong. PowerPoint doesn’t seem to make us stupid—there is no evidence of lower information retention or generalized cognitive decline, for example, among those who use it—but it does impose a set of assumptions about how information ought to be conveyed: loosely, in bullet points, and delivered by presenters to an audience of passive listeners. These assumptions have even reshaped the physical environment for the slide-deck age, Kernbach said: Seminar tables, once configured in a circle, have been bent, post-PowerPoint, into a U-shape to accommodate presenters.

The Atlantic

When I spoke with Kernbach, he was preparing for a talk on different methods of visual thinking to a group of employees at a large governmental organization. He said he planned to use a flip chart, draw on blank slides like a whiteboard, and perhaps even have audience members do some drawing of their own. But he was also gearing up to use regular old PowerPoint slides. Doing so, he told me, would “signal preparation and professionalism” for his audience. The organization was NASA.

The fact that the American space agency still uses PowerPoint should not be surprising. Despite the backlash it inspired in the press, and the bile that it raised in billionaires, and the red alert it caused within the military, the corporate-presentation juggernaut rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, according to Shawn Villaron, Microsoft’s vice president of product for PowerPoint—well into the hundreds of millions. If anything, its use cases have proliferated. During lockdown, people threw PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy or quit soccer or attend a Niall Horan meet and greet. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil rules the world.

On its face at least, the idea that PowerPoint makes us stupid looks like a textbook case of misguided technological doomsaying. When I asked Tufte to revisit his critique, he demurred, but later in our conversation I pressed him on the matter more directly: Was it possible that his own critique of a new technology had missed the target, just as so many others had in the past? Were the worries over PowerPoint any different from those about the printing press or word processors or—

He cut in before I could finish the thought. The question, he said with evident exasperation, was impossible to answer. “I don’t do big think, big bullshit,” he told me. “I'm down there in the trenches, right in the act of communication.” By which he meant, I think, that he doesn’t engage in any kind of remotely abstract historical thinking.

I tried narrowing the question. Today’s concerns about social media bear a certain resemblance to the PowerPoint critique, I said. Both boil down to a worry that new media technologies value form over substance, that they are designed to hold our attention rather than to convey truth, and that they make us stupid. Could it be—was there any chance at all—that Tufte had made the right critique, but of the wrong technology? He wasn’t having it. The comparison between PowerPoint and social media, he said, is “hand-waving and bullshit and opportunism.”

[Read: Yes, social media really is undermining democracy]

This dismissal notwithstanding, it’s tempting to entertain counterfactuals and wonder how things might have played out if Tufte and the rest of us had worried about social media back in 2003 instead of presentation software. Perhaps a timely pamphlet on The Cognitive Style of Friendster or a Wired headline asserting that “LinkedIn Is Evil” would have changed the course of history. If the social-media backlash of the past few years had been present from the start, maybe Facebook would never have grown into the behemoth it is now, and the country would never have become so hopelessly divided.

Or it could be that nothing whatsoever would have changed. No matter what their timing, and regardless of their aptness, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. Objections get steamrolled. The new technology takes over. And years later, when we look back and think, How strange that we were so perturbed, the effects of that technology may well be invisible.

Did the written word decimate our memory? Did radio shrink our attention span? Did PowerPoint turn us into corporate bureaucrats? If these innovations really did change the way we think, then we’re measuring their effects with an altered mind. Either the critiques were wrong, or they were so right that we can no longer tell the difference.

‘Things Don’t Always Change in a Nice, Gradual Way’

2023-07-13T17:39:14-04:00

It’s getting hard to keep track of all the overlapping climate disasters. In Phoenix, Arizona, the temperature has broken 110 degrees for nearly two weeks running. The waters off the Florida coast are approaching hot-tub hot, and before long, marine heat waves may cover half the world’s oceans. Up north, Canada’s worst wildfire season on record burns on and continues to suffocate American cities with sporadic smoke, which may not clear for good until October. In the Northeast, floods have put towns underwater, erased entire roadways, and left train tracks eerily suspended 100 feet in the air. Also, the sea ice in Antarctica—which should be expanding rapidly right now, because, remember, it’s winter down there—may be losing mass.

In one sense, this pile-up of crises is exactly what climate scientists expected. Global temperatures are rising at pretty much the anticipated rate, Simon Lee, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University, told me, and natural disasters are corollaries to that fact. There will be some year-to-year variation in what happens—and this one may clock in with slightly worse conditions, overall, than trend lines would predict. But the fact is, climate change is implicated at least to some extent in all of these disasters. It makes the hot days hotter. It makes rainstorms more intense. It dries out landscapes and primes them for ignition. “We don’t need to do a specific attribution study anymore” to make such assertions, Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told me. “We’ve been doing this for 20 years now … This is so far from rocket science.”

[Read: Boiling the ocean]

But when it comes to climate science, what researchers “expect” can be a sketchy concept. “We know the overall path we’re on,” Alex Ruane, a climate scientist at NASA, told me, but “things don’t always change in a nice, gradual way.” Although the global situation is deteriorating at about the rate that leading models would predict, more specific, local changes may come as a surprise. Climate change is, at its core, a destabilizing force: Think of its effects as being predictably unpredictable. The total surface area of the Antarctic sea ice, for example, is currently more than four standard deviations smaller than the average for this time of year. That’s not just breaking the record since measurements began in the 1970s; that’s shattering the record. Why exactly this has happened now—and whether it will end up as a terrifying blip or a permanent state—is still an open question. Likewise, scientists do not yet fully understand how climate change affects the way that weather systems move across the globe. A storm may be diverted from a drought-stricken region to an already sodden town, or a scorching atmosphere may stall out in a single place, as we’re seeing with the heat dome that has settled over Phoenix.

Even if those disasters do play out exactly as expected, the scientists I spoke with said they’ve noticed shifts in how Americans are discussing them. “People are no longer talking about climate change in the future tense,” Ruane said. “They’re talking about climate change in the present tense.” More and more of them have personal tales of climate woe. Disasters are no longer framed as harbingers; they’re simply understood to be the way things are. “These are not canaries in the coal mine,” Schmidt said. “The canaries died a long time ago.”

Back when he worked at The Atlantic, my former colleague Robinson Meyer would end his weekly newsletter with a section called “Someone Else’s Weather,” because, as he put it, “the climate is someone else’s weather.” I always took this to mean that the abstraction we refer to as the climate is a concrete, imminent reality for someone, somewhere. It’s the sky above their head, the earth beneath their feet, the feeling of the air around them.

This year’s accumulating catastrophes reinforce this formulation, but they also take it one step further. The heat and the fires and the melting and the floods all contribute to a growing sense that climate change is happening right here and now—that the climate truly has become the weather. We stay in because it’s hot. We take a different route to work because the roads have been washed out. We adjust our plans because of wildfire smoke in the same way that we’ve always done for bouts of lightning and rain. More and more, the climate is not someone else’s weather. It’s our own.

Hanna Rosin speaks with the climate writer Emma Pattee on how extreme heat is already changing our kids' summers. Listen to Radio Atlantic:

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