Saahil Desai | The Atlantic

Insider Trading Is Going to Get People Killed

2026-03-07T13:34:06-05:00

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not, it’s safe to assume, a devoted Polymarket user. If he had been, the Iranian leader might still be alive. Hours before Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was reduced to rubble last week, an account under the username “magamyman” bet about $20,000 that the supreme leader would no longer be in power by the end of March. Polymarket placed the odds at just 14 percent, netting “magamyman” a profit of more than $120,000.

Everyone knew that an attack might be in the works—some American aircraft carriers had already been deployed to the Middle East weeks ago—but the Iranian government was caught off guard by the timing. Although the ayatollah surely was aware of the risks to his life, he presumably did not know that he would be targeted on this particular Saturday morning. Yet on Polymarket, plenty of warning signs pointed to an impending attack. The day before, 150 users bet at least $1,000 that the United States would strike Iran within the next 24 hours, according to a New York Times analysis. Until then, few people on the platform were betting that kind of money on an immediate attack.

Maybe all of this sounds eerily familiar. In January, someone on Polymarket made a series of suspiciously well-timed bets right before the U.S. attacked a foreign country and deposed its leader. By the time Nicolás Maduro was extracted from Venezuela and flown to New York, the user had pocketed more than $400,000. Perhaps this trader and the Iran bettors who are now flush with cash simply had the luck of a lifetime—the gambling equivalent of making a half-court shot. Or maybe they knew what was happening ahead of time and flipped it for easy money. We simply do not know.

Polymarket traders swap crypto, not cash, and conceal their identities through the blockchain. Even so, investigations into insider trading are already under way: Last month, Israel charged a military reservist for allegedly using classified information to make unspecified bets on Polymarket.

The platform forbids illegal activity, which includes insider trading in the U.S. But with a few taps on a smartphone, anyone with privileged knowledge can now make a quick buck (or a hundred thousand). Polymarket and other prediction markets—the sanitized, industry-favored term for sites that let you wager on just about anything—have been dogged by accusations of insider trading in markets of all flavors. How did a Polymarket user know that Lady Gaga, Cardi B, and Ricky Martin would make surprise appearances during the Super Bowl halftime show, but that Drake and Travis Scott wouldn’t? Shady bets on war are even stranger and more disturbing. They risk unleashing an entirely new kind of national-security threat. The U.S. caught a break: The Venezuela and Iran strikes were not thwarted by insider traders whose bets could have prompted swift retaliation. The next time, we may not be so lucky.

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

The attacks in Venezuela and Iran—like so many military campaigns—were conducted under the guise of secrecy. You don’t swoop in on an adversary when they know you are coming. The Venezuela raid was reportedly so confidential that Pentagon officials did not know about its exact timing until a few hours before President Trump gave the orders.

Any insiders who put money down on impending war may not have thought that they were giving anything away. An anonymous bet that reeks of insider trading is not always easy to spot in the moment. After the suspicious Polymarket bets on the Venezuela raid, the site’s forecast placed the odds that Maduro would be ousted at roughly 10 percent. Even if Maduro and his team had been glued to Polymarket, it’s hard to imagine that such long odds would have compelled him to flee in the middle of the night. And even with so many people betting last Friday on an imminent strike in Iran, Polymarket forecast only a 26 percent chance, at most, of an attack the next day. What’s the signal, and what’s the noise?

In both cases, someone adept at parsing prediction markets could have known that something was up. “It’s possible to spot these bets ahead of time,” Rajiv Sethi, a Barnard College economist who studies prediction markets, told me. There are some telltale behaviors that could help distinguish a military contractor betting off a state secret from a college student mindlessly scrolling on his phone after one too many cans of Celsius. Someone who’s using a newly created account to wager a lot of money against the conventional wisdom is probably the former, not the latter. And spotting these kinds of suspicious bettors is only getting easier. The prediction-market boom has created a cottage industry of tools that instantaneously flag potential insider trading—not for legal purposes but so that you, too, can profit off what the select few already know.

Unlike Kalshi, the other big prediction-market platform, Polymarket can be used in the U.S. only through a virtual private network, or VPN. In effect, the site is able to skirt regulations that require tracking the identities of its customers and reporting shady bets to the government. In some ways, insider trading seems to be the whole point: “What’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market,” Shayne Coplan, the company’s 27-year-old CEO, said in an interview last year. (Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.)

Consider if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had paid the monthly fee for a service that flagged relevant activity on Polymarket two hours before the strike. The supreme leader might not have hosted in-person meetings with his top advisers where they were easy targets for missiles. Perhaps Iran would have launched its own preemptive strikes, targeting military bases across the Middle East. Six American service members have already died from Iran’s drone attacks in the region; the death toll could have been higher if Iran had struck first. In other words, someone’s idea of a get-rich-quick scheme may have ended with a military raid gone horribly awry. (The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.)

Maybe this all sounds far-fetched, but it shouldn’t. “Any advance notice to an adversary is problematic,” Alex Goldenberg, a fellow at the Rutgers Miller Center who has written about war markets, told me. “And these predictive markets, as they stand, are designed to leak out this information.” In all likelihood, he added, intelligence agencies across the world are already paying attention to Polymarket. Last year, the military’s bulletin for intelligence professionals published an article advocating for the armed forces to integrate data from Polymarket to “more fully anticipate national security threats.” After all, the Pentagon already has some experience with prediction markets. During the War on Terror, DARPA toyed with creating what it billed the “Policy Analysis Market,” a site that would let anonymous traders bet on world events to forecast terrorist attacks and coups. (Democrats in Congress revolted, and the site was quickly canned.)

Now every adversary and terrorist group in the world can easily access war markets that are far more advanced than what the DOD ginned up two decades ago. What makes Polymarket’s entrance into warfare so troubling is not just potential insider trading from users like “magamyman.” If governments are eyeing Polymarket for signs of an impending attack, they can also be led astray. A government or another sophisticated actor wouldn’t need to spend much money to massively swing the Polymarket odds on whether a Gulf state will imminently strike Iran—breeding panic and paranoia. More fundamentally, prediction markets risk warping the basic incentives of war, Goldenberg said. He gave the example of a Ukrainian military commander making less than $1,000 a month, who could place bets that go against his own military’s objective. “Maybe you choose to retreat a day early because you can double, triple, or quadruple your money and then send that back to your family,” he said.

Again, we don’t know for sure whether any of this is happening. That may be the scariest part. As long as Polymarket lets anyone bet on war anonymously, we may never know. Last Saturday, the day of the initial Iran attack, Polymarket processed a record $478 million in bets, according to one analysis. All the while, Polymarket continues to wedge itself into the mainstream. Substack recently struck a partnership with Polymarket to incorporate the platform’s forecasts into its newsletters. (“Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets,” Polymarket posted on X in announcing the deal.) All of this makes the site even more valuable as an intelligence asset, and even more destructive for the rest of us. Polymarket keeps launching more war markets: Will the U.S. strike Iraq? Will Israel strike Beirut? Will Iran strike Cyprus? Somewhere out there, someone likely already knows the answers.

America Is Slow-Walking Into a Polymarket Disaster

2026-01-17T08:42:10-05:00

For the past week, I’ve found myself playing the same 23-second CNN clip on repeat. I’ve watched it in bed, during my commute to work, at the office, midway through making carrot soup, and while brushing my teeth. In the video, Harry Enten, the network’s chief data analyst, stares into the camera and breathlessly tells his audience about the gambling odds that Donald Trump will buy any of Greenland. “The people who are putting their money where their mouth is—they are absolutely taking this seriously,” Enten says. He taps the giant touch screen behind him and pulls up a made-for-TV graphic: Based on how people were betting online at the time, there was a 36 percent chance that the president would annex Greenland. “Whoa, way up there!” Enten yells, slapping his hands together. “My goodness gracious!” The ticker at the bottom of the screen speeds through other odds: Will Gavin Newsom win the next presidential election? 19 percent chance. Will Viktor Orbán be out as the leader of Hungary before the end of the year? 48 percent chance.

These odds were pulled from Kalshi, which hilariously claims not to be a gambling platform: It’s a “prediction market.” People go to sites such as Kalshi and Polymarket—another big prediction market—in order to put money down on a given news event. Nobody would bet on something that they didn’t believe would happen, the thinking goes, and so the markets are meant to forecast the likelihood of a given outcome.

[Listen: Prediction markets and the “suckerification” crisis, with Max Read]

Prediction markets let you wager on basically anything. Will Elon Musk father another baby by June 30? Will Jesus return this year? Will Israel strike Gaza tomorrow? Will the longevity guru Bryan Johnson’s next functional sperm count be greater than “20.0 M/ejac”? These sites have recently boomed in popularity—particularly among terminally online young men who trade meme stocks and siphon from their 401(k)s to buy up bitcoin. But now prediction markets are creeping into the mainstream. CNN announced a deal with Kalshi last month to integrate the site’s data into its broadcasts, which has led to betting odds showing up in segments about Democrats possibly retaking the House, credit-card interest rates, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. At least twice in the past two weeks, Enten has told viewers about the value of data from people who are “putting their money where their mouth is.”

On January 7, the media giant Dow Jones announced its own collaboration with Polymarket and said that it will begin integrating the site’s odds across its publications, including The Wall Street Journal. CNBC has a prediction-market deal, as does Yahoo Finance, Sports Illustrated, and Time. Last week, MoviePass announced that it will begin testing a betting platform. On Sunday, the Golden Globes featured Polymarket’s forecasts throughout the broadcast—because apparently Americans wanted to know whether online gamblers favored Amy Poehler or Dax Shepard to win Best Podcast.

Media is a ruthless, unstable business, and revenue streams are drying up; if you squint, you can see why CNN or Dow Jones might sign a contract that, after all, provides its audience with some kind of data. On air, Enten cites Kalshi odds alongside Gallup polls and Google searches—what’s the difference? “The data featured through our partnership with Kalshi is just one of many sources used to provide context around the stories or topics we are covering and has no impact on editorial judgment,” Brian Poliakoff, a CNN spokesperson, told me in a statement. Nolly Evans, the Journal’s digital general manager, told me that Polymarket provides the newspaper’s journalists with “another way to quantify collective expectations—especially around financial or geopolitical events.” In an email, Jack Suh, a Kalshi spokesperson, told me that the company’s partnerships are designed to inform the public, not to encourage more trading. Polymarket declined to comment.

The problem is that prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes as much about gambling as about the event itself. This kind of thing has already happened to sports, where the language of “parlays” and “covering the spread” has infiltrated every inch of commentary. ESPN partners with DraftKings to bring its odds to SportsCenter and Monday Night Football; CBS Sports has a betting vertical; FanDuel runs its own streaming network. But the stakes of Greenland’s future are more consequential than the NFL playoffs.

The more that prediction markets are treated like news, especially heading into another election, the more every dip and swing in the odds may end up wildly misleading people about what might happen, or influencing what happens in the real world. Yet it’s unclear whether these sites are meaningful predictors of anything. After the Golden Globes, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan excitedly posted that his site had correctly predicted 26 of 28 winners, which seems impressive—but Hollywood awards shows are generally predictable. One recent study found that Polymarket’s forecasts in the weeks before the 2024 election were not much better than chance.

These markets are also manipulable. In 2012, one bettor on the now-defunct prediction market Intrade placed a series of huge wagers on Mitt Romney in the two weeks preceding the election, generating a betting line indicative of a tight race. The bettor did not seem motivated by financial gain, according to two researchers who examined the trades. “More plausibly, this trader could have been attempting to manipulate beliefs about the odds of victory in an attempt to boost fundraising, campaign morale, and turnout,” they wrote. The trader lost at least $4 million but might have shaped media attention of the race for less than the price of a prime-time ad, they concluded.

A billionaire congressional candidate can’t just send a check to Quinnipiac University and suddenly find himself as the polling front-runner, but he can place enormous Polymarket bets on himself that move the odds in his favor. Or consider this hypothetical laid out by the Stanford political scientist Andrew Hall: What if, a month before the 2028 presidential election, the race is dead even between J. D. Vance and Mark Cuban? Inexplicably, Vance’s odds of winning surge on Kalshi, possibly linked to shady overseas bets. CNN airs segment after segment about the spike, turning it into an all-consuming national news story. Democrats and Republicans point fingers at each other, and no one knows what’s really going on. Such a scenario is “plausible—maybe even likely—in the coming years,” Hall writes. It doesn’t help that the Trump Media and Technology Group, the owner of the president’s social-media platform, Truth Social, is set to launch its own platform, Truth Predict. (Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Kalshi and Polymarket.)

The irony of prediction markets is that they are supposed to be a more trustworthy way of gleaning the future than internet clickbait and half-baked punditry, but they risk shredding whatever shared trust we still have left. The suspiciously well-timed bets that one Polymarket user placed right before the capture of Nicolás Maduro may have been just a stroke of phenomenal luck that netted a roughly $400,000 payout. Or maybe someone with inside information was looking for easy money. Last week, when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt abruptly ended her briefing after 64 minutes and 30 seconds, many traders were outraged, because they had predicted (with 98 percent odds) that the briefing would run past 65 minutes. Some suspected, with no evidence, that Leavitt had deliberately stopped before the 65-minute mark to turn a profit. (When I asked the White House about this, the spokesperson Davis Ingle told me in a statement, “This is a 100% Fake News narrative.”)

[Read: The Polymarket bets on Maduro are a warning]

Unintentionally or not, this is what happens when media outlets normalize treating every piece of news and entertainment as something to wager on. As Tarek Mansour, Kalshi’s CEO, has said, his long-term goal is to “financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” (Kalshi means “everything” in Arabic.) What could go wrong? As one viral post on X recently put it, “Got a buddy who is praying for world war 3 so he can win $390 on Polymarket.” It’s a joke. I think.

Move Fast and Break Nothing

2025-10-02T07:30:00-04:00

Every trip in a self-driving Waymo has the same dangerous moment. The robotaxi can successfully shuttle you to your destination, stopping carefully at every red light and dutifully following the speed limit. But at the very end, you, a flawed human being, will have to place your hand on the door handle, look both ways, and push the door open.

From mid-February to mid-August of this year, Waymo’s driverless cars were involved in three collisions that came down to roughly identical circumstances: A passenger flung their door open and hit somebody passing by on a bike or scooter. That’s according to an independent analysis of crash reports the company has disclosed to the government, which found that most of the 45 serious accidents involving Waymos were the fault of other motorists or seemingly an act of God. (In one case, a pickup truck being towed in front of a Waymo came loose and smashed into the vehicle.) None were definitively the fault of Waymo’s actual self-driving technology.

Waymo, an AI company that is part of Google, loves to brag about its safety record. In a recent report tracking 96 million miles of fully autonomous rides, Waymo says its cars have been involved in 91 percent fewer accidents resulting in a “serious injury or worse” than cars driven by an average human over the same distance. Experts I spoke with had quibbles with Waymo’s comparisons but agreed that the company has an undeniably strong safety record. “They have not obviously been at fault for any fatalities,” Phil Koopman, an driverless-car expert at Carnegie Mellon, told me. Humans may not always do our job, but by and large, Waymo’s machines are doing theirs.

In a world of AI, it turns out that a 5,000-pound Jaguar SUV may be less concerning than an interactive text box. The AI boom has led OpenAI and many other companies to rush out their products, sometimes with disastrous results: Gemini has engaged in bondage scenarios with adolescent users, Elon Musk’s Grok recently went full Nazi for a few hours, and OpenAI is mired in a pending wrongful-death lawsuit after ChatGPT allegedly played a role in a teen’s suicide. (OpenAI declined to comment; Musk has posted that Grok was “manipulated” into going on an anti-Semitic rampage; and Google, which runs Gemini, has said that it has enacted additional safeguards to protect kids.)

[From the August 2025 issue: Sexting with Gemini]

“I like to tell people that if Waymo worked as well as ChatGPT, they’d be dead,” Bryant Walker Smith, a self-driving-car expert at the University of South Carolina School of Law, told me. Imagine if, instead of turning left at a stop light, a robotaxi decided to blast the stereo and start doing figure eights. Waymo pokes a hole in Silicon Valley’s prevailing ethos, especially in the AI age: Move fast and break things. Mark Zuckerberg has said that the risk of “misspending a couple hundred of billion dollars” on AI is smaller for Meta than risking a future in which his company is “out of position.” If you slow down, you might fall behind in building world-changing “superintelligence.”

The stakes are more immediately obvious for self-driving vehicles than for chatbots: Every day, more than 100 Americans die in car crashes, more than a 9/11’s worth of fatalities per month. Yet Waymo’s self-driving competitors have also seemed to adopt the ethos that is animating other AI companies. Over the summer, Tesla rolled out its own robotaxi service in a penis-shaped swath of Austin. (Elon Musk is going to Elon Musk.) In their first month on the streets, driverless Teslas got into three crashes while logging roughly 7,000 miles. Nationally, Waymo’s fleet racks up many more miles every day. Meanwhile, Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” feature, which is built into many of the company’s cars, has been linked to numerous deaths, and the company is facing lawsuits alleging false advertising. Just this week, two Democratic senators called for safety regulators to investigate the “Full Self-Driving” feature. (Tesla and Elon Musk did not respond to requests for comment.)

Or consider Cruise, a start-up that was quickly expanding nationally in 2023. In October of that year, one of its robotaxis struck a pedestrian in San Francisco after she was hit by another car and thrown in front of the vehicle. The Cruise vehicle dragged her more than 20 feet as it attempted to pull over. (The woman was seriously injured but survived.) Perhaps Cruise got unlucky and Waymo hasn’t. But even at the time, driverless-car experts were not surprised. A Cruise whistleblower had sent a letter to safety regulators in California alleging that the company’s cars weren’t up to snuff, as The Wall Street Journal reported then. After Cruise’s accident in 2023, its parent company, GM, halted its robotaxi business for good. (GM declined to comment.)

Compared with its robotaxi competitors, “Waymo has moved the slowest and the most deliberately,” Smith said—which may be a lesson for the world’s AI developers. The company was founded in 2009 as a secretive project inside of Google; a year later, it had logged 1,000 miles of autonomous rides in a tricked-out Prius. Close to a decade later, in 2018, Waymo officially launched its robotaxi service. Even now, when Waymos are inching their way into the mainstream, the company has been hypercautious. The company is limited to specific zones within the five cities it operates in (San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta). And only Waymo employees and “a growing number of guests” can ride them on the highway, Chris Bonelli, a Waymo spokesperson, told me. Although the company successfully completed rides on the highway years ago, higher speeds bring more risk for people and self-driving cars alike. What might look like a few grainy pixels to Waymo’s cameras one moment could be roadkill to swerve around the very next.

That’s not to say that Waymo’s extreme caution has resulted in perfection. Experts I spoke with pointed out some limitations in how the company compares itself to human drivers. For one, the average car on the road is more than a decade old, which makes it less safe than Waymo’s fleet of new, regularly serviced vehicles. Waymos also have glitched in ways that do not show up in aggregated crash data: There are anecdotes of the robotaxis driving into a flooded street, getting stuck in wet cement, and blocking two firetrucks. Last week, cops in the Bay Area pulled over a Waymo for making an illegal U-turn. “Since there was no human driver,” the police department wrote on Facebook, “a ticket couldn’t be issued (our citation books don’t have a box for ‘robot’).”

But such examples make up a vanishingly tiny portion of rides from a company that has come to dominate the world of robotaxis. The overwhelming majority of driverless-car rides in the United States on any given day happen in a Waymo. Bonelli told me it now completes “hundreds of thousands of paid rides per week.” Parents bring home their newborns in Waymos. High-schoolers head to first period in Waymos. And many more of the company’s robotaxis are about to hit the roads: The company recently won approval to start testing airport pickups in San Francisco and San Jose, California; next year, Waymo plans to debut its service in Washington, D.C.; Nashville; Miami; Dallas; and Denver.

[Read: Inside Waymo’s secret world for training self-driving cars]

Robotaxis are only as good as the driving data they have ingested. Building a driverless car that can roll through a cul-de-sac is relatively easy; building one that is ready for every possible scenario it might face on the road is much harder. Thanks to Google’s enormous war chest, Waymo has had the luxury to spend 16 years raking in data to create more precise self-driving cars, all with the hope of an eventual payoff. Waymo has been around for longer than Lyft, Instagram, and Snapchat—yet it has still never turned a profit. The robotaxi business is part of a unit of Alphabet called “Other Bets,” which lost a staggering $1.25 billion from April to June.

Self-driving cars still have a lot to prove when asphalt gives way to snow and black ice. As it enters new cities, Waymo says it is preparing for any possible weather. “We have been in Detroit in the snow and Seattle in the rain and thunderstorms in Miami,” Waymo’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana recently told the Atlantic contributing writer Derek Thompson. Because Waymo’s cars lack “someone to physically scrape off the icy build up,” Bonelli, the Waymo spokesperson said, “we implemented preventive measures to each of our sensors to maintain a clean view of its surroundings.” Waymos also can’t avoid the highway forever. On city streets, a confused robotaxi can just pull over. Robotaxis traveling at highway speeds can’t easily do that.

At any point, the company’s luck could run out. “We could see a fatality caused by the technology tomorrow,” Koopman said. For now, if a single death is tied back to an errant line of Waymo code, it could imperil the company’s future. As Waymo conquers one city and highway at a time, however, it may eventually become something like transportation infrastructure. Alphabet’s vision for Waymo points to a future in which its fleet of robotaxis is part of every aspect of travel. Why drive yourself to work when you could just order a Waymo? Why waste your Saturday getting a tune-up for your RAV4 when a driverless Waymo doesn’t need a chaperone? “They want to be Uber but also Toyota, the car dealer, Exxon, Pep Boys, State Farm, your transit agency, GMAC, UPS, Michelin and more—all combined,” Brad Templeton, an early Waymo consultant, has written.

Like other AI companies, Waymo wants to rule the world. Chatbots that cure cancer might still be a work in progress, but Waymos are already taking over cities. In the areas of San Francisco where it operates, Waymo is ferrying more riders than Lyft. Every new rollout of safe Waymos is one step toward a future in which the company is embedded in American life. Whether slow or fast, the AI endgame is all the same.

My Day Inside America’s Most Hated Car

2025-03-29T10:47:29-04:00

Photographs by Kent Nishimura

On the first Sunday of spring, surrounded by row houses and magnolia trees, I came to a horrifying realization: My mom was right. I had been flipped off at least 17 times, called a “motherfucker” (in both English and Spanish), and a “fucking dork.” A woman in a blue sweater stared at me, sighed, and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” All of this because I was driving a Tesla Cybertruck.

I had told my mom about my plan to rent this thing and drive it around Washington, D.C., for a day—a journalistic experiment to understand what it’s like behind the wheel of America’s most hated car. “Wow. Be careful,” she texted back right away. Both of us had read the stories of Cybertrucks possibly being set on fire, bombed with a Molotov cocktail, and vandalized in every way imaginable. People have targeted the car—and Tesla as a whole—to protest Elon Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s administration. But out of sheer masochism, or stupidity, I still went ahead and spent a day driving one. As I idled with the windows down on a street in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, a woman glared at me from her front porch: “Fuck you, and this truck, and Elon,” she yelled. “You drive a Nazi truck.” She slammed her front door shut, and then opened it again. “I hope someone blows your shit up.”

Earlier that day, my first stop was the heart of the resistance: the Dupont Circle farmers’ market. The people there wanted to see the organic asparagus and lion’s-mane mushrooms. What they did not want to see was a stainless-steel, supposedly bulletproof Cybertruck. Every red light created new moments for mockery. “You fucker!” yelled a bicyclist as he pedaled past me on P Street. The diners eating brunch on the sidewalk nearby laughed and cheered. Then came the next stoplight: A woman eating outside at Le Pain Quotidien gave me the middle finger for a solid 20 seconds, all without interrupting her conversation.

Kent Nishimura for The Atlantic

The anger is understandable. This is, after all, the radioactive center of DOGE’s blast radius. On the same block where I was yelled at in Mount Pleasant, I spotted a hand-drawn sign in one window: CFPB, it read, inside of a giant red heart; and at one point, I tailed behind a black Tesla Model Y with the bumper sticker Anti Elon Tesla Club. But the Cybertruck stands out on America’s roads about as much as LeBron James in a kindergarten classroom. No matter where you live, the car is a nearly 7,000-pound Rorschach test: It has become the defining symbol of the second Trump term. If you hate Trump and Musk, it is a giant MAGA hat, Pepe the Frog on wheels, or the “Swasticar.” If you love Trump and Musk, the Cybertruck is, well, a giant MAGA hat. On Monday, FBI Director Kash Patel called Tesla vandalism “domestic terrorism” as he announced a Tesla task force to investigate such acts. Alex Jones has trolled Tesla protesters from the back of his own Cybertruck, bullhorn in hand. Kid Rock has a Cybertruck with a custom Dukes of Hazzard paint job; the far-right podcaster Tim Pool owns one and says he’ll buy another “because it will own the libs”; and Kanye West has three. Trump’s 17-year-old granddaughter was gifted one by the president, and another by Musk.

Kent Nishimura for The Atlantic

When I parked the car for lunch in Takoma Park, where I support federal workers signs were staked into the grass, I heard two women whispering at a nearby table: “Should we egg it?” (In this economy?) Over and over again, as pedestrians and drivers alike glared at me, I had to remind myself: It’s just a car. And it’s kind of a cool one, too. It can apparently outrace a Porsche 911, while simultaneously towing a Porsche 911. Or it can power a house for up to three days. My day in the Cybertruck wasn’t extremely hard-core, but the eight onboard cameras made city driving more bearable than I was expecting. Regardless of what you do with it, the car is emissions-free. “The underlying technology of the Cybertruck is amazing,” Loren McDonald, an EV analyst at the firm Paren, told me. And the exterior undersells just how ridiculous it is. Just before I returned the car on Monday morning, I took an impromptu Zoom meeting from the giant in-car touchscreen. It has a single windshield wiper that is so long—more than five feet—that Musk has compared it to a “katana.”

Kent Nishimura for The Atlantic

After 10 hours of near-constant hazing, I navigated to an underground parking lot to recharge the truck (and my battered self-image). Someone had placed a sticker just beneath the Tesla logo: Elon Musk is a parasite, it read. Still, even in D.C., I got a fair number of thumbs-ups as my Cybertruck zoomed by the areas most frequented by tourists. Near the National Mall, a man in a red bandanna and shorts yelled, “That’s awesome!” and cheered. Perhaps it was an attempt at MAGA solidarity, or maybe not. Lots of people just seemed to think it looked cool. One guy in his 20s, wearing a make money, not friends hoodie, frantically took out his phone to film me making a left turn. Even in the bluest neighborhoods of D.C.—near a restaurant named Marx Cafe and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg mural—kids could not get enough of the Cybertruck. One girl in Takoma Park saw me and started screaming, “Cybertruck! Cybertruck!” Later, a boy spotted the car and frantically rode his scooter to try to get a better look. Just before sunset, I was struggling to change lanes near George Washington University when two teens stopped to stare at me from the sidewalk. I was anxiously checking directions on my phone and clearly had no idea where to go. “Must be an Uber,” one said to the other.

[Read: Admit it, the Cybertruck is awesome]

By 9 p.m., I’d had enough. I valeted at my hotel, with its “Tibetan Bowl Sound Healing” classes, and got a nervous look from the attendant. I can’t blame anyone who sees the car as the stainless-steel embodiment of the modern right. This week, a county sheriff in Ohio stood in front of a green Cybertruck and derided Tesla vandals as “little fat people that live in their mom’s basement and wear their mom’s pajamas.” But it is also a tragedy that the Cybertruck has become the most partisan car in existence—more so than the Prius, or the Hummer, or any kind of Subaru. The Cybertruck, an instantly meme-able and very weird car, could have helped America fall in love with EVs. Instead, it is doing the opposite. The revolt against Tesla is not slowing down, and in some cases people are outright getting rid of their cars. Is it really a win that Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona exchanged his all-electric Tesla sedan for a gas-guzzling SUV?

Then again, Republicans aren’t buying the Cybertruck en masse. It is too expensive and too weird. Buying any Tesla might be a way to own the libs, but the right has proved maddeningly resistant to going electric. “Your average MAGA Trump supporter isn’t going to go buy a Tesla,” McDonald, the EV analyst, said. Before the car shipped in November 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would sell 250,000 a year. He hasn’t even sold one-fifth of that in total—and sales are falling. (Neither Tesla nor Musk responded to a request for comment.)

Kent Nishimura for The Atlantic

Musk made a lot of other promises that haven’t really panned out: The Cybertruck was supposed to debut at less than $40,000. The cheapest model currently available is double that. The vehicle, Musk said, would be “really tough, not fake tough.” Instead, its stainless-steel side panels have fallen off because Tesla used the wrong glue—and that was just the most recent of the car’s eight recalls. The Cybertruck was supposed to be able to haul “near infinite mass” and “serve briefly as a boat.” Just this month alone, one Cybertruck’s rear end snapped off in a test of its towing power, and another sank off the coast of Los Angeles while trying to offload a Jet Ski from the bed.

The Cybertruck, in that sense, is a perfect metaphor for Musk himself. The world’s richest man has a bad habit of promising one thing and delivering another. X was supposed to be the “everything app”; now it is a cesspool of white supremacy. DOGE was billed as an attempt to make the government more nimble and tech-savvy. Instead, the cuts have resulted in seniors struggling to get their Social Security checks. So far, Musk has only continued to get richer and more powerful while the rest of us have had to deal with the wreckage. Let that sink in, as he likes to say. The disaster of the Cybertruck is not that it’s ugly, or unconventional, or absurdly pointy. It’s that, for most people, the car just isn’t worth driving.

No One Has to Settle for Bad Pizza Anymore

2024-12-06T11:00:00-05:00

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In pizza heaven, it is always 950 degrees. The temperature required to make an authentic Neapolitan pizza is stupidly, unbelievably hot—more blast furnace than broiler. My backyard pizza oven can get all the way there in just 15 minutes. Crank it to the max, and the Ooni Koda will gurgle up blue flames that bounce off the top of the dome. In 60 seconds, raw dough inflates into pillowy crust, cheese dissolves into the sauce, and a few simple ingredients become a full-fledged pizza.

Violinists have the Stradivarius. Sneakerheads have the Air Jordan 1. Pizza degenerates like me have the Ooni. I got my first one three years ago and have since been on a singular, pointless quest to make the best pie possible. Unfortunately, I am now someone who knows that dough should pass the windowpane test. Do not get me started on the pros and cons of Caputo 00 flour.

An at-home pizza oven is a patently absurd thing to buy. Much to my wife’s consternation, I now own two. It’s all the more ridiculous considering that I live in New York City, where amazing pizzerias are about as easy to spot as rats, and space is a precious commodity; this is not a town that favors single-use kitchen tools. These devices do one thing well (pizza) and only that one thing (pizza). My 12-inch Ooni is among the cheapest and smallest high-heat pizza ovens out there, and it still clocks in at $400 and 20 pounds. You can get an 11-in-1 combination Instant Pot and air fryer for a fraction of the cost.

But somehow, the portable-pizza-oven market is booming. Ooni makes nine different models—including a $900 indoor version that’s like a souped-up toaster oven—and similar products are available from companies including Cuisinart, Ninja, Gozney, and Breville. Oprah included a pizza oven in her 2023 gift guide. Florence Pugh has Instagrammed her portable-oven odysseys.

[Read: America before pizza]

The paradox of pizza has long been this: America’s favorite food—one that an eighth of the country eats on any given day—is difficult, if not impossible, to make well at home. Not anymore. We are in the middle of a pizza revolution; there has simply never been a better time to make pizza at home.

The traditional home oven is great for lots of things: chocolate-chip cookies, Thanksgiving turkeys, roasted brussels sprouts, whatever. Pizza is not one of them. Let’s consider a classic New York pie, which doesn’t require the same extreme heat as its Neapolitan brethren. It sounds weird, but you want the pie to be medium rare. The crust should be crispy but still pliable, the cheese melted but not burned. The only way to achieve that is to blast pizza dough with heat from both top and bottom—about 600 degrees at the very least, preferably 650. But nearly every kitchen range tops out at 550 degrees. “By whatever accident of fate, the level of heat that’s necessary is just out of the reach of a typical home oven,” Adam Ragusea, a food YouTuber who is helping open up a pizzeria in suburban Knoxville, Tennessee, told me. That temperature discrepancy matters a lot. Try making pizza on a simple aluminum sheet tray in your home oven, and by the time the crust is golden brown, it’ll be brittle like a cracker and the cheese will have puddled into grease.

Overcoming the limitations of the reviled kitchen range has long stumped homemade pizza enthusiasts. Julia Child laid out tiles in her oven to soak up the oven’s heat and transfer it to the crust for extra crispiness. That inspired the pizza stone, an oversize ceramic tile that you insert into your oven. At times, the human will to make a decent pizza at home borders on farce. Before making pizza, some recipes suggest that you should leave your oven at full heat for 45 minutes, or an hour, or even two. In the 2000s, one software engineer in Atlanta realized that in self-cleaning mode, ovens can hit 800 degrees—but the door locks. So he snipped off the safety latch with a pair of garden shears. Others have done the same, voiding the warranty on their oven in the name of better pizza.

Still, nothing you can do in a standard kitchen competes with the tools that a pizzeria has at its disposal. Traditional commercial pizza ovens are gigantic and expensive, sometimes costing upwards of $20,000. Some of the oldest pizzerias in the United States still use their original ovens, manufactured nearly a century ago. Even if your oven reaches 750 degrees, its walls “are not going to be as thick as the walls of a commercial pizza oven,” J. Kenji López-Alt, a chef and the author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, told me. “So there’s just less heat energy trapped in there.”

Portable ovens are like the iPhones of home pizza making: They have changed everything. The prototype for the first Ooni, launched on Kickstarter in 2012, looks more like a medieval torture device than anything you could feasibly use to cook. It was soon joined by the Roccbox, a stainless-steel dome that can run on either wood or gas. Newer models have gotten progressively better. The ovens aren’t that complicated, but they are genius. They are fairly inexpensive, and small enough to take on camping trips and beach vacations. For the home cook who isn’t making a hundred pizzas in one go, “it’ll do a great job at mimicking a restaurant oven,” López-Alt said.

[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: J. Kenji López-Alt thinks you’ll be fine with an induction stove]

For a while, these ovens could be found in relatively few backyards. Then America went pizza-oven wild during the pandemic. What’s better than nurturing a sourdough starter? Nurturing a sourdough starter, topping it with sauce, and launching it into the flames. In 2020, Ooni sales increased by 300 percent. The ovens have stayed in high demand, Joe Derochowski, an analyst at the market-research firm Circana, told me. At housewares shows these days, he said, “you see pizza ovens all over.” Scott Wiener, a pizza expert who leads tours in New York City, always asks his groups if they make pizza at home and how they cook it. “One person will say ‘Ooni,’ every time,” he told me.

Perhaps part of the appeal of these home ovens is that they satisfy the same urge that using a grill does: Let’s face it; fire is fun. Traditionally, though, pizza has been thought of as an extension of baking ; in Italy, pizza originated with bread bakers looking to sell cheap food to workers. Many of the earliest pizzerias in the U.S. were founded by bakers who had arrived from Italy. But making pizza is really a lot more like grilling a burger than baking bread. Let your pizza sit for a few seconds too long, and the flames will take the dough from lightly singed to fully incinerated. (All pizza is better than no pizza—except when that pizza is so burnt, it tastes like ash.)

Home pizza ovens represent the next generation of grilling; they take those familiar, irresistible propane flames and apply them to another arena of cooking entirely. And as with grilling, to make good pizza, you need accoutrements. I slide my homemade pizza into the Ooni using one tool, spin it around with another, and then monitor the heat with yet another. Pizza ovens “echo the barbecue world and the home-grilling world,” Wiener said. For $1,000, you can buy an Ooni that lets you cook three pizzas at once and remotely track the temperature from your phone. As Ragusea put it: “Men love their fucking toys.”

Tools and gadgets can only take you so far. Even with the fanciest oven on the market, you still have to learn how to stretch the dough and get it into the oven without creating an oblong mess. “There’s all these special techniques involved in pizza that don’t apply to any other kind of cooking,” López-Alt said. If you want to learn, there are pizza forums, pizza Facebook groups, and so, so many pizza YouTube videos.

My first pizza, made in my kitchen oven, was so oversauced that it was more like tomato soup in a bread bowl. A ridiculous number of videos later, my pizza game has gone from JV to the big leagues. Pizza ovens beget videos on how to use them, begetting more interest in ovens, begetting more videos. It is a spin wheel of great pizza.

Even in the Ooni, my pizzas are not better or even that much cheaper than what you’d find in a great pizzeria, but they are mine. I get why my fellow pizza diehards gather online not only to hone their technique, but also to share their creations (even when they might give any Italian nonna a heart attack). Candied lemon and ricotta pizza! Mexican street corn pizza! Detroit-style Chongqing-chicken pizza topped with green onion and sesame seeds!

The irony of the pizza revolution is that this should be a moment for a pizza recession. Remember when the only thing you could get delivered was pizza, and maybe Chinese food? When you least wanted to cook, it was pizza time: In 2011, one of the biggest days for pizza eating was the day before Thanksgiving. Now you can DoorDash penne alla vodka or a pork banh mi. Yet Americans have fallen even deeper in love with pizza.

[From the October 1949 issue: Pizza, an introduction]

You can now find amazing pizza just about everywhere. Pizza pop-ups are opening using newer, larger versions of the cheap portable ovens. “Five years ago, if you wanted to open a mobile pizza company, then you would have to spend easily $5,000 on an oven and a trailer,” Wiener said. “Now you can spend half of that, and get two of these ovens.”

Still, the pizza sicko doesn’t always win. Recently, the pizza cravings got me late one evening. I fired up the Ooni, fiddled with the dough, and was ready to launch a pie when my hunger sapped my concentration. The dough had a hole in it, and disintegrated into sloppy goo in the oven. So much for that.

Part of getting a pizza oven is learning how to use it. The other part is learning when you should just leave it to the professionals.

This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “I’m a Pizza Sicko.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Sorry, You Need a Neck Fan

2024-08-09T11:34:39-04:00

This summer, one question has been living rent-free in my head: Do I look like a giant dork? Faced with miserable heat and humidity, I have surrendered to JisuLife, the maker of a plastic sea-green neck fan that spurts cool air onto my face. Mine was $28.30; it’s rechargeable and looks absolutely ridiculous—like if Beats headphones had a baby with a travel pillow.

At one point, I put on my best summer clothes for a dinner out and then wrapped the device around my neck before leaving the house. It felt about as embarrassing as showing up to a wedding in a tuxedo and Crocs. The neck fan is not glamorous, but fashion be damned. My JisuLife and its 78 air vents accompany me on my daily commute, during which I once spotted a pair of teens in matching white neck fans holding hands (true love!). Last week, I wore the gadget to the grocery store and caught a knowing glance from an elderly woman doing the same. Simone Biles’s mom and dad each had one on as they sat in the audience at the Paris Olympics. They are everywhere at Disney World. Jenna Bush Hager has touted them on the Today show. With good behavior, Amazon warehouse workers can earn enough “swag bucks” to buy one to stay cool on the job.

The neck fan is a heat gadget for hot times, a piece of technology designed to make extreme weather a bit more bearable. “Live chill, stay cool” goes JisuLife’s slogan. It’s been a gross summer, as it likely will be next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. At this rate, it may soon be weird not to wear one.

The longer I wear my neck fan, the easier it is to imagine a future in which neck fans are as much part of the summer as sunglasses and flip-flops. A future in which neck fans go the way of airpods—first ugly, then ubiquitous. The promise of the neck fan is that you can always be just a button away from your own personal microclimate. That even though many Americans already shuffle between air-conditioned homes, air-conditioned cars, and air-conditioned offices, the answer to extreme heat is to buy something like wearable AC for those pesky moments when you still have to be outside.

But even AC is an insufficient solution for 13 straight monthly heat records, 129-degree temps, and pavement hot enough to give you third-degree burns. Meanwhile, the neck fan is about as high-tech as a microwave or a beard trimmer. The model I have has one button that powers it on and toggles between three speeds. (Thankfully, the fans are bladeless, presumably so they won’t accidentally give you a shave.) You plug the fan in to recharge it. You can get neck fans with “AI mode”—whatever that means—and $200 ones with special thermal cooling chips, but for the most part, they are cheap products from such esteemed brands as FrSara, OLV, Penkou, and Jmostrg.

In other words, neck fans are just more electronic junk—the kind that litters e-commerce sites such as Temu and TikTok Shop and is hawked online by influencers. That’s how neck fans first began to take off to such a degree that even Wirecutter decided to review them. “I saw a Twitter video that said the neck fan was cooler than an air conditioner and thought, This is utter nonsense—this is the stupidest thing,” Thom Dunn, who wrote the site’s guide, told me. “Why did 4 million people watch this?”

[Read: The junk is winning]

It is pretty stupid, scientifically speaking. “These devices will almost certainly have no impact on actual body core temperature,” Chris Tyler, a researcher at the University of Roehampton, in London, who has studied the relationship between the neck and heat regulation, told me in an email. A neck fan “will probably make people FEEL cooler but won’t make them any cooler,” he said. When the temperature isn’t hot enough to be truly risky, though, feeling better counts for something. At the lowest setting, my JisuLife is useless, even in pretty mild heat. But spending an hour outside at 90 degrees became more tolerable with my neck fan cranked all the way up—which I came to realize only when the device ran out of battery and whirred to a stop.

That extra bit of comfort has proved alluring. Dunn eventually came around: The Wirecutter guide calls the devices “more pleasant than you’d expect.” Leo Chen, the head of marketing at JisuLife, told me that the company has sold $40 million worth of neck fans in the United States so far this year—already double that of last year. As of this spring, you can buy JisuLife neck fans at Costco, CVS, Best Buy, and Tractor Supply. Another brand, Torras, sells luxe iterations, with cooling and heating options, that are available at Home Depot and Lowe’s—and has partnered with the Dallas Mavericks to promote the device. As Dunn told me, “Neck fans are the perfect serendipity of global warming and global markets.”

Lots of other devices have a similar promise: It is hot, and technology can help. There are stylish handheld fans (Drake has even used one), belt fans that puff out your shirt and make you look like the Michelin man, and an e-watch that promises to be “your personal thermostat.” Sony sells a V-neck undershirt that also functions as a personal AC. Perhaps extreme heat is destined to change how we interact with technology. You may not need Ray-Ban smart glasses or a combination air fryer and an Instant Pot, but you may eventually need a heat gadget.

Perhaps the best use for a neck fan isn’t what is billed on all the product listings. One night last week, I came home from work and plopped down in front of the TV. Out of a mix of laziness and frugalness, I resisted the impulse to reach for the AC remote and instead slung on my neck fan. Cool and comfortable, I turned on a mindless Netflix reality show, and settled into the couch. A few minutes in, the camera panned to one of the main characters. She was wearing a neck fan.

A Fancy Card Is Becoming the Only Way to Get a Restaurant Reservation

2024-07-01T15:13:58-04:00

The cocktail is $21, and it is absolutely worth it. Or at least that is what I’ve heard about a certain gussied-up old-fashioned that keeps making the rounds on my Instagram. Rum is infused with rose petals, ginger, and a smattering of other Indian spices and then mixed with orange juice and whole milk. The dairy curdles and is strained out drip-by-drip until the final clarified liquid is as clear as glass—a recipe that took two months to develop and requires 36 hours of preparation. After all that, it’s served on top of an ice cube stamped with the name of the restaurant that sells it: Bungalow.

For weeks I’ve been trying and failing to get a reservation at the buzzy Lower Manhattan Indian restaurant. The problem is Resy. The reservation app never seems to have any open slots. New tables supposedly open up every day at 11 a.m. Eastern. Most days they are all taken within three minutes.

Such is the nature of restaurant reservations these days: It has never been easier to book a table, and it’s never been harder to actually find one. You can fire up apps such as Resy, Tock, SevenRooms, Yelp, and OpenTable and find plenty of openings at perfectly good, even great, restaurants. But getting a seat at the most sought-after spots, especially in major cities, has become hellish. In the days of phone reservations, tables might have been booked up weeks or months in advance at the most exclusive restaurants—but now the phenomenon plays out beyond just the Michelin-starred spots. Batches of new openings can disappear before you have the time to click and confirm—perhaps snatched up by bots or scalpers. One student at Brown has reportedly made $70,000 by hawking reservations between classes.

But with the right credit card, you have a better shot. Resy, which is owned by American Express, keeps certain tables open for the Platinum crowd, and leapfrogs such cardholders to the front of waiting lists. Apparently one reservation app wasn’t enough. Last month, American Express announced that it was shelling out $400 million for Tock, a Resy competitor used by some 7,000 restaurants, bars, and wineries worldwide. The goal is to connect “even more premium customers with the most exciting restaurants,” Howard Grosfield, an American Express executive, said in the company’s press release. In all likelihood, a fancy credit card is about to matter even more in the reservation wars. For an entire set of in-demand spots, a card isn’t just for paying the bill: It’s something like an entry ticket in its own right.

Reservations, once free, have been financialized. If you want to eat at the best spots, you’ll fork over $695 annually for Amex Platinum, buying access to exclusive reservations—roughly equivalent to how you largely need a fancy card to get into an airport lounge. Every day, Bungalow’s Resy page sees about 1,500 people vying for a spot, Jimmy Rizvi, a co-owner of the restaurant, told me. American Express withholds a few tables for its elite customers, and in return comps Bungalow the nearly $500 monthly fee to use Resy. “And it benefits us that we get a clientele of big spenders,” Rizvi said.

[Read: The one place in airports people actually want to be]

Amex is not the lone credit-card giant to figure out that there is money to be made off reservations: JPMorgan Chase owns the restaurant-review site The Infatuation, through which it offers exclusive reservations and hosts ultra-luxe food events just for its Sapphire Reserve members. And Capital One has its own reservation platform, offering spots at hundreds of restaurants.

When it works, parlaying a card into a reservation can feel great, like a cheat code. Or like you’re a celebrity who can get a table anywhere, any night. But eventually, the reservation wars will make losers of us all. If you’ve been to an airport lounge of late, did you struggle to find a free outlet to charge your phone? Was the buffet line long enough that you skipped out on complementary yogurt parfait and breakfast potatoes? The metal credit cards with eye-watering annual fees have become so popular that the lounges are no longer a respite from the crowds in Terminal 2. Something similar is already happening with restaurants. The exclusive privileges are no longer, well, exclusive. So many people want in on reservations that even the proud owners of an Amex Black card, with its $10,000 initial charge and $5,000 annual fee, don’t have a great shot. In 2022, when Resy hosted the Copenhagen restaurant Noma for a five-night pop-up in Brooklyn, only certain American Express card owners had even the opportunity to buy tickets for $700 a pop. They still sold out instantly and generated a waitlist of 20,000 people.

The same process plays out again and again. Reservations to the cool spots quickly disappear on the apps, which makes them more desirable, which makes the next batch of slots disappear even quicker. As Amanda Mull wrote in The Atlantic, “Resy has effectively become a one-stop shop for securing the kind of restaurant experience that people want to brag about to their friends … It is a digital velvet rope, showing diners in no uncertain terms which places are hopelessly mobbed.”

Things are the same on Tock. Although the platform is smaller than Resy, it has some of the most in-demand spots. That includes Alinea, the Chicago fine-dining mecca with a tasting menu that has included edible green-apple balloons and a dessert course in which chefs paint on your table with Jackson Pollock–like strokes. (The restaurant’s co-founder Nick Kokonas also started Tock.) You’ll also find reservations for both Atomix and SingleThread—the only two restaurants in the U.S. currently ranked among the world’s 50 best. As The New York Times once put it, “OpenTable is economy. Resy is premium economy. Tock is business class.”

[Read: Nothing is cooler than going out to dinner]

Sure, trying and failing to nab a reservation is literally a champagne problem—pity the poor soul who can’t splurge on dinner and a bottle of Dom Perignon Brut. But consider the bigger picture: Must every aspect of life be subject to some form of digital arbitrage? Dating apps are full of schemes to make you pay up. Airbnb is basically just as expensive and corporatized as actual hotels. An Amazon search result will pull up reams of stealthy sponsored listings. Now even restaurant reservations are a commodity—vacuumed up by bots and scalpers looking to sell. As a last attempt to find my way to Bungalow and its $21 cocktail, I closed out Resy and opened up another site: Appointment Trader. Someone had managed to land a table for two for Tuesday evening, and it could be mine for the low price of $175. “Bots are the biggest problem we have,” Rizvi said, snatching up about 8 percent of all reservations at Bungalow. When they aren’t sold, the table might sit empty. One New York steakhouse with an especially bad bot problem reportedly has lost $10,000 in one night from cancellations and no-shows.

I had to ask Rizvi: Any tips on getting a table? All of the reservations, all of the fancy cards, all of the people clogging up the waiting list—“it’s a good problem to have,” he said. “But we are getting bad reviews as well from people who are not able to make the reservation.” So right at opening time, Bungalow saves a few tables for the lone style of dining impervious to this madness: walk-ins.

The Deepfake Crisis That Didn’t Happen

2024-06-07T15:59:00-04:00

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

Presidential elections in the United States are prolonged, chaotic, and torturous. (Please, not another election needle …) But they don’t come close to rivaling what happens in India. The country’s latest national election—which wrapped up this week with the reelection of Prime Minister Narendra Modi—was a logistical nightmare, as it always is. To set up polling booths in even the most rural of areas, Indian election officials hiked mountains, crossed rivers, and huddled into helicopters (or sometimes all three). More than 600 million voters cast ballots over the course of six weeks.

To add to the chaos, this year voters were deluged with synthetic media. As Nilesh Christopher reported this week, “The country has endured voice clones, convincing fake videos of dead politicians endorsing candidates, automated phone calls addressing voters by name, and AI-generated songs and memes lionizing candidates and ridiculing opponents.” But while experts in India had fretted about an AI misinformation crisis made possible by cheap, easy-to-use AI tools, that didn’t exactly materialize. Lots of deepfakes were easily debunked, if they were convincing at all. “You might need only one truly believable deepfake to stir up violence or defame a political rival,” Christopher notes, “but ostensibly, none of the ones in India has seemed to have had that effect.”

Instead, generative AI has become just another tool for politicians to get out their messages, largely through personalized robocalls and social-media memes. In other words, politicians deepfaked themselves. The point isn’t necessarily to deceive: Modi retweeted an obviously AI-generated clip of himself dancing to a Bollywood song. It’s an eye-opening lesson for the U.S. and other countries barreling toward elections of their own. For all the concern about reality-warping deepfakes, Christopher writes, “India foreshadows a different, stranger future.”

— Saahil Desai, supervisory senior associate editor

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani

The Near Future of Deepfakes Just Got Way Clearer

By Nilesh Christopher

Throughout this election cycle—which ended yesterday in a victory for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party after six weeks of voting and more than 640 million ballots cast—Indians have been bombarded with synthetic media. The country has endured voice clones, convincing fake videos of dead politicians endorsing candidates, automated phone calls addressing voters by name, and AI-generated songs and memes lionizing candidates and ridiculing opponents. But for all the concern over how generative AI and deepfakes are a looming “atomic bomb” that will warp reality and alter voter preferences, India foreshadows a different, stranger future.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

ElevenLabs is building an army of voice clones. Last month, my colleague Charlie Warzel profiled an AI-audio company that has been implicated in deepfakes. “I tested the tool to see how convincingly it could replicate my voice saying outrageous things,” he writes. “Soon, I had high-quality audio of my voice clone urging people not to vote, blaming ‘the globalists’ for COVID, and confessing to all kinds of journalistic malpractice. It was enough to make me check with my bank to make sure any potential voice-authentication features were disabled.”

P.S.

If you need another sign of how targeted ads are coming for everything, behold: “Costco is building out an ad business using its shoppers’ data.” The wholesale giant will soon personalize ads based on its customers’ shopping habits—joining Venmo, Uber, Marriott, and a slew of other companies. “What isn’t an ad these days?” Kate Lindsay wrote in The Atlantic earlier this year.

— Saahil

The IRS Finally Has an Answer to TurboTax

2024-03-20T13:54:41-04:00

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

The program is not TurboTax, or any one of its many competitors that will give you the white-glove treatment only after you pony up. It is Direct File, a new pilot program made by the IRS. It walks you through each step in mostly simple language (in English or Spanish, on your phone or laptop), automatically saves your progress, shows you a checklist of what you have left to do, flags potential errors, and calculates your return. These features are already part of TurboTax, but Direct File will not push you to an AI chatbot that flubs basic questions. And most crucial, it’s completely free.

That Direct File exists at all is shocking. That it’s pretty good is borderline miraculous. This is the same agency that processes your tax return in a 60-something-year-old programming language and uses software that is up to 15 versions out of date. The only sure thing in life, after death and taxes, is that the government is bad at technology. Remember the healthcare.gov debacle? Nearly 3 million people visited the site on the day it launched in 2013; only six people were actually able to register for insurance. As of the end of last year, about half of .gov websites are still not mobile friendly.

Direct File isn’t perfect—the program is available in only 12 states, and it isn’t able to handle anything beyond the simplest tax situations—but it’s a glimpse of a world where government tech benefits millions of Americans. In turn, it is also an agonizing realization of how far we are from that reality.

Right now, Direct File is sort of akin to when Facebook (or rather TheFacebook) was a site for Harvard students run out of Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room: Most people can’t use it, and the product is still a work in progress. The IRS has strategically taken things slowly with Direct File. In part to avoid the risk of glitches, it officially launched just last week, well into tax season, and with many restrictions. Only midway through my own Direct File journey did I realize that I owed some taxes on a retirement account, and thus couldn’t actually file on the site. I then sheepishly logged in to TurboTax like a teenager crawling back to their ex; for now, it offers a more seamless experience than Direct File. Unlike on the IRS program, I could upload a picture of my W-2, and TurboTax immediately did the rest for me.

For many years, taxpayer advocates have dreamed of a free government tax portal, similar to websites where you pay parking tickets and renew your driver’s license. Computers and taxes are made for each other: Even as far back as 1991, when most Americans didn’t own a computer, you could have found at least 15 different kinds of private tax software. Lots of other countries, such as Japan, Germany, and New Zealand, already have their own government-run tax sites. According to a distressing New York Times report, Estonians can file online in less than three minutes.

Sure, America’s tax code—unlike Estonia’s!—is an alphabet soup of regulations, but the multibillion-dollar tax-prep industry has also gone to great lengths to stop Americans from filing their taxes for free. After all, why would anyone pay TurboTax upwards of $200 to file if they didn’t have to? (Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax, has an answer: “Filing taxes without someone advocating for your highest refund could be a recipe for overpaying the Internal Revenue Service and [state] departments of revenue, organizations with titles that clearly state their focus, generating revenue for the government,” Rick Heineman, an Intuit spokesperson, told me.)

[Read: The golden age of rich people not paying their taxes]

In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act shook loose $15 million for the IRS to study the feasibility of creating its own program—and so began Direct File. The program could have been contracted out, as much of the government’s technology is. (The original, disastrous healthcare.gov was the end result of 60 contracts involving 33 outside vendors.) Instead it was made almost entirely by the government’s own programmers, product managers, and designers, Bridget Roberts, the head of the Direct File team, told me.

Engineers created a prototype by mapping out the tax code into a series of steps: The software has to know that a millionaire homeowner doesn’t need to see any of the questions that apply only to low-income renters, for example. Then designers tested language to make sure that taxpayers could easily understand it. “We were going through constant user research—putting pieces of Direct File in front of taxpayers and getting their feedback,” Roberts said. Early guinea pigs were asked to screen-share while they tested Direct File. “That way, if there were any bugs, we would fix them before we moved on,” she said. It all sounds more Sam Altman than Uncle Sam.

The government could not have made something like this even 10 years ago. Unlike in the pre-healthcare.gov days, “now there is a generation of civic-tech innovators who want to go into government or want to work with the government,” Donald Moynihan, a public-policy professor at Georgetown, told me. In the past decade, attention given to the government’s technological deficiencies has led to the creation of agencies such as the United States Digital Service and 18F—both of which hire tech workers for temporary stints in the public sector. Other agencies, such as Veterans Affairs, have hired more than 1,000 of their own tech workers. The salaries are nowhere near as good as in Silicon Valley, but surely a government gig can be more fulfilling than tinkering with the user experience for Instagram share buttons all day. Amid the tech layoffs in 2023, the government launched a tech-jobs board and endeavored to hire 22,000 tech workers. Last month, the federal government began pushing to hire AI talent by boosting salaries and introducing incentives such as student-loan repayment.

[Read: Why is there financing for everything now?]

That is how you get something like Direct File. Both the USDS and 18F, Roberts said, were brought in to help create the product, working alongside IRS engineers. There have been other successes from these groups too. Consider COVIDtests.gov, where until recently you could order free tests in basically a minute. Or my personal favorite, analytics.usa.gov, where you can monitor how much traffic government sites are getting. (In the past week, it shows, Direct File has gotten nearly 450,000 clicks.) Many .gov websites, although not necessarily wonderful, no longer feel like they’re a time portal to 1999.

But the work has been halting, at best. The more I played around with Direct File, the more frustrated I grew that there isn’t more government technology like it. Certain websites have gotten a facelift, but most of the government’s digital services lag behind: Some state unemployment systems still run on outdated, buggy portals and mainframe computers that crashed during the pandemic, delaying much-needed checks. Last year, a glitch in the Federal Aviation Administration’s 30-year-old computer system grounded thousands of flights and caused the first nationwide stop on air travel since 9/11. “Another healthcare.gov could happen today,” Mikey Dickerson, a former administrator of the United States Digital Service, told me. In fact, a similar debacle is happening right now: The Department of Education’s attempt to revamp its financial-aid form led to dire glitches that have upended the entire college-admissions cycle.

Ultimately, the fundamental reasons the government is bad at tech haven’t changed much. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy, Dickerson told me: Too often, the government operates under a model of collecting a list of everything it wants in a tech product—a months-long endeavor in itself—enlisting a company that can check them all off, and then testing it only when basically all the code has been written. The government is “not capable of keeping up with the crushing wave of complex systems that are becoming more and more obsolete,” he said. Hiring processes remain a problem too. Because the government doesn’t have a good way to evaluate a candidate’s technical skills, it can take nine months or longer to wade through the applicant pool and make a hire, Jen Pahlka, the author of Recoding America, told me. “There’s more people who want to work in government than we can absorb,” she said.

Everything had to go right to unleash Direct File. Congress set aside money. Programmers created something from scratch instead of revamping an online service built on outdated code. All to build the government’s own TurboTax—a long-heralded dream for some of the Leslie Knope types who work in civic tech. But even now, after all this work, the future of Direct File is in doubt. The IRS has not committed to anything beyond this year, and that Americans will clamor for Direct File next spring is not a given: By one measure, Direct File’s total employees are outnumbered by just the lobbyists working for Intuit.

And so, Direct File is the essence of government tech right now—a work in progress. “Increasingly, the face of government is digital,” Moynihan said. “We mostly see government on our phones and laptops, as opposed to going to an office somewhere or calling someone on a phone.” The dream of tapping a button on my iPhone and chatting with the DMV, or the VA, or Medicare, is just that: a dream. But hey, at least until April 15, I still have IRS Representative-1004671045.

America’s Last Morse-Code Station

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

Photographs by Ann Hermes

“Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.” With that, in January 1997, the French coast guard transmitted its final message in Morse code. Ships in distress had radioed out dits and dahs from the era of the Titanic to the era of Titanic. In near-instant time, the beeps could be deciphered by Morse-code stations thousands of miles away. First used to send messages over land in 1844, Morse code outlived the telegraph age by becoming the lingua franca of the sea. But by the late 20th century, satellite radio was turning it into a dying language. In February 1999, it officially ceased being the standard for maritime communication.

Nestled within the Point Reyes National Seashore, north of San Francisco, KPH Maritime Radio is the last operational Morse-code radio station in North America. The station—which consists of two buildings some 25 miles apart—once watched over the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Both KPH sites shut down in 1997, but a few years later, a couple of radio enthusiasts brought them back to life. The crew has gotten slightly larger over the years. Its members call themselves the “radio squirrels.” Every Saturday, they beep out maritime news and weather reports, and receive any stray messages. Much of their communication is with the SS Jeremiah O’Brien, a World War II–era ship permanently parked at a San Francisco pier.

Last July, the photographer Ann Hermes visited the radio squirrels and stepped into their time machine. To send a message, they tapped each Morse-code letter into a gadget called a “bug,” generating a loud, staticky noise that reverberated throughout the whole building. “It’s almost like jazz,” Hermes told me—a music of rhythm and timing that can sound slightly different depending on who is doing the tapping.

Some of the hulking machines date back to World War II. The squirrels do their own repairs, and scrounge eBay for replacement parts on the newer units. To honor the station’s past, the volunteers start each Saturday morning with “services” for “The Church of the Continuous Wave,” in which they eat breakfast off vintage plates branded with the Radio Corporation of America’s old logo.

Morse code is not quite extinct: The U.S. Navy still teaches it to a few sailors, and in 2017, a British man who had broken his leg on a beach used it to signal for help in the dark with a flashlight. Many of the radio squirrels are retired or nearing retirement. But when Hermes visited over the summer, she spotted one 17-year-old hovering around the squirrels in action. Born after the effective end of Morse code, he was nonetheless eager to help keep the jazz going.

This article appears in the April 2024 print edition with the headline “The Radio Squirrels of Point Reyes.”

The Barcode Engineered Its Own Downfall

2024-01-11T07:00:00-05:00

To marvel at the choice and convenience of modern shopping, go visit your grocery-store mustard aisle. My local Whole Foods sells more than 20 different kinds: basic yellow mustard and Grey Poupon, yes, but also “spicy brown mustard” and “banana-pepper mustard” and “no-sugar-added honey mustard” and “organic salt-free mustard.” There is “uniquely sharp mustard”(!), and “sulfite-free original Dijon mustard squeeze”(!?).

Such dizzying choices are made possible by an amazing piece of technology: the barcode. These black-and-white lines are machine-speak for an item’s Universal Product Code, which allows a scanner to tell you exactly what the item is, and draw up its price in any given store. The barcode is why a cashier can quickly scan your stuff, shove it into a bag, and hand you a receipt (and how self-checkout kiosks are able to make you do all the work). And because the barcode allows for incredible efficiency in tracking and managing inventory, it is a large part of why grocery stores now have a paralyzing number of options. Around the time the barcode debuted, in 1974, supermarkets stocked an average of 9,000 products. Today, you will find more than 30,000.

In this half century, the barcode has become the plumbing of global capitalism—revolutionary, pervasive, forgettable. More kinds of scannable codes have arrived since the ’70s, but the linear UPC barcode is on the packaging of most consumer products you get from every store, grocery or otherwise, brick-and-mortar or online. It is among the greatest, most consequential inventions in American history. How did we get stadium-size supermarkets, Costcos, and Amazon? “The barcode has to be there at the beginning,” Timothy Simcoe, an economist at Boston University who has studied the technology, told me. Barcodes are on books, TVs, wine bottles, spatulas, and underwear. There are barcode tattoos, barcode conspiracy theories, barcode presidential scandals, and buildings on four continents designed to resemble barcodes.

Basically nothing about the symbol itself has changed in 50 years. Look at the first barcode, from a 67-cent pack of Wrigley’s gum: It doesn’t seem outdated, because it isn’t outdated. Scanners have gotten cheaper and better, but the barcode is still the barcode is still the barcode. At least, it is for now. After all this time, the barcode’s success in building an America that crams its stores and warehouses with an ever-expanding pile of stuff might finally be its own undoing.

If the sound of the barcode era is beep, the sound of the era that preceded it was click. Every product once needed a literal sticker price, which was stamped into place. “In those days, we were kind of like Western gunmen,” Norman Mayne, the CEO of Ohio’s Dorothy Lane Market since 1967, told me. “We had our price stamper on our hip as if that was our six-shooter.” Without a code to scan, a hardware store would have to manually log every single wrench, paint can, and tape measure coming and leaving through its doors. A bookstore might not have an up-to-date sense of which titles were selling and which weren’t. Grocery stores had it especially rough; the checkout counter often turned into a traffic jam. A cashier adept at swiftly keying in prices was so valued that, in 1964, the winner of the International Checker of the Year Award was given a trip to Hawaii and a mink stole.

In the early 1970s, grocery execs came together to figure out a better way. First, they conceived of a standard 12-digit Universal Product Code tied to every product, sort of like a phone number that would ring up not a person, but cans of Campbell’s chicken-noodle soup. Then they picked a slate of companies to figure out some way for machines to read it. The barcode had to be virtually fail-proof, to avoid a scanner reading one product as another. It had to be simple, so that even a cashier in training could quickly run it over a scanner at any angle. It had to be tiny, to fit on even the smallest items. It had to be easily and cheaply printable, so barcoding every item wouldn’t cost a fortune.

It was October 20, 1949 and IBM inventor N. Joseph Woodland applied for the first patent on bar code technology.

It was not until 1973 the grocery industry’s task force settled on a standard of IBM’s approach for the UPC Code.

RCA and Litton was under close consideration. pic.twitter.com/NEjEU6UGtD
— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) September 22, 2020

If talks had gone just a bit differently, we might have ended up in a world with a “sun” barcode on every deodorant stick and cereal box, or maybe RCA’s round one, which had already been piloted at a Kroger in Kenwood, Ohio. “We came extremely close to ending up with the RCA ‘bullseye’ barcode,” Jordan Frith, a Clemson professor and the author of Barcode, told me. “It came down to the last day.” In 1973, the committee went out to an adult theater to watch Deep Throat (I’m serious), and soon made their decision: IBM’s rectangular, zebra-striped barcode. One symbol to rule them all.

The barcode is deceptively simple by design. The black-and-white stripes of varying thickness represent the numbers in a UPC code. Point a laser at the barcode, and light will reflect back from the white lines, but not the black ones, turning into 0s and 1s on a computer. In that split-second beep, a machine knows that the first chunk of those 12 digits is the manufacturer’s code, whereas the second half points to the specific product—sulfite-free dijon, not the plain dijon or the dijon laced with Mike’s Hot Honey. From the beginning, the design was basically perfect. “We got very, very few errors,” Paul McEnroe, an engineer on the IBM barcode team and the author of The Barcode (which is a different book from Barcode), told me. At the company’s barcode lab in North Carolina, an IBM vice president picked up a pack of cigarettes with a barcode, McEnroe said, “and threw it across the checkout stand. It bounced as it passed across the top of the table, over the scanner window, spinning. And the damn thing—it read it.”

The UPC barcode was only ever supposed to be confined to the grocery industry, and it nearly didn’t make it to that. Fears that the symbol’s spread would automate workers out of their jobs led unions to wage a decades-long war against it. Even some of the people who developed the barcode predicted that fewer than 10,000 companies would ever use it. Over time, convenience won out. Now more than 10,000 UPC barcodes are scanned every second. “Think of the barcode as the Rosetta stone of the 20th century,” Mark Cohen, a retailing professor at Columbia Business School, told me. “Thousands of years from now, some archaeologist is going to uncover the barcode, and it will be revealed to be the first step in digitizing information.”

It set off a Cambrian explosion in the products on America’s shelves, abetting the creation of megastores and ultrafast supply chains. The wonders of modern shopping are downstream from the barcode, and so are its worst excesses: mindless consumerism, wasteful junk, corporate dominance. Bigger companies were quicker to pay up for expensive scanners, which allowed them to move even more efficiently and wring out profits that mom-and-pop stores couldn’t.

The barcode also unleashed many more kinds of barcodes, including siblings of the original with more lines representing more numbers and letters, and distant cousins that look nothing like it. Different industries have their own symbols, and sometimes so do different companies. The U.S. Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS all use different symbols to track a product's journey to your doorstep. One barcode descendant in particular has risen to prominence in recent years: the QR code. That is where the trouble starts.

Though at first something of a dud, QR codes have come to adorn restaurant menus, installation guides, TV ads, and so many other things. The square black-and-white patches act as physical links to the internet; point your smartphone at one, and it will pull up a webpage. But depending on how they’re set up, the codes are also capable of functioning in the same way as the original barcode: storing information about products and scanning with a beep at the register. The difference is that QR codes can store much, much more information. A traditional barcode conjures an item and its price. A QR code, when used as a barcode, can additionally identify an item’s expiration date, when and where it was made, and many more little bits of data.

The powers of a QR code are appealing to pretty much any brand that makes consumer products, and any store that sells them. If just two jugs of milk on the dairy shelf are days away from expiring, a store could use QR codes to automatically slash their price and get them out the door. A listeria outbreak might be easier to corral by pinpointing the specific ice-cream pints that are affected. A drug store can immediately know whether tubes of whitening toothpaste on a special display near the entrance outsell the same tubes on a shelf in the back.

Then consider us shoppers. Pointing your phone at a QR code could “unlock an experience the manufacturer wants to take you on,” Carrie Wilkie, the senior vice president of standards and technology at GS1 US, a not-for-profit that is sort of like the government of barcodes, told me. Download your grocery store’s app and type in that you have a peanut allergy, and you could get a pop-up if something you scan has even trace amounts of peanuts. Perhaps you might scan a pair of selvedge jeans and decide they’re not worth $200, then later receive an email giving you 15 percent off. Loyalty points, coupons, clothing tags, warranty forms, back-of-the-box recipes, nutrition facts, and even interactive games—all of that is getting stuffed into the QR code.

The original barcode, for all its persistence, is finally falling behind in the world it helped create. “We’ve gotten a little bit comfortable with what the linear barcode can do for us without challenging what it can’t do,” Wilkie said. Anyone can make a QR code with just a few clicks, but only GS1 produces and oversees all QR codes that also work as barcodes. The design has such an advantage that, by the end of 2027, GS1 aims to allow companies to entirely replace the old zebra-striped barcode with a QR code on products. The barcode won’t formally be phased out, but it seems destined to disappear from price tags and packages as QR codes take over. After half a century, the reign of the barcode as we’ve known it will be over.

If the old barcode created modern shopping in all of its variety and excess, the new one is ushering in the next era—with its own pitfalls of data harvesting and hyper-targeting. Retailers “are very excited about the data that can be gleaned from having a more advanced barcode,” Phil Lempert, a retail-industry analyst, told me. A company such as Kroger can already see what items you buy on its website and share the data to generate ads on your Roku; with a QR code, items you scan in-store with your phone can conceivably be grist for targeted ads.

At the moment, much of the potential of the QR code is still mostly that—potential. Yes, the codes are already on some packaging, but almost none is a full-fledged barcode. In September, I dropped into the Manhattan-based flagship store of Puma, the first brand in America that has transitioned to QR codes for everything. (Per the present GS1 requirements, all Puma’s products still come with a traditional barcode as well, even if it isn’t scanned.) On the second floor, past the wall of basketball shoes, I found a $40 men’s T-shirt covered with Smurfs that had a price tag with both the UPC barcode and a QR code that read SCAN ME in the middle. When I pointed my phone at the QR code, and clicked a pop-up confirming that I was in the store, my phone loaded the page for the Smurfs shirt on Puma’s website. That was it. Perhaps if I’d wanted sneakers in a size that wasn’t in stock, I could have saved a few seconds, but really nothing about shopping in the store felt like the future.

It’s likely only a matter of time. Melissa Garbayo, a Puma spokesperson, told me that QR codes are already enabling a new degree of inventory management on the company’s back end, connecting to chips that can track the precise location of every item in the store. A few other brands have started to flirt with using QR codes as barcodes, but the new codes still mostly act as basic links. Scan a can of Pepsi’s Starry lemon-lime soda (though not other Pepsi products), and you’ll open up a webpage with nutrition and allergen information. It will probably be another year or more until many retailers truly embrace the QR code, Wilkie told me. The biggest brands are positioned to get there first, just like the original barcode’s earliest adopters. Several more companies are test-running the new barcode right now, she said, hammering out what the QR codes can actually do before we all start scanning them en masse.

When the barcode officially turns 50 this summer, it won’t get a national holiday in its honor or a grand parade down Fifth Avenue with floats in the shape of laser scanners. There is no statue of IBM’s barcode czar, George Laurer; no Halloween costume for Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, who patented the first barcode; no foundation named after Alan Haberman, who brought together the committee of grocery execs. Perhaps the humble barcode and its creators deserve such an honor. During the design process, IBM and every other company that vied for America’s symbol supremacy agreed to forgo profit and put the winning symbol in the public domain, part of “the greatest-ever example of industry cooperation with no government oversight,” Frith said.

Unlike its predecessor, the QR code is unlikely to ever reach the Mount Rushmore of inventions. It might not last 50 years, or even 10. New kinds of technology are far more advanced than the QR code. In 11 Amazon fulfillment centers, a spokesperson told me, a kind of artificial intelligence called “multimodal identification” can already “scan” items based on the shape and text on their packaging, no barcode needed. Still, the old barcode has one thing that the QR code, and Silicon Valley, cannot beat. It is so universally simple, and simply universal, that it may refuse to fully die. Two years after the first barcode scan, Businessweek was ready to call it a flop; when QR codes were invented in the ’90s, Frith told me, people predicted they would soon kill the barcode.

Even in the QR-code future, the barcode might still linger on certain items, both old and new—in the 2030s, ’40s, and probably for the rest of your life. A barcode that becomes a bit more invisible in daily life might be one that is also more visible when it actually appears on a product. Maybe then the barcode will finally get its due.

Electric Cars Are Already Upending America

2023-12-29T06:30:00-05:00

One day in late November, I cradled a red Samsung flip phone in my hands as if it was a ruby gemstone. To me, it was just as precious. Deep inside an overstuffed dresser in my childhood bedroom, I had spotted the glint of my first-ever cellphone, a Samsung SGH-A707 purchased in the waning days of the George W. Bush presidency. The device, no bigger than a credit card, had long ago succumbed to the spider web of cracks on its screen. For a moment, I was brought back to life before the smartphone, clicking the phone’s plastic keys for the first time in more than a decade.

This device, and every other phone like it, of course, was made obsolete by the touchscreen slabs now in all of our pockets. Perhaps you have heard that we are now on the cusp of another iPhone moment—the rise of a new technology that changes the world. No, not that one. Despite the post-ChatGPT frenzy, artificial intelligence has so far been defined more by speculative hype than actual substance. Does anyone really want “AI-powered” smoothies, sports commentary, or roller skates? Assuming the bots don’t wipe out humanity, maybe AI will take the jobs of high-school teachers, coders, lawyers, fast-food workers, customer-service agents, writers, and graphic designers—but right now, ChatGPT is telling me that Cybertruck has 11 letters. There’s a long way to go.

Meanwhile, electric cars are already upending America. In 2023, our battery-powered future became so much more real—a boom in sales and new models is finally starting to push us into the post-gas age. Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million of them in 2023, according to a forecast by BloombergNEF, about the same number sold from 2016 to 2021 total. “This was the year that EVs went from experiments, or technological demonstrations, and became mature vehicles,” Gil Tal, the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, told me. They are beginning to transform not just the automotive industry, but also the very meaning of a car itself.

If the story of American EVs has long hinged on one company—Tesla—then this was the year that these cars became untethered from Elon Musk’s brand. “We’re at a point where EVs aren’t necessarily exclusively for the upper, upper, upper class,” Robby DeGraff, an analyst at the market-research firm AutoPacific, told me. If you wanted an electric car five years ago, you could choose from among various Tesla models, the Chevy Bolt, the Nissan Leaf—and that was really it. Now EVs come in more makes and models than Baskin-Robbins ice-cream flavors. We have more luxury sedans to vie with Tesla, but also cheaper five-seaters, SUVs, Hummers, pickup trucks, and … however you might categorize the Cybertruck. Nearly 40 new EVs have debuted since the start of 2022, and they are far more advanced than their ancestors. For $40,000, the Hyundai Ioniq 6, released this year, can get you 360 miles on a single charge; in 2018, for only a slightly lower cost, a Nissan Leaf couldn’t go half that distance.

[Read: Admit it, the Cybertruck is awesome]

All of these EVs are genuinely great for the planet, spewing zero carbon from their tailpipes, but that’s only a small part of what makes them different. In the EV age, cars are no longer just cars. They are computers. Stripping out a gas engine, transmission, and 100-plus moving parts turns a vehicle into something more digital than analog—sort of like how typing on an iPhone keyboard is different than on my clackety old Samsung flip phone. “It’s the software that is really the heart of an EV,” DeGraff said—it runs the motors, calculates how many miles are left on a charge, optimizes the brakes, and much more.

Just like with other gadgets that bug you about software updates, all of this firmware can be updated over Wi-Fi while a car charges overnight. Rivian has updated its software to add a “Sand Mode” that can enhance its cars’ driving ability on dusty terrain. Many new cars are getting stuffed with technology—a new gas-powered Mercedes-Benz E-Class comes with TikTok integration and a selfie stick—but EVs are capable of more significant updates. A gas car is never going to meaningfully get more miles per gallon, but one such update from Tesla in 2020 increased the range on its Model X car from 328 to 351 miles after the company found ways to wring more efficiency out of its internal parts. And because EVs all drive basically the same, tech is a bigger part of the sell. Instead of idly passing the time while an EV recharges, you can now use a car’s infotainment system to Zoom into a meeting, play Grand Theft Auto, and stream Amazon Prime.

The million-plus new EVs on the road are ushering in a fundamental, maybe existential, change in how to even think about cars—no longer as machines, but as gadgets that plug in and charge like all the others in our life. The wonderful things about computers are coming to cars, and so are the terrible ones: apps that crash. Subscription hell. Cyberattacks. There are new problems to contend with too: In Tesla’s case, its “Autopilot” software has been implicated in fatal crashes. (It was the subject of a massive recall earlier this month that required an over-the-air update.) You now might scroll on your phone in bed, commute in your EV, and log into your work laptop, all of which are powered by processors that are constantly bugging you to update them.

[Read: The end of manual transmission]

If cars are gadgets now, then carmakers are also now tech companies. An industry that has spent a century perfecting the internal combustion engine must now manufacture lithium-ion batteries and write the code to govern them. Imagine if a dentist had to pivot from filling cavities to performing open-heart surgery, and that’s roughly what’s going on here. “The transition to EVs is completely changing everything,” Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. “It’s changing the people that automotive companies have to hire and their skills. It’s changing their suppliers, their factories, how they assemble and build them. And lots of automakers are struggling with that.”

Take the batteries. To manufacture battery cells powerful enough for a car is so phenomenally expensive and arduous that Toyota is pumping nearly $14 billion into a single battery plant in North Carolina. To create software-enabled cars, you need software engineers, and car companies cannot get enough of them. (Perhaps no other industry has benefited the most from Silicon Valley’s year of layoffs.) At the very low end, estimates Sam Abuelsamid, a transportation analyst at Guidehouse Insights, upwards of 10,000 “software engineers, interface designers, networking engineers, data center experts and silicon engineers have been hired by automakers and suppliers in recent years.” The tech wars can sometimes verge on farce: One former Apple executive runs Ford’s customer-software team, while another runs GM’s.

At every level, the auto industry is facing the type of headache-inducing questions about job losses and employment that still feels many years away with AI. “There’s a new skill set we’re going to need, and I don’t think I can teach everyone—it will take too much time,” Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, said in May. “So there is going to be disruption in this transition.” Job cuts are already happening, and more may come—even after the massive autoworker strike this year that largely hinged on electrification. Such a big financial investment is needed to electrify the car industry that from July to September, Ford lost $60,000 for every EV it sold. Or peel back one more onion layer to car dealerships: Tesla, Rivian, and other EV companies are selling directly to consumers, cutting them out. EVs also require little service compared with gas vehicles, a reality that has upset many dealers, who could lose their biggest source of profit. None of this is the future. It is happening right now.

But if EVs are having an “iPhone moment,” we are still in the days when a few early adopters had the clunky, OG version. Most cars you see are a decade old; for all these EV sales, just 1 percent of cars on the road are all-electric. Even if we hit President Joe Biden’s EV target of 50 percent of sales by 2030, the sheer life span of cars will mean that gas vehicles will still greatly outnumber electric ones by then. Gas stations are not closing. Parking garages are not buckling under the weight of EVs and their hefty batteries. Electric cars remain too expensive, and they are limited by janky public chargers that are too slow, assuming they work at all. If you don’t have a house where you can install your own plug, EVs are still mostly just unrealistic. Most alarming might be the politics that surround them: Donald Trump and lots of other Republicans are vowing to stymie their growth. Carmakers are not even hiding that next year’s election might lead them to reconsider their EV plans.

Even so, the transition is not slowing down. Next year, America should hit 1.9 million EV sales, Corey Cantor, an EV analyst at BloombergNEF, told me. Another burst of models is coming: A retro-futuristic Volkswagen van! A Cadillac Escalade with a 55-inch touchscreen! A tiny Fiat 500e for just $30,000! And yes, they are succumbing a bit to hype themselves. In June, Mercedes’s infotainment screen got an optional update. Now you can talk to it through a chatbot.

This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.

America Before Pizza

2023-12-21T11:57:00-05:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.

Consider—just for one terrible, stressful, bleak moment—if our forebearers in Naples had never invented pizza. No perfectly charred Margherita pies, no late-night Domino’s delivery, nothing. To the pizza-deprived, the world’s most beloved food probably wouldn’t sound all that special. What’s so great about the combo of bread, cheese, and sauce, after all? The alchemy among the three creates something that is so much greater than the sum of its parts—but I don’t have to tell you that, thankfully.

In 1949, the writer Ora Dodd had a much tougher challenge. In her story for The Atlantic, simply titled “Pizza,” Dodd sought to introduce Americans to a strange new food taking over Italian neighborhoods:

The waiter moves aside the glasses of red wine, and sets before you a king-sized open pie. It is piping hot; the brown crust holds a bubbling cheese-and-tomato filling. There is a wonderful savor of fresh bread, melted cheese, and herbs. This is a pizza, Italian for pie. There is a plural, pizze, but no one ever uses it, for pizza is a sociable dish, always intended to be shared. Two people order a small pizza, about a foot in diameter. A large pizza is twice that size. Don’t imagine an American pie blown up to about two feet, however; a pizza is a nearer relation to a pancake. It is very flat, made of raised bread dough, with the filling spread on top.

Dodd’s story is the closest you’ll ever feel to an alien hearing about pizza for the first time. How does the pizzaiolo stretch the dough? “He places this large flat pancake on his closed fist, like a floppy hat, and twirls it round and round. The elastic dough becomes thinner and thinner. A skilled pizza-maker knows exactly when to stop twirling: when the cake is at its thinnest, just before it breaks through.” What do you put on top of a freshly cooked pie? “Garlic and chopped orégano (wild marjoram) are the seasonings, used as the customer may request.”

At that point, when President Joe Biden was in grade school and The Atlantic was almost a century old, pizza was completely unfamiliar to the overwhelming majority of Americans. We began to evolve beyond the days of “orégano (wild marjoram)” only in the 1960s, when pizza became synonymous with takeout and delivery—a cheap, delicious, and customizable food for the masses. One pizza joint in Ypsilanti, Michigan, DomiNick’s, focused on delivering to nearby college students. In 1965, it changed its name to Domino’s, and within 24 years had ballooned into 5,000 locations. Now America’s love affair with the dish has reached such heights (some 3 billion pies are eaten each year) that imagining a time before pizza feels as unnerving as imagining New York without the subway or Paris without the Eiffel Tower. So much of the American diet has followed the same arc: Food we now eat all the time and take for granted probably wasn’t available even a few decades ago.

We all know that computer mainframes the size of rooms gave way to laptops and iPhones, but that same kind of “disruption” has also infiltrated our meals. Decades before the rise of pizza, spaghetti and meatballs—a dish that did not exist in Italy—became an American favorite. How that happened is one of the “few fundamental questions” that Corby Kummer explored in “Pasta,” an 11,000-word Atlantic cover story from 1986. (Bring back the one-word headlines!) In the early 1900s, new arrivals from Italy had limited access to some of the fruits and vegetables that went into dishes they’d slurped up back home. But they did have meat. So much meat. The meatball, born out of necessity, just made sense. Other American takes on Italian food from that era now sound revolting at best: Mushy pasta cooked in a sauce of canned tomato soup and Worcestershire sauce. One early recipe for baked ziti, Kummer writes, called for “one and a half pounds of meat, one pound of ricotta, a half pound of mozzarella, and two cups of white sauce for one pound of pasta.”

America’s changing tastes are because of immigration, yes, but also because of the grocery store. In the ’70s, the average supermarket stocked approximately 9,000 items. You might have found a few flavors of yogurt, if that. Now when you head to a supermarket, you can find 60,000 options and choose among blueberry, strawberry, and peach kefir. The modern grocery store is a triumph of science and technology. Why are brussels sprouts no longer a metaphor for stinky grossness? Partly because plant breeders figured out how to eliminate a compound that turned them bitter. Hear me out: American life is more delicious now that the Red Delicious apple has given way to the holy Honeycrisp.

Over the next 70 years, the food we eat will continue to change. Silicon Valley is on a quest to perfect the pizza robot, which could cook up a pie inside a truck while it’s on the way to your home. Maybe we will soon be eating more pawpaws, an enigmatic fruit native to the eastern United States and Canada that somehow tastes tropical, like a mix of mango, pineapple, and banana. Once an all-American favorite, the pawpaw disappeared from our diet because it’s hard to grow and ship—but now food scientists are working on a version that might survive a journey to Whole Foods. As my colleague Yasmin Tayag wrote last month, the fruit aisle is getting trippy—starting with yellow watermelon, pink pineapples, and white strawberries. In the future, we may eat more chickpeas. And MSG. And yerba mate. And … gluten-free pasta made of durian seeds.

Perhaps, actually, science has gone too far.

Admit It, the Cybertruck Is Awesome

2023-11-30T18:19:33-05:00

Of the many quirks of Elon Musk’s Cybertruck, the Cybertruckiest of them all might be this: its windshield wiper. Not wipers, wiper. Tesla’s electric pickup, which debuted today and starts at $61,000, has just a single gigantic rain-wicking blade—a monstrosity that stretches several feet and that Musk says is “like a katana.” (The original idea, laser-beam wipers, apparently didn’t work.)

Nothing about the wiper or, frankly, about the Cybertruck makes much sense. It is a subzero fridge on wheels, a chef’s knife that went on the supersize-me diet and gained thousands of pounds. Tesla’s long-awaited model, its first entirely new one in four years, has a bullet- and arrow-proof exoskeleton, but it apparently struggles to climb up a dirt hill. The car is capable of pulling “near infinite mass” (according to earlier Tesla marketing) and can “serve briefly as a boat” (according to Musk), but its angular design means that even tiny manufacturing flaws stick out “like a sore thumb” (again, according to Musk).

Frankly, it is an impractical meme car for an impractical meme CEO—the perfect vehicle for the edgelord X magnate. “This car is very amateurish,” Adrian Clarke, a former car designer for Land Rover and a writer for the Autopian, told me. But at least it’s different. Most other EVs can’t say as much, even though the electric age can and should be a chance to make cars not just harder, faster, stronger, and better, but also stranger.

Traditional cars have hulking grilles in the front, because the internal combustion engine gets very hot very quickly from all of the tiny explosions that power your car. You have to cram into the backseat in part because the transmission, drive shaft, fuel tank, exhaust systems, catalytic converter, and fuel injector take up so much space. EVs don’t have to deal with any of that: They have a huge battery (the Cybertruck’s primo “Cyberbeast” model has an estimated range of up to 320 miles) and a tiny motor splayed out on a flat “skateboard” beneath the car—and that’s basically it.

[Read: The one thing holding back electric vehicles in America]

Car designers, free of the constraints of a gas engine and its hundreds of parts, don’t have carte blanche, Clarke said—but they can make EVs funky. Funkier than just frunks. “We have the opportunity to give the car a totally new kind of proportion,” Steffen Köhl, Mercedes-Benz’s director of advanced exterior design, told Car and Driver. The Cybertruck, for all of its many faults, lives up to this promise. Too many other EVs don’t. A fully electric Ford F-150 Lightning is a technological feat that can power a house for up to three days, but from a distance, you can’t tell it apart from its gas-powered cousin. Other EVs are even more Wonder Bread: The electric Hyundai Genesis G80 is so similar to its gas twin that it has been described as an “EV in disguise.” Toyota is working on a simulated stick shift for EVs that will let drivers pretend to manually shift gears, and many EVs spurt out fake engine noises.

Some EVs, such as the retro-futuristic Hyundai Ioniq 6, are more sci-fi, but on the whole, carmakers are trying to make the jump to EVs easier by sticking with the big-grilled designs that drivers already know. That’s apparently why Ford made the F-150 EV look so familiar. “The car market is quite conservative,” Clarke said, “because for most people, a car is the second-biggest purchase they’ll make.” That tendency is dumbing down the truly world-changing capabilities of the electric car. Any path to hitting the world’s climate goals involves an embrace of EVs, but in the U.S., they still represent just a sliver of new-car sales. The transition is proving to be rocky at best, with cars that are far too expensive and far too partisan. (EVs have become even more of a blue-state thing in recent years.)

[Read: Tesla’s magic has been reduced to its chargers]

With all of this in mind, design may in fact be more important than ever, Clarke said, especially because every electric car drives basically the same hyper-fast, hyper-quiet way. The Cybertruck isn’t my style, and it may not be yours. (Which is fine: It’s not even slated to hit the market until next year, starting with the most expensive versions, which top out at just shy of $100,000.) The Cybertruck “will be competitive with its electric challengers but does not undercut them in range and price,” Corey Cantor, an EV analyst at BloombergNEF, told me. Even so, there’s no denying Tesla’s influence: Many major automakers are planning to use the company’s charging adapter, and touch-screen dashboards now abound. In part because of Tesla, every car company, it seems, wants to be a tech company. “There’s been some nice vehicle launches this year, but not one that I think is as big as this, in terms of normal interest,” Cantor said.

Perhaps the Cybertruck’s odd design might trickle down to more practical yet still strange and futuristic EVs from other companies. A bonanza of vanilla EVs isn’t inspiring purchases in much of the country. Maybe a katana windshield wiper can.

A Voicebot Just Left Me Speechless

2023-07-17T12:41:00-04:00

It’s not that hard to say my name, Saahil Desai. Saahil: rhymes with sawmill, or at least that gets you 90 percent there. Desai: like decide with the last bit chopped off. That’s really it.

More often than not, however, my name gets butchered into a menagerie of gaffes and blunders. The most common one, Sa-heel, is at least an honest attempt—unlike its mutant twin, a monosyllabic mess that comes out sounding like seal. Others defy all possible logic. Once, a college classmate read my name, paused, and then confidently said, “Hi, Seattle.”

But the mispronunciations that bug me the most aren’t uttered by any human. They come from bots. All day long, Siri reads out my text messages through the AirPods wedged into my ears —and mangles my name into Sa-hul. It fares better than the AI service I use to transcribe interviews, which has identified me by a string of names that seem stripped from a failed British boy band (Nigel, Sal, Michael, Daniel, Scott Hill). Silicon Valley aspires for its products to be world-changing, but evidently that also means name-changing.

Or at least that’s what I thought. Listen to this:

Saahil Desai · Eleven Labs

It’s an AI voice named Adam from ElevenLabs, a start-up that specializes in voice cloning. (It’s sort of like the DALL-E of audio.) This bot not only says my name well; it says my name better than I can. After all, Saahil comes from Sanskrit, a language I do not speak. The end result is a dopamine hit of familiarity, an amazing feeling that’s like the tech equivalent of finding a souvenir key chain with your name on it.

In addition to chatbots that can write haiku and artbots that can render a pizza in the style of Picasso, the generative-AI revolution has unleashed voicebots that can finally nail my name. Just as ChatGPT learns from internet posts, ElevenLabs has trained its voices on a huge volume of audio clips to figure out how to talk as people do—at least 500,000 hours , compared with tens or hundreds of hours of audio with earlier speech models. “We have spent the last two years developing a new foundational model for speech,” ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski wrote in an email. “It means our model is context-aware and language agnostic and therefore better able to pick-up on nuances like names, as well as delivering the intonation and emotions that reflect the textual input.” The data that are part of newer voicebots might include any number of websites dedicated to pronouncing things, and if someone has correctly said your name in an audiobook, a podcast, or a YouTube video, newer AI models might have it down.

Companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are also developing more advanced voicebots—although they’re still a mixed bag. I tested the same sentence—“C’mon, it’s not that hard to say Saahil Desai”—on AI voice programs from each of them. They all could handle Desai, but I was not greeted with a chorus of perfect pronunciations of Saahil. Amazon’s Polly software, perhaps even worse than Siri, thinks my name is something like Saaaaal:

Saahil Desai · Amazon Polly

Both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure were inoffensive but not perfect, slightly twisting Saahil into something recognizably foreign. Nothing could beat ElevenLabs, but Voicebox, an unreleased tool from Meta that the company recently touted as a “breakthrough in generative AI for speech,” got very close:

Saahil Desai · Meta Voicebox

Computers can now say so many more names than just my own. “I noticed the same thing the other day when my student and I created a recording on ElevenLabs of CNN’s Anderson Cooper saying ‘Professor Hany Farid is a complete and total dips**t’ (it’s a long story),” Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley computer scientist, wrote in an email. “I was surprised at how well it pronounced my name. I’ve also noticed that it correctly pronounces the names of my non-American students.” Other tricky names I tested also fared well: ElevenLabs nailed Lupita Nyong’o and Timothée Chalamet, although it turned poor Pete Buttigieg’s last name into a very unfortunate Buttygig.

That AI voices can now say unusual names is no small feat. They face the same pronunciation struggles that leave many humans stumped; names like Giannis Antetokounmpo don’t abide by the rules of English, while even a simpler name can have multiple pronunciations (Andrea or Andrea?) or spellings (Michaela? Mikayla? Michela?). A name might still fall flat to our ears if an AI voice’s color and texture ring more HAL 9000 than human, Farid said.

Previous generations of voice assistants—Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, your car’s GPS—just didn’t have enough information to get through all of these steps. (In some cases, you can provide that information yourself: A spokesperson for Apple told me that you can manually input a name’s phonetic spelling into the Contacts app to tweak how Siri reads it.) Over the years, this technology “really sort of plateaued,” Farid wrote. “It was just really struggling to get through that uncanny valley where it’s sort of human-like, but also a little weird. And then it just blasted through the door.” Advances in “deep-learning” techniques inspired by the human brain can more readily spot patterns in pitch, rhythm, and intonation.

That is the weird contradiction of AI right now: Even as this technology is prone to biases that can alienate users (voice assistants more frequently misidentify words from Black speakers than white speakers), it can also help pop smaller feelings of alienation that bubble up. To constantly hear bots bungle my name is a digital indignity that reminds me that my devices do not seem made with me in mind, even though Saahil Desai is a common name in India. My blue iPhone 12 is a six-inch slab that contains more of me than any other single thing in my life. And yet it still screws up the most basic thing about my identity.

But a world in which the bots can understand and speak my name, and yours, is also an eerie one. ElevenLabs is the same voice-cloning tech that has been used to make believable deepfakes—of a rude Taylor Swift, of Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro debating Ratatouille, of Emma Watson reading a section of Mein Kampf. An AI scam pretending to be someone you know is far more believable when the voice on the other end can say your name just as your relatives do.

Once it became readily clear that I couldn’t stump ElevenLabs, I slotted in my middle name, Abhijit. Out came a terrible mess of syllables that would never fool me. Okay fine: I admit it’s actually pretty hard to say Saahil Abhijit Desai.

Compostable Plastic Is Garbage

2023-07-06T07:00:00-04:00

In 2023, the options for a build-your-own fast-casual lunch can include wild Alaskan salmon, harissa honey chicken, cauliflower shawarma, seasonal roasted zucchini, preserved lemon vinaigrette, za’atar bread crumbs, creamy vegan feta, and skhug. But whatever you choose, it will all inevitably be served in a compostable bowl. As an office worker blessed (and cursed) with endless overpriced meal options, I have shoveled way too much random food into my mouth from a compostable vessel, using a compostable utensil.

The forks, in particular, are not prone to subtlety: Some are embossed with the word COMPOSTABLE; others are green, in case anyone forgets they are “green.” But the compostable-packaging takeover has been tough to miss. Perhaps you have gotten leftovers in a compostable container, stuffed groceries into a compostable produce bag, or sipped coffee out of a compostable straw. Compostable packaging “is growing, and growing a lot,” David Henkes, a food-industry analyst at Technomic, told me. By 2021, 7 percent of all food-service packaging was compostable, Henkes said; its share has almost certainly grown since then, especially in major cities. Among the companies that now use it: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Cava, Sweetgreen, Panera Bread, Taco Bell, and Frito-Lay.

But although compostable packaging is easy to spot, compost bins to put it in are not. All of my office forks and soggy fiber packaging have gone straight into the kitchen trash, just like normal plastic would. Only a tiny fraction of this compostable packaging and plastic, it turns out, is actually getting composted. Even if restaurants, homes, and office buildings have composting bins, in most places this pile of compostable trash has nowhere to go: America doesn’t have the composting infrastructure to deal with it. These products might have the potential to be better for the planet than traditional plastic, but right now, compostable plastic is just plastic.

What makes plastic so great is also what makes it so terrible. The substance, created from fossil fuels, is cheap, moldable, and so durable that most plastic that humans have ever produced still exists. Compostable plastic is made by chemically manipulating plant sugars such as corn starch and sugar cane to achieve similar properties; the flimsier, cardboardlike compostable bowls are molded out of bamboo and other plant fibers. The promise of these products is the same: Whereas a plastic fork or bowl might get used for just a few minutes before lingering in the environment forever, a compostable version degrades over time, not unlike an apple core you throw away in the woods. Only more slowly. Much more slowly.

In most cases, compostable plastic is compostable only under very specific conditions. “It’s not like what you would do in your yard if you tried to compost a banana peel,” Sarah-Jeanne Royer, an oceanographer at Hawaii Pacific University, told me. “You need to have access to a composting facility.” And a home compost pile is like the industrial version in the same way that a pickup-basketball game among preteens is the same sport as the NBA. Fruit and vegetables start to dissolve into soil within a few weeks; meat takes a little longer. Eventually, any form of compostable plastic should break down too, Frederick Michel Jr., a compost expert at Ohio State University, told me. Eventually. In one study, compostable plastic bags buried in soil for three years were so sturdy they could still hold a full load of groceries. Royer submerged a type of compostable plastic in seawater and could not find any signs of degradation 428 days later.

A commercial plant speeds that timeline up to just a few months, using machinery that encourages the best possible conditions for composting. The bugs and microbes that break down organic matter release heat in the process, and all the rotting waste at a composting facility can routinely hit temperatures of 160 degrees. You will never achieve that at home.

But good luck finding one of those facilities. America is churning out all of this biodegradable packaging without the ability to process it: The entire country has roughly 200 full-scale food-waste composting plants, and about three-fifths of those accept compostable packaging, according to not-yet-published research from BioCycle. In practice, getting your compostable plastic into one of those plants means living in one of just a few cities—San Francisco, Seattle, parts of New York—that picks up compost just like trash and recycling and trucks it to a plant. Everyone else is left in compost deserts, Michel said. In Ohio, “the only way for me to compost is in my backyard,” he said. Cities as big as Atlanta do not have a composting plant within an hour’s drive; the entire state of Alabama does not have a single place that can digest compostable plastic.

The companies using these products are aware of these limitations. Consider the 10-email exchange I had with Cava, trying to confirm that the fast-casual chain does in fact use compostable bowls, which the spokesperson originally outright denied. It ended with the spokesperson acknowledging that “CAVA’s bowl containers are primarily made of bagasse” (which is made from sugar cane and is compostable) but that “there are some limitations to the availability of composting facilities, which is why CAVA is careful about how they talk about it.” And in the long term, companies who are handing out single-use items should be trying to switch over. A single fork turned back into biomass is more biodegradation than most of the plastic in human history has ever done. So much of the world’s plastic is used for packaging that, with the proper infrastructure, “if everything that’s now plastic was made out of compostable plastic, then it would dramatically change what we are looking at,” Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineer at Michigan State who studies renewable plastics, told me. The equivalent of a dump truck’s worth of plastic sloshes into the ocean every minute, entangling wildlife, poisoning the soil and water, and splitting into microplastics that accumulate up the food chain; replacing that with something even marginally less permanent would be a positive change.

As long as compostable plastic is ending up in landfills, though, the math is less favorable. In a dump, these products may not biodegrade for more than a century. And they can have an additional knock against them: In the anaerobic conditions of a landfill, certain types of compostable plastic can also spew methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Compostable plastic might backfire in other ways too. A push against single-use plastic has made lots of people reconsider, even if briefly, whether to use that plastic plate or bowl or straw; compostable products implicitly signal to consumers that they can use these instead and walk away with a lighter conscience. “Marketing people are always asking me, ‘So what about compostable plastic?’” says Claire Sand, a packaging consultant for major companies, because consumers badly want this to be the answer to single-use plastic. In the U.S., all certified compostable products are required to have a label making clear that they are meant to be composted in “aerobic municipal and industrial composting facilities.” But fine print is easy to overlook with all the green colors and brand names, including EarthChoice, Eco-Baggeez, Greenware, and Responsible Products. And though a plastic takeout container can live a second life as pseudo-Tupperware, and a plastic bag as a garbage liner, many compostable versions just don’t cut it.

Both compostable plastic—and America’s composting network—will get better. Diverting compostable stuff from landfills is so important for making a dent in emissions that the federal government is throwing $90 million at it. Plenty of companies are also trying to make better compostable products: Can I interest you in plastic that turns into protein powder, banana -peel plastic, avocado plastic, and seaweed plastic? Still, finding the right balance between durability and compostability is tough. No one wants a box of spoons that rots after three weeks in your cupboard.

If you must buy compostable plastic products, some are better than others. Look for items that are certified by the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI), and whenever possible, TÜV OK Compost Home, Michel said, a European standard that signifies that the plastic should disintegrate even in home compost piles. And try to avoid anything made of polylactic acid, or PLA, which is the among most onerous biodegradable plastic to compost, though also the most popular. Broadly speaking, the less something is like real plastic, the easier it is to break down. The best compostable utensil is not embossed with COMPOSTABLE or green in color but made of untreated wood. “It is inherently compostable and does not really pose any more of an issue than a branch falling off of a tree,” Michel said.

The other alternative is, well, not just swapping one kind of single-use plastic with another. Somehow, metal straws have joined the pantheon of reusable water bottles and coffee cups that people trek around, but you know what is already far more readily available? Silverware. Earlier this week, just after tossing my soggy fast-casual bowl to its ominous fate in the trash can, I noticed a clean metal fork sitting on my desk, just waiting for me to use it.

This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.

Car-Rental Companies Are Ruining EVs

2023-06-16T09:19:33-04:00

The best way to cap a weekend road trip, I can assure you, is not by jostling for an EV charger outside a Sheetz gas station in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It’s Memorial Day, and I’m in a runt of a rental car trying to outmaneuver a Ford F-150 Lightning. Thirty minutes of waiting for a charger to free up is bringing out my most Darwinian instincts: Like an eagle swooping down to nab a goat, my tiny black Chevy Bolt EUV swings into the spot before the pickup even knows what’s happening. The adrenaline rush of sweet victory is immediately tempered by an emotional letdown. My car needs an hour of charging before it’s ready to go again.

I didn’t ask for any of this. Three days earlier, I had booked Hertz’s cheapest option—in this case, the “Manager’s Special”—assuming I’d end up with a forgettable sedan. What I did not consider was an electric car. “Sorry, it’s all we have,” the man at the Hertz counter in downtown Brooklyn said as he handed over the keys. With no forewarning, no experience driving an EV, and virtually no guidance, what was supposed to be a restful trip upstate was anything but. Just a few hours of highway driving would sap the battery, leaving me and my friends scrounging for public chargers in desolate parking lots, the top floors of garages, and hotels with plugs marked for guests only. It was a crash course in EVs for four people who had never heard of CCS versus CHAdemo, the 80/20 rule, and Level 3 chargers.

Maybe the same thing will happen to you, if it hasn’t already. After my disastrous weekend, I talked to three rental-car experts: All of them were familiar with the phenomenon of the surprise EV, a result of how much the industry is leaning into electric cars. Only 4 percent of Americans own an EV, but Hertz plans for a quarter of its fleet to be electric by the end of next year.

These are great, potentially planet-saving machines, but the ordeal made me want to wage a slash-and-burn campaign against all of them. A surprise EV rental, it turns out, is tailor-made to amplify the downsides of electric cars, especially among impressionable newbies. “You know, it's really not smart,” Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. “If they’re out of gas cars, they’re out of gas cars, but they’ve got to eliminate the surprise thing.” The promised transition away from dirty gas cars only works if people actually want to buy EVs, as all of the government tax breaks and Will Ferrell ads make abundantly clear. Yet the very first time that many people experience an electric car will be not at a dealership, but rather on a rental-car trip.

EVs may work great for the business traveler who is taking their Tesla from the airport to the hotel and to a client meeting across town, but things are way more complicated for road-trippers. What makes an EV rental such a struggle is that it is a rental: The overwhelming majority of EV owners charge their cars at home, waking up to a full charge every morning. Unless you luck out and have a place to charge overnight at your hotel or Airbnb, you’re stuck with America’s Wild West of public EV chargers.

[Read: The one thing holding back electric vehicles in America]

Plugs are not only hard to find, they’re sometimes full or broken—and very often too slow for anything but overnight charging. When my Chevy Bolt was just about running on empty in the Finger Lakes, the closest charger I could find was blocked by a blue Tesla loitering after a fill-up. The next best option was so slow that after four hours of charging, the car had added a measly 70 miles to its range—roughly what a gas pump could do for a similarly sized car in well under 30 seconds. Plenty of Tesla Superchargers popped up on Google Maps, but none of them worked with my hapless Bolt.

If I had known an EV was coming my way, I would have dutifully planned out my charging strategy ahead of time instead of sitting in a Sheetz parking lot and simmering with road rage. Gas drivers tend to find the nearest pump whenever they’re low on fuel, but with an EV, every time you park could end up as a missed opportunity to get a bit of juice. Because of the quirks of lithium-ion batteries, you might save time charging your EV in bursts, as opposed to doing it all in one go; with this in mind, drivers learn to compulsively check EV charging apps—Plugshare, Chargehub, Chargeway—for nearby stations. Compared with filling up on gas, “it’s just a completely different experience,” says Ellen Kennedy, an expert on carbon-free transportation at the think tank RMI.

Some guidance on these matters helps—but all Hertz had provided me with was a sheet of paper listing three nearby EV chargers, which were really not germane to my out-of-town trip. “It would be like a business person going to an office-rental store back in the late ’80s to get an IBM Selectric,” McDonald said, “and the person at the desk says, Oh, we’re out of those. Here’s a Macintosh computer.” Laura Smith, Hertz’s executive vice president of global sales and customer experience, told me that the company emails a link to an online EV guide to every customer who explicitly books an electric car. Because my car was a surprise, I didn’t get one. (Smith said that Hertz has begun to put QR codes pointing to the online guide on the keychains for all its EVs.)

[Read: EVs make parking even more annoying]

At this point, Hertz has one of the biggest EV fleets in the entire world, an army of tens of thousands of Teslas, Polestars, and GMs, with an order of magnitude more on the way. Perhaps Hertz is “over-fleeted” with electric cars, Jonthan Weinberg, the CEO of the rental-car site AutoSlash, told me. That means that if the car you wanted isn’t available, the one you get instead is more likely to be an EV. Perusing Hertz’s website suggests that EVs may indeed be overstocked across the country. The three cheapest rental-car options I could find for this weekend at New York’s JFK airport are all EVs. At LAX, the cheapest EV will run you $40 a day, compared with $88 for the Manager’s Special. And at Midway in Chicago, the only available cars are all EVs.

Other rental-car juggernauts aren’t at Hertz’s numbers yet. Both Avis and Enterprise offer EVs, but in nowhere near the same numbers—and mostly as luxury cars. “We will not introduce large numbers of EVs into our fleet until we have clarity that the customer experience meets our standards,” Lisa Martini, a spokesperson for Enterprise Holdings, which owns Enterprise, National, and Alamo, wrote in an email.

Expect that to change—and quickly. Car-rental companies buy something like one-tenth of all new cars in America, and EVs are tempting options, Sharky Laguana, the president of the American Rental Car Association, told me: They are far easier to maintain than conventional cars, containing a tiny fraction of the moving parts. EVs also seem to hold their value, a major factor considering that rental-car companies tend to sell off their cars after a year or two. “I just can’t see us waiting until the last minute and then pulling the trigger” on the EV transition, Laguana said. “I think that we would want to be way ahead of it.”

The auto industry seems to think that the turn toward EV rentals will help convince people that gas is not the future—and prevent them from buying cars that may be spewing carbon for the next decade-plus. After all, what is a car rental if not a very long test drive? Hertz has suggested that its own embrace of EVs represents “a critical step toward adoption.” Similarly, the CEO of GM recently called its partnership with Hertz “a huge step forward for emissions reduction and EV adoption that will help create thousands of new EV customers for GM.” But for that to be true, renting an EV has to be a good experience, not a last-minute surprise that upends your whole trip.

It could have been that way for me: Heading out of the Hertz garage for the first time, I weaved through New York traffic and was spit out of the Holland Tunnel in New Jersey. Slowly, the initial EV shock turned into the bliss of clicking on cruise control on a traffic-free highway. The Chevy Bolt was a zippy little engine that could, a car that screamed boring Prius but had the acceleration and torque more reminiscent of a Porsche. Not even an hour later, though, somewhere on I-80, a ding erupted from the dashboard: Only 20 miles left on the charge. So much for that.

Return of the People Machine

2023-04-03T14:55:16-04:00

Even a halfway-decent political campaign knows you better than you know yourself. A candidate’s army of number crunchers vacuums up any morsel of personal information that might affect the choice we make at the polls. In 2020, Donald Trump and the Republican Party compiled 3,000 data points on every single voter in America. In 2012, the data nerds helped Barack Obama parse the electorate to microtarget his door-knocking efforts toward the most-persuadable swing voters. And in 1960, John F. Kennedy had the People Machine. Using computers that were 250,000 times less powerful than a modern MacBook, Kennedy’s operatives built a simulation of the presidential election, modeling how 480 types of voters would respond to any conceivable twist in the campaign. If JFK made a civil-rights speech in the Deep South, the People Machine could, in the words of its creators, “predict the approximate small fraction of a percent difference that such a speech would make in each state and consequently … pinpoint the state where it could affect the electoral vote.”

But you don’t hear Nate Silver talking about the latest People Machine forecast, because it was, in fact, all bogus. The simulation—part hucksterism, part hubris—promised a lot but delivered little, telling the Kennedy campaign nothing it didn’t already know. “The People Machine was hobbled by its time, by the technological limitations of the nineteen-sixties,” the Harvard historian Jill Lepore writes in The New Yorker. “The machine sputtered, sparks flying, smoke rising, and ground to a halt.” Instead, the best way we have to actually predict elections is still the jumbled mess that is polling. Because reaching people has become harder than ever for pollsters, so has the job of figuring out who is going to vote, and for whom. If the polls had been spot-on, Trump would never have been president, and just hearing the phrase election needle wouldn’t make any liberal’s skin crawl. Polling can still sometimes nail an election, but the problems are real: In 2020, presidential polls had their biggest miss in 40 years, and what was predicted to be a quick win for Joe Biden turned into an excruciating four-day squeaker.

You can see why there’s an urge to find a better way. The idea of mimicking voters with tech may have been fantastical when JFK was running for president, but it seems far less so in the age of hyped-up AI chatbots that talk in a confident, natural way. (Dear Bing, please leave my relationship alone.) Instead of polling humans, it’s now theoretically possible to poll bots that emulate humans. When researchers at Brigham Young University fed OpenAI’s GPT-3 bot background information on thousands of real American voters last year, it was unnervingly good at responding to surveys just like real people would, for all their quirks, incoherence, and (many) contradictions. The fake people were polled on their presidential picks in 2012, 2016, and 2020—and they “gave us the right answer—almost always,” Ethan Busby, a political scientist at BYU and a co-author of the study, told me.

So while ChatGPT can spit out anything in the voice of Shakespeare or Shakira, this technology can seemingly also simulate whole groups of voters—MAGA zealots, suburban wine moms, and elderly Black churchgoers alike. Yes, for now, it’s an academic experiment. But considering the woes of polling, the idea of turning to bots might seem pretty appealing to cash-strapped political apparatchiks trying to gauge how their candidate’s doing. A high-quality political poll can run $20,000 or more, but this particular AI-polling experiment cost the BYU researchers just $75. The People Machine, it seems, has whirred back to life.

Here’s an easy way to think of the problems with polling right now: Can you remember the last time you picked up a phone call from a random number? Many of the best public-opinion surveys still involve actually calling people, but virtually no one is willing to answer the questions anymore. New York Times/Siena College is the Ferrari of polls, and its response rates have dipped as low as 1 percent in recent years, requiring two hours of dialing for a single completed interview. Polling is always a game of extrapolation—in a national survey, thousands of people need to tell you something about hundreds of millions of voters—but the information is so bad that using it to predict an outcome within a few points is a bit like trying to sink a half-court shot, blindfolded, after shotgunning five beers.

But chatbots can be programmed to answer every question you want every single time. Because so-called large language models have ingested basically everything on the internet, these bots have a firm sense of our kaleidoscope of political views. And they are exceptionally good at “mirroring what people think and how they speak and behave,” Lisa Argyle, a BYU political scientist and the lead author on the AI-polling study, told me. ChatGPT may refuse to talk politics with you, but I got it to play a 40-year-old white man in rural Ohio with pro-gun, anti-abortion views. A sample of the output: “The Democrats want to take away our guns and kill innocent babies.”

Sure enough, in the paper, which was published recently in the journal Political Analysis, that type of humanlike behavior is precisely what emerged when the researchers fed the machine the backstories of thousands of real voters from the past three presidential elections and asked them whom they would prefer in each election. Those backstories were each composed of 10 biographical tidbits from people who had responded to a major postelection study, including their basic demographics (race, gender, state of residence) and other aspects of their identity (church attendance, feelings about the American flag, interest in politics). And then the bot spit out a probability that such a person would prefer the Democratic or Republican presidential contender.

Think about it this way: Give a bot the prompt “professional football team from Cincinnati,” and it knows to respond with “Bengals,” not “shawarma,” because it is making connections based on all the text that has been stuffed into it. That same approach also seems to work for political views: The bot told the researchers that a 29-year-old white man from Louisiana who is a strong Republican and regularly attends church would have had a 96 percent chance of voting for Trump in 2016, because its algorithms determined that words like Trump, Donald, and Republican were far more associated with that profile than words like Hillary, Clinton, and liberal.

And this approach worked exceptionally well in the experiment. For all three elections, bots matched the preferences of real voters at least 85 percent of the time—sometimes with alarming accuracy. In the AI poll of the 2012 election, bots predicted that 39 percent would vote for Mitt Romney. In the real 2012 poll, it was 40 percent. In the 2020 poll, the bot’s predictions matched the responses of 90 percent of real voters who said they didn’t attend church, and of 94 percent of Black voters. “It can mimic human behavior with astonishing accuracy,” Busby said. “And that holds no matter how you slice it up—whether we looked at specific subgroups or looked at different residents of different states, like swing states.”

[Read: ChatGPT changed everything. Now its follow-up is here.]

A swirl of data and algorithms can, of course, never account for the full range of human weirdness, let alone with just 10 tidbits of the most elementary personal information. (Who knows why people wrote in “Ur mom,” “Cheddar,” and “Can’t Do It” rather than voting for real candidates in the 2020 election?) True independents are a total crapshoot with AI, just as they are “the hardest to predict in any polling situation,” Argyle said. But in aggregate, bots can get the proportions right for many different personae. GPT-3 is good at predicting political views because American politics is, in a sense, very predictable. You don’t need AI to know that in 2016, a 58-year-old Black Democrat from New York City would likely have preferred Clinton to Trump.

But even voters who are much harder to read can be parsed by AI. Quick: Did a 30-year-old Mississippi woman who identified as “slightly liberal” and expressed a strongly favorable view of “seeing the American flag flying” vote for Clinton or Trump? GPT-3 says 75 percent for Clinton. The bot tries to make an educated guess based on connections that we mere mortals might not see; this skill is why AI, for all its foibles, may be adept at understanding our opinions. “We are not built to identify granular patterns between very small signals, but these machines are very good at doing that,” Deborah Raji, an expert on AI bias at the Mozilla Foundation who wasn’t involved with the study, told me. Consider the problem of “nonresponse bias”: pollster-speak for the idea that certain groups, particularly Trump voters, are especially unlikely to respond to pollsters, skewing poll results. “It’s possible that using AI can help us supplement or fill out or get a more nuanced understanding of some of those populations where we just have a really low response rate anyway,” Argyle said.

None of this means that we are barreling toward a world in which AI polling can fully replace the real deal. Candidates can’t just fire up a chatbot and hone their stump speech after testing it out against AI versions of evangelicals or South Florida Cuban Americans. “When you emailed [the paper] to me, honestly my first reaction was, Is this a joke?” Joshua Clinton, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and co-director of the Vanderbilt Poll, told me.

[Read: Prepare for the textpocalypse]

Clinton laid out a sprawling list of problems with AI polling. OpenAI’s latest bot, GPT-4, is brand-new, but from a polling standpoint, it is already outdated. Bots can’t learn anything new unless they’re trained on a corpus of new data, but the whole point of polling is to gauge how views are changing. If you want to know how Republicans are responding to Trump’s indictment, polls can tell you that; ChatGPT cannot. And these models are trained only on what people write online. The internet is swarming with socialist Reddit posts and brain-poisoning Facebook memes, but these are hardly representative of the electorate as a whole, Raji reminded me. When researchers at Stanford compared the views of chatbots with those of 60 different demographic groups in the U.S., they found “substantial misalignment”—especially among certain specific groups, such as Mormons and widows. “One person, one vote” is very different from “One post, one vote.”

But polling may still not totally evade the chatbot revolution, either—particularly at a time when every company and industry so badly wants to tout its “AI-powered” whatever. “Over the past 30 years, polling has been completely transformed by changes in computing and communications,” Barbara Carvalho, the director of Marist College’s poll, told me. “So my expectation is that polling will absolutely be affected by AI.”

Polling is already a data scientist’s fantasyland, stuffed with Ph.D.-level statistics and machine learning; simpler forms of AI were helping predict elections well before high schoolers were using ChatGPT to write English essays. Other researchers have fed chatbots text from Fox News and produced responses that can mimic humans. One company, Synthetic Users, is polling bots for use in marketing. But Raji cautions against taking this too far: “Good intentions aside, I think ultimately the way it will likely play out is just less investment in the actual engagement of real people,” she said.

Bots cannot—should not—replace people wholesale, but that doesn’t mean bottom-shelf pollsters who already rely on shady methods won’t try to use AI to pump out even more bad polls to sway media attention and campaign contributions. In that sense, AI polling is perhaps just a fun-house mirror of the future of chatbots: What seems like a way to solve one problem sometimes just begets another, and another, and another.

You Don’t Know How Bad the Pizza Box Is

2023-01-13T07:00:00-05:00

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

Happiness, people will have you think, does not come from possessing things. It comes from love. Self-acceptance. Career satisfaction. Whatever. But here’s what everyone has failed to consider: the Ooni Koda 12-inch gas-powered outdoor pizza oven.

Since I purchased mine a year ago, my at-home pizza game has hit levels that are inching toward pizzaiolo perfection. Like Da Vinci in front of a blank canvas, I now churn out perfectly burnished pies entirely from scratch—dough, sauce, caramelized onions, and all. By merely looking at a pie, I can tell you whether the cornicione is too puffy or just right, if the crust could use a bit more leoparding, and whether the dough should have spent another day in the fridge. I am now, in a word, pizza-pilled.

But enlightenment is not without its consequences. The pies from my usual takeout spot just don’t seem to taste the same anymore. They’re still fine in that takeout-pizza way, but a certain je ne sais quoi is gone: For the first time, after opening up a pizza box and bringing a slice to my mouth, I am hyperaware of a limp sogginess to each bite, a rubbery grossness to the cheese. The cardinal rule of restaurants is that to-go food is never as good as the real deal, but even when my homemade pizzas sit around for too long, they don’t taste anywhere near that off.

Pizza delivery, it turns out, is based on a fundamental lie. The most iconic delivery food of all time is bad at surviving delivery, and the pizza box is to blame. “I don’t like putting any pizza in a box,” Andrew Bellucci, a legendary New York City pizza maker of Andrew Bellucci’s Pizzeria, told me. “That’s just it, really. The pizza degrades as soon as it goes inside,” turning into a swampy mess.

A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane.

[Read: The 3 big advances in the technology of the pizza box]

And yet, the pizza box hasn’t changed much, if at all, since it was invented in 1966. Then, boxes were shallow cardboard squares with flaps to lock them into place. Today, boxes are shallow cardboard squares with flaps to lock them into place. You’ll see the same design both in dinky spots for drunken college students and in the country’s most sought-after Neapolitan joints. Since the introduction of this corrugated vessel, humanity has landed on the moon, rolled out the internet, created cellphones, and invented combination air fryer–instant pots. But none of that matters: Ye olde pizza box refuses to die.

The problem with the pizza box starts with the pie itself. Let’s consider what makes the pizza so perfect—not the alchemy between sauce and cheese, but the texture. A classic hot pizza will have a tender and gooey center with a crust that’s as dry and crispy as an eggshell. Even a single slice of freshly cooked budget pizza can deliver a textural kaleidoscope that is unparalleled for its price.

None of these qualities fares well in a box. Unlike a Tupperware of takeout chicken soup or palak paneer, which can be microwaved back to life after its journey to your home, the texture of a pizza starts to irreparably worsen after even a few minutes of cardboard confinement. “You’ll never get a pizza out of a box that tastes as good as it would have before it went in,” Scott Wiener, a New York pizza-tour guide and the author of Viva la Pizza!: The Art of the Pizza Box, told me.

The basic issue is this: A fresh pizza spews steam as it cools down. A box traps that moisture, suspending the pie in its own personal sauna. After just five minutes, Wiener said, the pie’s edges become flaccid and chewy. Sauce seeps into the crust, making it soggy. All the while, your pizza is quickly losing heat. After 15 minutes, the cheese has congealed into dollops of rubber. And after 45 minutes, your pizza deteriorates into something else entirely. “It’ll be chewy and dry at the same time,” Anthony Falco, a pizza consultant and the author of Pizza Czar, told me. “And there’s nothing you can do to fix it.”

How to get a hot pizza from the oven to your doorstep is a centuries-old dilemma. When pizza was merely winter sustenance for paupers in 19th-century Naples, pies were loaded into stufas, copper containers that young lads would balance on their heads. Things got weird fast when pizza made its way to the U.S. At Lombardi’s in New York City, perhaps the country’s first pizzeria, lore has it that lukewarm pies were rolled up with twine and reheated on factory furnaces by famished laborers. After World War II, when to-go pizza began to take flight, we finally got the progenitor of the pizza box: flimsy paperboard containers similar to today’s cake boxes. By 1949, when The Atlantic sought to introduce America to the pizza, the package was already something to lament: “You can take home a pizza in a paper box and reheat it, but you should live near enough to serve it within twenty minutes or so. People do reheat pizza which has become cold, but it isn’t very good; the cheese may be stringy, and the crust rocklike at the edges, soggy on the bottom.”

[Read: The art of pizza-making]

And then came the modern pizza box. In 1966, the owner of a small Michigan pizza chain called Domino’s enlisted a local packaging company to construct a box out of corrugated cardboard that would better withstand takeout and delivery. Think about any recent Amazon box you’ve gotten in the mail, and you’ll see what makes this box different: Corrugation produces a layer of wavy cardboard between a top and bottom sheet, sort of like a birthday cake. The design creates thick, airy walls that both protect the precious cargo within a pizza box and insulate the pie’s heat while also allowing some steam to escape.

This new take on the box ushered in a takeout-pizza revolution. “It was a pleasure to hand one to a customer and feel confident that it wouldn’t sag open and drop the pizza on his porch,” Tom Monaghan, Domino’s founder, wrote in his 1986 autobiography, at which point the chain already had several thousand stores worldwide. And these boxes do have a lot going for them: They are dirt cheap to mass-produce, can stack on top of one another without compromising the pizza within, ship flat to nestle into cramped shops, and are deceptively easy to fold. (At the World Pizza Games 2022—yes, a real thing—the first-place winner folded five boxes in 20 seconds.)

We’ve gotten a couple of pizza-delivery innovations in the past few decades: the insulated heat bag—that ubiquitous velcroed duffel used to keep pies warm on their journey—those mini-plastic-table things, and … well, that is mostly it. No pizza box in widespread use today is significantly better at keeping a pizza fresh than the one Domino’s invented all those years ago. Indeed, if any pizza holds up well in the old-fashioned box, it’s the chain variety. These pies run drier to avoid a case of the pizza slops. But there is a lot more to pizza than Domino’s and Pizza Hut.

With no better options, some pizzerias are now rejiggering their recipes to better survive the box, dropping their oven temperatures and adding the cheese beneath the sauce. “Every single pizza that I put in a box I know is going to be, let’s say, at least 10 percent not as good as it could have been,” Alex Plattner, the owner of Cincinnati’s Saint Francis Apizza, told me. Others dream of better days. “After smoking a lot of weed, I have come up with a lot of ideas for a better box,” said Bellucci, the New York City pizza maker.

If there is a single food item poised for some technological ingenuity, it’s pizza. Food trends come and go, like Quiznos and kale, but to-go pizza is timeless, even immortal: When the pandemic wrecked the restaurant industry in 2020, pizza sales managed to tick up; billions of pizzas are delivered in this abomination of a box every year. In other words, the pizza box is a market failure that is screaming to be, well, disrupted. We are simply eating a worse version of one of the most popular foods around, all because of the deficiencies of something that seems so eminently fixable.

The thing is, though, an improved box exists. “There are products out there that are better,” said Wiener. “But all of them have problems.” And he would know. Wiener’s Brooklyn apartment includes a Guinness World Record–winning collection of 1,750 pizza boxes, which have been meticulously cataloged by spreadsheet and stuffed into a closet. Just about all of these boxes are the common corrugated kind, but a special few are honest attempts to move beyond it. “Some of them are weird prototypes—I have an inflatable pizza box from Denmark,” he said. “I have a pizza box that becomes a spatula. It’s the weirdest.”

Corporate America and garage inventors alike have sought to pioneer a better box. In 2015, one cash-flush Silicon Valley start-up, Zume, created the Pizza Pod™️: a round, two-piece spaceship of a container made from compressed sugarcane fiber. Let a pizza sit inside it and the fibers will absorb the errant moisture better than cardboard, keeping the pie crisp. Last year, the German brand PIZZycle debuted the Tupperware of pizza containers, a reusable vessel studded with ventilation holes on its sides. Even Apple—that Apple—has patented its own round pizza box exclusively for its famished Cupertino office workers. And perhaps the most ingenious container I’ve found is from an Indian company called VentIt. The box takes the normal corrugated vessel and thins out part of the cardboard at the top and bottom, creating venting channels that, at least according to VentIt’s own research, achieve something miraculous: reducing steam inside the box by an additional 25 percent while also maintaining the pizza’s temperature.

A better pizza box is not science fiction. Even Apple filed a patent for its own version in 2010. (United States Patent and Trademark Office)

So we know it’s not a question of ingenuity: We can construct better pizza boxes, and we already have. The real issue is cost. No superior pizza box—from VentIt, Zume, wherever—can come close to matching the price of simple corrugated cardboard, and in a restaurant industry with such tight margins, the math is hard to deny. Until customers overcome their Stockholm syndrome, why would pizzerias fork up more money for something that immediately lands in the trash? “The problem is that everybody expects this box and nobody’s too offended by it,” Wiener said. “There hasn’t been enough push for something different.”

[Read: Nothing is cooler than going out to dinner]

For now, we’re still waiting for the perfect box—one that is as cheap, stackable, foldable, and sustainable as its corrugated brethren. “When ALL factors are considered, corrugated cardboard has proven to be the best available material for packaging pizza,” John Correll, a pizza-packaging inventor with 43 patents, told me over email. “For years, other materials have been suggested and tried, but they each have problems.”

There are other issues too. Five companies control 70 percent of the cardboard market in the U.S., a level of consolidation that is rampant across the American economy. Independent pizzerias are everywhere, but the pizza chains still dominate takeout and delivery. Domino’s alone accounts for nearly 40 percent of delivery-pizza sales in the U.S.—on par with all regional chains and mom-and-pops combined. Perhaps these big companies are stifling real pizza-box innovation. “We have a solution that, for the most part, delivers the hot product to a customer in a way that also works for our operations,” Zach Halfmann, Domino’s director of operations innovation, told me. “We haven’t found a need to rethink it.”

And so we must find peace with this cursed container. Its simplicity is its value, and precisely why it’s so hard to give up. Like a Christmas tree or a cast-iron pan, what the pizza box lacks in perfectly engineered function, it makes up for in familiarity, tradition, and even populism.

Your life is different from your grandparents’, but this is quite literally your grandparents’ pizza box—and also Elon Musk’s pizza box, and Joe Biden’s, and Oprah Winfrey’s. It is a custom that brings us together in a kind of communion—sogginess and all. “There’s no wealthy-person version of the pizza box,” Carol Helstosky, a University of Denver professor and the author of Pizza: A Global History, told me. The pizza box is just the pizza box. But hey, at least we’ve moved past the stufa.

Is Food Getting Better?

2022-11-24T07:00:00-05:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Congrats! You are probably about to eat the very best Thanksgiving meal of your life.

Maybe your turkey is drier than a World Cup fan in Qatar, or maybe you overcommitted and nothing is ready by 8 p.m. Maybe you’re making the same exact menu as last year. But if you round up every single Thanksgiving dinner in the United States—all the birds and pies and mac and cheeses and green-bean casseroles—on average, the meal will be just marginally, imperceptibly tastier than last year. On average, it will be noticeably better than a decade ago, substantially better than two decades ago, and night-and-day better than 40 years ago. Expand that out until, let’s say, the ’50s, and the average Thanksgiving dinner then versus now is like comparing Little Caesars to Eleven Madison Park. If the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, the arc of home cooking bends toward yumminess.

In the simplest sense, the modern Thanksgiving dinner is just far less defined by the “traditional” foods—and for the better. There are now endless recipes for vegan Thanksgiving, keto Thanksgiving, Peking-duck Thanksgiving, and (regrettably) turducken Thanksgiving. This year, I’m making roasted honeynut squash with homemade mole and mango pie for dessert—a menu that I would not have been able to whip up several decades ago. Americans have changed what Thanksgiving looks like, and in turn the modern grocery store has made it easier for Americans to change what Thanksgiving looks like: In the early 20th century, the average store stocked about 500 items. Now it’s 40,000 to 50,000 items. Or let’s just focus on produce: In 1975, the average grocery stocked 65 kinds of fruits and veggies. By 1998, that number had reached 345.

All of these changes make the most difference for people who deviate from the Thanksgiving staples, but it also seems clear that the average holiday meal has gotten inexorably better even for the less experimentally inclined. Let’s say you’re making apple pie and brussels sprouts. Remember when the only apples you could get were Red Delicious and Granny Smith? Now perfectly tart Pink Lady and Honeycrisp apples are recipe staples. I just checked, and my own grocery store has 20 kinds of apples in stock! And remember when brussels sprouts were America’s most hated vegetable? Well, in the ’90s, breeders eliminated the compound that made sprouts bitter, and chefs simultaneously figured out that blasting them in the oven was far superior to boiling them to death. Cooking techniques, abetted by a bonanza of appliances, have just drastically improved over the years. People: Salt, fat, acid, heat!

Go look at old recipes, and things get dark fast. In the 1900s, people were eating Jell-O salad with grated onion and seafood. A pre-1980 Bon Appétit turkey recipe suggested that people cook the bird for nine hours (?) without adding any salt (???). Do you really think that’s as good as what you’ll eat tonight?

[Read: Moneyball for turkeys]

I know not everyone will agree with me on this. Even my own colleagues have been, shall we say, roasting me. So I invited two of those colleagues, Daniel Engber and Amanda Mull, to debate the premise over Slack. Our exchange follows and has been edited for length and clarity. — Saahil Desai

Daniel Engber: Wait, let’s be clear about what we’re saying here. If all the elements of cooking really are improving over time—if we have better recipes than we did before, and we’re preparing them with more diverse ingredients via more enlightened methods—then the effects wouldn’t be limited to holiday meals. Saahil, you’re not just saying Thanksgiving is getting more delicious. You’re saying Food is better than it’s ever been before. You’re claiming that the average dinner that we eat in 2022 is of higher quality, and confers more gustatory pleasure, than the average dinner that one might have eaten in 1992, or that one’s parents might have eaten in 1972, or 1952. You’re at least implying that the way we eat has been evolving toward perfection.

This all reminds me of my grandpa, who had a habit of insisting (over decades and at every single family event) that whatever food was served to him must be the best he’d ever eaten. He'd take a bite of stuffing, and astonishment would spread across his face. “You’ll never believe this …” he’d say. Or: “I know this seems improbable …”

Of course this was just my grandpa’s schtick: We’d put out the food, he’d come out with the baloney. Yet here we are debating whether Murray had it right. Are we really living in the best of times for eating?

It doesn’t really feel that way to me. I don’t recall having been any less satisfied by food 10 or 20 years ago than I am today. (If, when I was 20, a time-traveling chef from 2022 had appeared in my kitchen with a satchel full of cotton-candy grapes and other groceries of the future, the food would not have been the thing that changed my life.) It also seems a little odd to claim that something artful—as cooking surely is—could or would become more perfect over time. A chef’s tools and raw materials have improved, but so have those of painters, writers, and musicians. We don’t say that painting is better than it’s ever been before, just because we have better pigments and a more diverse array of brushes. We don’t argue that we’re reading better novels, just because they can be written and edited more easily than they were before computers. Why do we revere pictures drawn 100 years ago as at least the equal of today’s, and yet we laugh at “Jell-O salad with grated onion and seafood”? Serious question!

Amanda Mull: There has probably never been a better time in American history to be a home cook. Saahil is correct that the number and variety of ingredients available at the average grocery store have expanded mightily over the past several decades, as have sources of inspiration and instruction on how to use flavors that are novel to you. Food media online and on TV are as vast and robust as they have ever been, and restaurants serving Thai or Indian or Greek food are now a common part of the culinary landscape in much of the country. Immigration patterns, technological advances in food manufacturing, and a globalized supply chain have changed the American palate over the past 50 years or so, and largely for the better. To use Dan’s metaphor of food as a creative pursuit akin to art: Painting did get better—more vivid, more evocative, more affecting—when more and better hues became available for use by painters in the first half of the 18th century.

Whether all of that means this year’s Thanksgiving dinner is likely to be the best you’ve ever had is a little less obvious to me. As important as population-level changes are, home cooking is still personal and idiosyncratic, and that’s even more true when you’re contending with the deep nostalgia of something like Thanksgiving, where certain recipes remain sacrosanct within families far beyond any objective capacity they might have to delight the palate. An objective third party might pick Bon Appétit’s green-bean casserole, which includes fresh mushrooms and a béchamel base, over your grandmother’s version, which uses canned cream-of-mushroom soup, but you might prefer Grandma’s because it reminds you of childhood. You might even find the implication that Thanksgiving needs to be gussied up kind of annoying, and you’d be well within your rights.

[Read: This Thanksgiving, remember the curse of ham]

Dan begins to get at something that I think is true: Our enjoyment of food is highly predicated on our expectations of what we’re about to eat. That means people 50 years ago probably didn’t enjoy their Thanksgiving meals any less than you will enjoy yours, but it also means your judging criteria for maximum Thanksgiving enjoyment are probably different from those you’d use to judge a trendy new restaurant.

That Thanksgiving is a family holiday is central to how difficult it is to divine its overall trajectory. Trends are largely the province of the young, and Thanksgiving authority tends to pass generationally—if your family celebration is still ruled by the same people who were in charge of the meal in the 1980s, then it might not look a whole lot different today than it did then, even if most members of the family don’t really love what’s on the table. The Coca-Cola–sweetened Jell-O salad did not exit my own family Thanksgiving, for example, until the grandmother who made it every year died.

The opposite can also be true: American food culture rests on numerous regional and ethnic food subcultures, and some of them have never had any issue creating food that would pass muster with today’s omnivores. If you come from a family where previous generations really knew what they were doing in the kitchen—and whose food culture is itself partly responsible for the overall improvement of American food—then your own attempts at Grandma’s collards or lasagna might not be up to snuff.

Saahil Desai: Okay, Dan, so if food and art are one and the same, I’ll be coming over to your place tonight for liver-sausage pineapple and ham-and-bananas hollandaise. Of course these foods are exactly and undoubtedly the same as a Mark Rothko print you might have hanging in your home. I have no doubt that Americans in the ’50s genuinely and earnestly enjoyed their time of Jell-O everything, but can’t we acknowledge that while also saying food as a whole is just better now? Grandpa Murray was right!

Food to me seems to exist in some weird purgatory between art and technology: Trends are real, but the ingredient boom and rise of food science really have changed things, especially for people who don’t have ties to “traditional” Thanksgiving food. Take my parents, who immigrated from India in the ’80s, and have no nostalgic lust for sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows. Now that there is a bounty of Indian grocery stores in Ohio, where they live, they’re able to make what, for them, is a tastier Thanksgiving meal than 40 years ago.

[Read: Thanksgiving’s most underrated food]

Even if some people are still eating antiquated recipes like Coca-Cola–sweetened Jell-O salad, the meal still does change over the years—just as it has in your family, Amanda. And I don’t think we can underrate how median cooking techniques have improved. The whole reason turkey has a reputation as dry is because people have been cooking it wrong. Let’s say in 1950 you gave a group of 100 Americans a Kenji López-Alt recipe for perfectly cooked, succulent turkey. I have a very hard time not believing that, conservatively, at least 75 percent of people would prefer it to the rubbery nonsense that dominated then.

Engber: Okay, let’s really talk about Jell-O for a moment—the jiggly elephant in the room. Everyone has mentioned Jell-O, and for good reason: It’s the emblem of the midcentury “bad food” baseline from which we’ve allegedly diverged. (It sounds like in Amanda’s family, the Jell-O–based Thanksgiving dish amounted to an exercise of cruel, gerontocratic power.) But Jell-O was itself a product of progressive and enlightened thinking about food, a tool of “scientific cookery” as the practice was understood by the early 20th century’s version of the Cook’s Illustrated crowd. We love to pat ourselves on the back for roasting our brussels sprouts instead of boiling them; we sing the praises of the Maillard reaction. (Side point, but is there any scientist in history more overrated than Louis Maillard?) Yet a different era had a different set of values, and Jell-O satisfied them.

The culinary values of that time weren’t necessarily worse than ours, nor were they more abstemious. They were simply different, in a way that optimized a different set of pleasures. Jell-O is, if nothing else, a source of fun. Where is the fun, the whimsy, the jiggly delight in our menus for Thanksgiving 2022? We’ve abolished it in favor of more modern (and dispiriting) food idols: authenticity and healthfulness. What a drag.

Mull: I think that what you two are arguing isn’t mutually exclusive. To me, it’s pretty inarguable that greater ingredient availability and food variety is a rising tide that lifts most boats and makes it easier for people from many different backgrounds to riff on Thanksgiving with foods and flavors that are as nostalgic in their families as stuffing and cranberry sauce are for many white Americans. And for younger Americans, white and non-, who have grown up eating pho and vindaloo and barbacoa, their opportunity to take the reins on Thanksgiving means that the holiday’s average menu is likely to improve—to become more delicious and exciting and flavorful—over time.

I disagree with Dan’s notion that Thanksgiving fun has been replaced by the false idols of authenticity and healthfulness. The food seems as rich and decadent as ever to me (I say that as the person in charge of the baked mac and cheese at my Thanksgiving, and as someone who lived through the low-fat nonsense of the ’80s and ’90s). If anything, our newly fecund grocery stores hold the possibility of not taking capital-T Thanksgiving Traditions so seriously. Why not brine the turkey in soy, ginger, and garlic? Why not get some crunch into the meal with turmeric-roasted chickpeas?

[Read: The correct time to eat Thanksgiving dinner]

But the argument that different eras had different values and different expectations is, I think, a reasonable one! People cook and eat to suit their palates, and Americans of the 1950s grew up developing different palates from most people today. The variety and flavorfulness that Americans embrace today would be overwhelming, probably to the point of disgust, for people who have completely different expectations of food.

Desai: So here’s the thing: It’s really easy to lose sight of just how much food has changed in the past decade, let alone the past 40 or 50 years. Perhaps I sound like a freshman econ major who just read The World Is Flat, but consider this: Even in the late 1940s, most Americans had not tried pizza. Pizza!!! The honeynut squash I’m roasting tonight is basically like an adorable shrunken butternut with a sweeter, more concentrated flavor. Even five years ago, it was next to impossible to find outside of farmers’ markets in the Northeast. I just got mine from a Whole Foods in suburban Ohio. Again, averages, averages, averages. I have no doubt that some people cook the same Thanksgiving meal and derive the same pleasure from it year after year, and good for them. But what matters here is the country en masse. For people who want to experiment, who for whatever reason can’t or don’t want to eat the same old Thanksgiving staples, how can we deny that the holiday has gotten way tastier? A dry turkey with jiggly cranberry sauce is hardly peak home-cooking performance. Americans can avoid it now, and avoid it I shall.

Engber: Ah, the blessed honeynut: There’s truly never been a better time to be alive! The strength of your argument, as of Amanda’s, is that it’s thoughtful and nuanced. The weakness of your argument, as of Amanda’s, is that it’s wrong.

So now we can buy more kinds of squash. Great. That’s clearly better than not being able to buy more kinds of squash. But another evolutionary pathway has pushed us in just the opposite direction, away from the buy-anything-at-any-time mentality that you’ve both touted as an objective boon for modern cooking. In 1994, Florence Fabricant wrote about the trend among chefs of using only fresh and local ingredients, in place of making, say, tomato salads through the winter. “It’s a very old idea that suddenly seems radically new,” she claimed.

[Read: How to engineer the optimally delicious Thanksgiving plate]

So did the radical ascendance of seasonal dishes 30 years ago make food “better” than it was before? Did cooking get better when we got more ingredient diversity, or did it improve when we started using less of it? Maybe—just maybe—it’s not so much the quality of our food that changes over time, but its fashions.

Mull: The important factor here is not just that America’s grocery stores have more foods and ingredients in absolute numbers, but that much of what we have is also better than it would have been 30 or 40 years ago. From 1994 to 2019, for example, the number of American farmers’ markets almost quintupled. These gains—plus the increased availability of high-quality pantry staples and international foods, and better information about how to use ingredients—are not enough to improve every individual Thanksgiving. Good food tends to be expensive, and millions of Americans lack reliable access to any fresh food. But on average, they seem like enough to say that the American diet has become more delicious.

Few meals in the country’s food culture are as heavily predicated on nostalgia as Thanksgiving. It makes sense that the menu would change more slowly than the rest of our national eating habits, but also that younger people with different palates will grow up to create their own familial expectations in their kids, and eventually their grandkids. Are those meals better, from a strictly food-centric standpoint? Probably, but not uniformly. And your grandkids, too, might eventually find Grandma’s gochujang-glazed carrots a little old-fashioned, or abandon the age-old green-bean casserole that you cherish.

There’s only one Thanksgiving tradition that I feel sure will remain in perpetuity: No future generation will find a better way to cook a turkey than to deep-fry it in a vat of peanut oil in the driveway, and no matter how many times they’re warned, every year, a couple of dads will chuck a frozen turkey into that oil and make the local news by burning the house down. Things change, but not everything.

Put Your Face in Airplane Mode

2022-07-19T11:13:18-04:00

My time on Delta Airlines 5308, seat 17B, sent my cortisol levels through the roof. Because of “bad weather” and “air traffic,” the departure time got pushed back … and again … and again. As we sat on the JFK tarmac for a solid two hours, a maskless woman directly in front of me didn’t stop coughing. They were sputtering, throaty noises like nothing I have heard before: Less your usual ack and more like huh-khleagggghhh. Since getting vaccinated, I haven’t exactly built my life around avoiding COVID—but still, I’d rather not get sick. And this flight, scheduled for a Wednesday evening in early June, felt more stressful than it had to be.

I did not end up getting COVID, though perhaps I got lucky. Mask wearing is no longer required by major airlines in the U.S., and as anyone who has flown recently can tell you, even in a month of crowded summer travel and the rapid spread of BA.5, Americans are done with masks. “Since the mask mandate ended, I’ve flown to Europe, I’ve flown to New York, I’ve flown to Dallas–Fort Worth, and I’ve flown to a couple more places,” Henry Harteveldt, an airline-industry analyst, told me last month. “Depending on the destination, as little as 20 percent of passengers are wearing masks.”

[Read: Is BA.5 the reinfection wave?]

I get it. Masking up for many hours on a flight is, to use a technical term, a pain. Enduring the discomfort of wearing a mask for the sake of lowering your risk, and everybody else’s, is a tough ask, especially when the risk of getting COVID seems unlikely to abate anytime soon. But what if I told you that there’s a third option here—a way to split the difference between going bare-faced on a plane and never taking off that N95? And that this strategy lets you nearly max out your COVID protection with just a tiny fraction of the annoyance?

Here’s the cheat code: Instead of masking up for your whole flight, just cover up at the start and end of it. Those crucial few minutes—first when you’re boarding the plane, and then after you’ve landed—account for only a sliver of your travel time, but they are by far the riskiest for breathing in viral particles.

Everyone already knows to switch off cellphone service when their flight is about to leave the gate, and then to turn it on the second they’ve landed. Something like the same principle could work for masking, too. Call it “airplane mode” for your face: Keep your mask in place until your plane is in the air, and then put it on again after you land. Otherwise, you’re free to breathe about the cabin.

A commercial flight might seem like the scariest possible setup for super-spreading COVID: Hundreds of strangers who have been God-knows-where over the past few days cram into a metal tube for hours on end. In such quarters, and given current infection rates, you’re very likely to have at least one sick person on board. Indeed, people have caught the virus while on planes, especially on flights without mask mandates. On one trip from London to Hanoi in early March 2020, a sick passenger in business class wound up spreading COVID to 14 travelers and one crew member. But your chances of getting sick don’t stay the same during the course of the flight, Joseph Allen, a Harvard public-health professor who studies ventilation, told me. When the plane is at cruising altitude, the risk will be at its lowest.

That’s because planes are equipped with virus-zapping ventilation systems that put schools, restaurants, and other places to shame. About half of the stale, germ-laden air gets flushed out of the plane as the engines suck in more air from outside, and the other half gets recycled through HEPA filters. No other indoor spot that people typically frequent rivals that level of ventilation: In a home, the air gets refreshed every three hours. In a bank, it’s every 45 minutes. In a hospital operating room, it’s at least every five minutes. On airplanes, that cycle takes as little as two minutes.

But these primo ventilation systems aren’t always on, and they’re not always operating at full blast. To cut down on fuel costs and exhaust emissions—at least before the pandemic—pilots often shut off the ventilation system while planes are at the gate, Dan Freeman, a safety-management systems expert at Boeing, told me. A passenger can sometimes feel that difference in real time: Maybe it’s a bit hot and muggy when you first get on board; then the lights flicker for a second and you hear the engine come to life, followed by a rush of cool air from the AC vent above you. To make matters worse, passengers jam together in the aisles during the hot and muggy phase, huffing and puffing out aerosols as they strain to lift their bags into overhead bins.

Even on the ground, with a plane’s jet engines offline, pilots can use other methods to power ventilation systems. And in the early days of COVID, airlines claimed that they were making the most of them. In July 2020, for example, United vowed to “maximize air flow volume and recirculation of cabin air for passengers from the moment they step onboard.” But it’s not clear whether such measures are here to stay. Representatives for Delta, United, American, and Southwest all told me that, yes, they’re still piping in fresh air while their planes are on the ground. (Spirit did not respond to a request for comment.) Anecdotal evidence is not as promising. In recent months, passengers armed with pocket-size monitors that gauge ventilation have tweeted out images of readings during boarding and disembarking that might indicate the presence of stale air. When a Bloomberg reporter ferried around one of these monitors for several weeks’ worth of travel in April, she found that some of the highest readings of carbon dioxide occurred on airplanes, specifically as she was boarding. (The benefits of HEPA filters would not show up on these monitors.) “It seems wildly variable,” Allen told me. “I don’t think we know what airlines are doing or not doing and why it varies from one plane to the next and one airport to the next.”

So we shouldn’t think about airplane masking as an all-or-nothing binary, where you’re either sucking fabric for eight hours straight or giving up on masking altogether. Covering up for the minutes at the very start and very end of a flight makes a big, big difference. When the plane is stopped, definitely put that mask on; in the air, it’s okay to peel it off. “Wearing your mask during those critical periods is a way to drop the risk of flying,” Allen said, making it “lower than any other part of your trip.”

Let me show you how to put your face in airplane mode. The first step is making sure that you have an N95 or something equivalent. (A baggy cloth mask that’s two years old does not cut it.) Then, keep that mask in place at the very least until your plane leaves the gate. “We’ll get the most bang for our buck with mask wearing if we do it during boarding and deplaning,” Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech, told me. You can also choose to wait a little while longer before you take it off, just to make sure that the ventilation system has time to cycle out every bit of standing air. Five to 10 extra minutes should do the trick, Marr said. Or, if you can stand it, keep the mask on until your flight hits cruising altitude. That’s when the plane’s ventilation reaches peak performance, Joshua Santarpia, an aerosol expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told me. He said that when you’re safe to use your laptop, you’re safe to unmask.

Putting your face in airplane mode won’t make sense for everyone. If the guy sitting next to you makes a stray comment about how he can’t smell anything today, even fully active cabin ventilation may not prevent contagion. And if you’re unvaccinated, elderly, or immunocompromised, any number of hours of prolonged masking might be more than worth the inconvenience.

But for Americans who are burned out on endless masking, this approach has the upside of being eminently doable. Let’s crunch the numbers: The average domestic flight distance in the U.S. is 905 miles, and usually takes at least two hours. Boarding and deplaning together take about 50 minutes, on average, Harteveldt said. If you’re masking only then, you’ll be free and clear for more than 70 percent of your trip. Naturally, the math gets even better for international, long-haul flights. On a trip from New York to Singapore, one of the longest commercial flights in the world, you might spend 17 hours—or 93 percent percent of the journey—unmasked, with just a marginal increase to your risk of getting sick.

Ideally, this could be an official airline rule. Maybe Delta gate attendants would hand you a cute Keep Climbing–stamped N95 when they scanned your ticket, and then you’d see a little mask logo above your cabin row, next to the seat-belt sign that dings when turbulence hits. I asked Airlines for America, the industry’s trade group, if it would consider supporting a very limited masking policy of this kind. “We are pleased that the CDC has lifted pandemic-era restrictions—including mask and pre-departure testing requirements—in accordance with science and research,” a spokesperson told me in an email.

For now, airplane mode is a choice, but it’s an easy one to make. The practice will be useful in this summer of BA.5, but also in the future when COVID case rates are much lower. SARS-CoV-2 is not the only airborne virus, of course, and though we don’t go into full lockdown over the flu or common colds, a few basic precautionary measures may still be worth the cost. In 1977, an Alaska Airlines flight sat on the tarmac in Homer, Alaska, for three hours to sort out an engine problem. Within three days, 72 percent of the passengers had come down with the flu. Maybe if people’s faces had been in airplane mode that day in Homer, a super-spreader event would have been avoided. “Do I enjoy wearing a mask in public? Yeah, not even a little bit. But I hate being sick,” Santarpia said. “So if it’s flu season, am I going to wear a mask on the airplane? Yeah, you’re damn right I’m going to.”

Uber Pool Is a Zombie

2022-07-05T14:41:00-04:00

In the end, Uber Pool had to go. By mid-March 2020, chunks of America were already in lockdown, AMC had boarded up its movie theaters, and the country’s toilet-paper reserves were getting wiped out. The novel coronavirus was here, and sharing rides with strangers in a different stranger’s car had become yet another part of life upended by the pandemic. “If you must travel” using any of Uber’s other options, the company made sure to note on March 17, the day it officially disabled the pooling feature on its app, “please keep your driver’s well-being in mind by washing your hands before and after entering the vehicle.”

Before the pandemic, shared rides (both from Uber Pool and its biggest competitor, Lyft Line) were an inescapable part of urban life for the professional class. They were the dive bar of ride hailing: always cheap, mostly chaotic. But while just about every other mode of transportation has long since returned—goodbye masks on planes, hello cruise ships—Uber Pool has been nowhere to be found. Yes, people can still order Ubers for themselves, but the drama (and the very occasional joy) of schlepping across town while avoiding eye contact with two other Poolers has vanished.

[Read: Will Uber and Lyft become different things?]

Until now … kind of. I guess? A couple weeks ago, the ride-hailing juggernaut debuted its new take on pooled rides, “UberX Share,” in nine American cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. The name is different and worse, and so are the deals. Uber Pool would give you a flat-rate discount before booking, up to 50 percent cheaper than just riding solo. With UberX Share, there’s lots of fine print: Riders get a tiny deal up front and then up to 20 percent off if you match with another rider along the way (and that match can only be with a single rider).

It’s different because it has to be. Uber Pool showed us just how cheap ride-hailing could get, but its return is not a time machine so much as a reminder of how much less wallet-friendly the gig economy is these days. Chalk it up to high gas prices, weird market forces, Uber being Uber, or a little bit of everything, but the ride that cost $20 in early 2019 now runs $30. The service has been warped into something else entirely, and it’s not clear at all that people want to take the plunge.

On Sunday, June 26, I embarked upon a grand ride-hailing voyage, spending my afternoon and evening taking five separate trips around New York City. Not only did my rides fail to involve other passengers, but my drivers all told me they had yet to take any rider in a shared Uber that actually was, well, shared. I was stumped: If any day would have been paradise for Uber Pool as we once knew it, it would look a lot like the day of New York City’s Pride march, which fell this year on the day of my expedition. Pride draws in millions of mostly young revelers, surely some of whom, I figured, would just find it easier to hop into the nearest Uber pool instead of braving clogged subway cars.

At first, when I fired up the Uber app, it seemed like I was onto something: On the map showing all the Ubers around me, each car was lit up in a rainbow flag, and Fares are slightly higher due to increased demand flashed across my screen. For the first leg of my journey, I set off for Prospect Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood about a mile north of my home. After a seven-minute wait (and a $14 charge), Fazal Khan and his black Prius rolled up to my doorstep. It had all the funkiness of the Uber Pool of yore, updated for pandemic times: A “Black Ice”–scented tree freshener swung from his rearview mirror, and Khan was wearing a red bandanna over his face with a surgical mask he had pulled on top. The backseat was empty before I climbed in, but Khan seemed like exactly the type of driver who would have already done lots of UberX Shares: He drives 10-hour shifts seven days a week, he told me, taking breaks only to grab pushcart burgers and down cups of coffee. “Not Starbucks,” he said, “always street coffee.” I was quickly disappointed. As we zoomed up Seventh Avenue, all I got was this: “People aren’t taking shared rides,” he said.

Well, okay then. Alas, the same thing kept happening. I crossed over to Lower Manhattan, made my way up to Murray Hill, then bounced down to the Lower East Side, forlornly staring at the empty passenger seats beside me and waiting for my Uber app to announce I’d been rerouted somewhere out of the way. Striking out wasn’t cheap—some of my rides came out to $20 for a couple of miles, virtually the same cost as just taking a traditional Uber. But at least I did get more time to chat with drivers, who seemed decidedly blasé about the return of Uber Pool. The only thing worse than one drunk passenger, it turns out, is two. One Uber driver who didn’t speak much English called his wife on speakerphone so she could let me know that I was his first-ever UberX Share. When I pestered another driver about UberX Share, he insisted that he’d never even heard of the service before.

By the time the gray Hyundai that would take me back home to Brooklyn circled past a solid three times, I had lost $87 and any hope of finding another pool-er. Opting for UberX Share had saved me a grand total of $12.45, which obviously isn’t nothing, but also isn’t even in the same stratosphere of deals that made Uber Pool so popular. Taking the same five Uber Pools in February 2020 would have shaved down my total fares by about $32, according to my own calculations of data from the research firm YipitData. If I had gotten even a few truly shared rides, the difference presumably wouldn’t be so stark, but then again, I hadn't gotten any truly shared rides.

[Read: The servant economy]

My rides were just a tiny experiment, on their own no grand evidence that UberX Share is a flop. But so far, I haven’t been able to find much else that suggests otherwise. Sergio Avedian, an Uber driver based in L.A. who is a senior contributor to the blog The Rideshare Guy (which has no affiliation with Uber), told me that about 40 percent of his rides used to be Uber Pool. Last week, he went hunting for UberX Share passengers, working 20 rides in total, so he could write about it. He got just one UberX Share request (which, naturally, was not shared). Passengers could be thinking that “the initial discount [on UberX Share] is so small, I might as well just be by myself,” Avedian said. The prices appear to have the service stuck in ride-hailing purgatory: not cheap enough to draw back Uber Pool’s core constituency of college students and underemployed 20-somethings, and too much of a pain for those who can afford the luxury of a solo trip.

Perhaps with some algorithm tweaks and a bit of marketing jiu-jitsu, we’ll all soon be UberX Sharing everywhere. That’s certainly Uber’s vision: A spokesperson told me in an email, “While it’s early and customers are just becoming familiar with the new rides offering, we’re happy with the levels of driver and rider engagement we’re seeing throughout the country.” The spokesperson declined to share specific ridership data, and said that Uber plans on expanding the service to other cities in the coming weeks and months.

But relative to the cultural impact Uber Pool left behind—it became the subject of memes and late-night skits—this relaunch feels like a dud. It’s not Uber’s fault, exactly. If Pool felt too good to be true back in the 2010s, that’s because it was. Uber has the scale and visibility that any start-up would die for, but it does not have the most basic thing that matters: profitability. A big part of the problem is that ride-hailing broke the rules of Econ 101. Every time you called a car, Uber lost money on that ride—the company has reportedly lost hundreds of millions on pooled rides alone each year, and $30 billion in total over the past five years. A torrent of venture-capital money filled in the gap, fueling what my colleague Derek Thompson has called the “Millennial lifestyle subsidy.”

Now the spigot has dried up, and the shared rides we used to have are gone. (Lyft recently relaunched its own pooled-rides service, and like Uber, the company is in a rough place economically.) “If you ask me how optimistic I am about the viability of Uber Pool, I would say that it was really hard to be viable before COVID,” Gad Allon, a Wharton professor who studies the gig economy, told me. This version of Uber Pool might be a little more sustainable—giving riders a sliver of a discount while also not eating so much into Uber’s bottom line. That still might not be enough. “I’m not confident that it can be viable at all even after that,” Allon said.

[Read: The end of the millennial lifestyle subsidy]

At first, my long and lonely journey got me all wistful about the Uber Pool we lost. That, I realized, is wrong: UberX Share reveals the whole house of cards that held up those cheap rides all along. The company has brought back shared rides, but it can’t bring back everything that made them so appealing in the first place. When I asked my string of Uber drivers what they thought about the old Uber Pool, everyone who was driving then had the same take: It was a hellscape. Drivers got stuck with circuitous routes cooked up by the Uber algorithm, protracted waiting times, and unhappy customers inclined to give bad ratings. “This one is going to be much better for the driver than Uber Pool,” Alkely Keita, the driver of an enormous black SUV, told me—and thus, much worse for the rider. Not necessarily a bad trade-off, but only if it lasts.

It’s a Great Time to Hoard Nickels

2022-03-18T11:57:00-04:00

In economic-speak, the Ukraine crisis has been a “supply shock.” In English, that means that in the United States you’ll now find record-high gas prices, liquor stores devoid of Russian vodka, and … uhh … Americans heading into their local banks and politely asking for hundreds of dollars in nickels.

Let me explain. Russia supplies more than 20 percent of the world’s high-quality nickel, which is a crucial component in everything from stainless steel to pipes to the batteries that power electric cars. But with Ukraine under siege, companies in the West have been wary of buying Russian nickel. This has increased demand for nickel from everywhere else, which, in turn, has bumped up its price on the London Metal Exchange. What happened next is as close to a Hollywood blockbuster as commodity finance can get: A Chinese businessman nicknamed “Big Shot,” who bet that nickel prices would fall, had to cover his mounting losses by buying back shares, shooting the stock somewhere into the exosphere. Within the span of 24 chaotic hours last week, the price of nickel rose 250 percent, forcing the London Metal Exchange to halt trading for the first time since 1985.

During all of this, of course—of course—some Americans found a roundabout way to make some money: hoarding nickels. Yes, the coin is worth just five cents, but the metal it contains—75 percent copper and 25 percent nickel—has long been worth more than that. According to Coinflation.com, a website that tracks the value of the metals in coins, the “melt value” of a single nickel currently stands at eight cents. Last week, during the height of nickelmania, it ratcheted all the way up to 16 cents. Actually melting down those nickels for profit is illegal, but that hasn’t stopped opportunistic investors from zigzagging between banks and credit unions to gather nickels, with the hopes of one day selling them off for more than five cents. Forget bitcoin and dogecoin; this small community of financial speculators is pouring money into real, physical coins.

Scooping up coins for their metal is, in fact, an age-old tradition. Five-cent nickels were first minted in the 1860s because Americans were squirreling away gold and silver coins during the Civil War. Over the past decade or so, a small but spirited subculture of prepper types has been hoarding nickels as a contingency plan against inflation Armageddon. According to Boomerang, by Michael Lewis, the hedge-fund manager Kyle Bass owns $1 million in nickels that he stores in a vault in Dallas.

Now that nickel prices have gone haywire, hoarding suddenly seems to have hit it big. In pockets across the internet, people are plotting ways to add to their nickel stashes and flaunting their hauls. On Reddit’s Wall Street Silver channel, users who call themselves “apes” (an apparent reference to silverback gorillas, because, you know, silver) are falling deep inside the nickel vortex. One post of a cardboard box plastered with $100 NICKELS is captioned with “I know a guy that works at a bank. He said he had one unopened box of nickels left ...” The top comment: “Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—you got the golden ticket.”

On Realcent.org, the OG forum for coin hoarders, where bitcoin enthusiasts get branded as “crypto-cultists,” all the new competition has been met with a swirl of exasperation, frenzy, and paranoia. “The teller said ‘everyone hates nickels,’” posted a user who claimed to have just snagged some coins from a local bank. “Not for long, HAHA. 🤫” Another hoarder fretted about “the real social threat”: Oprah or a Kardashian tweeting about nickels.

As far as I can tell, most of these hoarders aren’t actually turning a quick profit off of five-cent coins by surreptitiously smelting them down in their backyards. “My plan is just to sit on it and see what happens,” Mark Pacino, a hoarder in the Los Angeles area, told me. “Worst-case scenario, I can just turn it back to cash.” When Pacino heard about all the nickel madness last week, he told me, he called up his bank and asked for $500 in nickels—his first foray into stashing the coins. The branch manager would supply him with only two $100 boxes, each weighing more than 20 pounds. “Everything was like a normal transaction,” he said, “until I went to pick up the nickel and the guy who brought them out from the back was asking me questions like, ‘So, are you a coin collector?’”

Clark Boyles, from West Virginia, had a tougher time at the bank. “I walked up and just told the two ladies at the front, ‘Can I have $100 in nickels?’” he told me. “They laughed me out of the bank.” Nevertheless, Boyles said he’s managed to snag $300 in nickels in recent weeks, and he’s hoping to land $700 more. Like Pacino, Boyles’s long game is to hedge his bets, preparing for a world in which nickel prices are so persistently expensive that he could sell his coins for more than their face value. Bass, the famous hedge-fund manager, declined an interview, but in an email he pointed to his nickel stash—which weighs 220,000 pounds, or by my calculations more than six empty 18-wheelers—as a way to teach his kids “the basic ideas behind central banking and the money printing press. It was an exercise in how the world works and what we, as a family, could do to defend against inflation.”

On the whole, nickel hoarding is still a niche interest. Sherri Reagin, the chief financial officer of Indiana’s North Salem State Bank, who serves on the U.S. Coin Task Force, told me that none of the bank’s nine branches has seen any noticeable increase in requests for nickels. This is probably for the best. No economist I talked with advised pulling out your 401(k) and going all in on nickels. Even so, I was surprised that they said the basic logic holds up. “I’ve thought it over and I’ve decided I’m not going to rush down to my bank and take out $1,000 of nickels,” Terrance Odean, a UC Berkeley finance professor who studies investor behavior, told me. “But of the things people do—I’ve seen a lot crazier.”

What makes nickel hoarding different from so many other shades of investing where your money could go kaput is that five-cent coins will always be five-cent coins, regardless of the value of the nickel they contain. The upside is potentially quite big. The U.S. Mint already lost $61 million by manufacturing nickels last year; maybe one day, the composition of the coins will change, or they’ll be discontinued outright. At that point, the ban on melting down nickels would likely go away too, Odean said. If not, maybe coin collectors—actual coin collectors—would want to start snatching up the newly extinct currency.

Just don’t count on nickel doomsday happening anytime soon. While the pandemic has pushed Americans further away from cold, hard cash, even pennies are still here. “Just given the experience of the penny, I don’t see us getting rid of the nickel anytime soon,” Robert Whaples, an economist at Wake Forest University who has studied the effects of going penny-less, told me. The more fundamental problem is that inflation can cut both ways. If we eventually hit the type of hyperinflation where people light $20 bills on fire to stay warm, then a nickel stash would more than pay for itself, because of the metal’s lingering value. If not, then the slow creep of inflation will just eat away at America’s nickel piggy banks while hoarders manage all the logistical headaches of storing coins in such ungodly quantities. In 2019, the blogger JP Koning crunched the numbers on Bass’s nickel stash and determined that, accounting for storage, forgone interest, and inflation, he was already down roughly $70,000 on his initial $1 million after eight years.

Five-cent coins, after all, will always be five-cent coins. In the 1930s, a nickel could get you a bottle of Coke. In the ’60s, it could get you a stamp. In the ’80s, it could get you a piece of gum. But good luck finding anything for that much these days.

Restaurants Learned the Wrong Pandemic Lessons

2022-03-02T08:00:00-05:00

If you want a sign that Americans are done with the pandemic, you could rummage around for a poll. Such as this one, which suggests that 70 percent of the country thinks it’s time to “get on with our lives.” Or this, in which even more people say they’re burned-out by COVID-19. Or this. Or this. But really, here’s all you need to do: Go look inside your favorite restaurant.

Yes, the coronavirus is still killing nearly 2,000 people a day, and another variant is more a question of when than if. But the post-Omicron sigh of relief has been a godsend for the country’s beleaguered bars and restaurants. By some measures, Americans appear to be more comfortable eating out now than at any other time since March 2020. At various points in the past two weeks, reservations on OpenTable have outpaced even pre-pandemic levels. Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California, perhaps the country’s most famous fine-dining spot, announced last week that it would finally reopen its dining room after two years of hypercautiousness. At the same moment, blue cities such as New York and Chicago, among the last holdouts for widespread safety restrictions, are even dropping their vaccine requirements to dine out.

All of this makes the present a pivotal transition moment for restaurants. Beyond merely struggling to survive, many spots can actually start gearing up for the future and considering what sort of COVID measures and spur-of-the-moment tweaks should stick around for the long haul. On the whole, the restaurant business does seem to have learned a few lessons from all these months of pandemic life. But the problem is that many of these lessons are precisely the wrong ones.

The paradox of eating out during the pandemic is that everything that makes indoor dining fun is also what makes it risky. Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech, laid out the challenges for me: “People cannot be masked,” she said. “They’re sitting there for a long time. It’s crowded. Everyone goes there to talk.” All this nibbling, laughing, and sneezing whips up aerosolized particles of the virus that can linger in the air—turning restaurants into COVID hot spots.

For a while, we’ve known that some straightforward air-quality improvements are plainly the best way to tamp down on some of the risk. Under typical building codes, restaurants have about the same indoor-air standards as other buildings—with more exhaust hoods in the kitchen to handle the smells and fumes. These codes aren’t designed with viruses in mind, and anyway, HVAC systems are rarely monitored to ensure that they’re working as advertised. At one Guangzhou, China, restaurant, an AC unit slingshotted the virus between diners sitting 15 feet apart.

Joseph Allen, the director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings program, told me that in a perfect world, all restaurants would get regular tune-ups to ensure that their HVAC systems are working properly to swap out, dilute, and filter the air. After that, “you want to maximize the amount of outdoor air coming in,” Allen said. Opening some doors and windows helps, but the best play is to have your HVAC setup pump in even more fresh air while a filter (ideally rated MERV-13 or better!) strips away lots of menacing particles.

In some cases, HVAC upgrades are expensive, logistically tough, or just plain time-consuming. Clive Samuels, the president of the HVAC company CoolSys Energy Design, told me that the full ventilation changes that would be ideal for restaurants can run up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, even before you factor in the higher energy costs. But many restaurants don’t need a full overhaul to make a difference, Allen said. Beyond smaller-scale routine tune-ups, restaurants could dot their space with portable HEPA filters, which can retail for less than $100. William Bahnfleth, an architectural engineer at Penn State, envisions one at every table, “like a centerpiece arrangement,” he told me. Meanwhile, new restaurants could design their space keeping ventilation in mind in a way that they simply weren’t before the pandemic. Most restaurants have just one spot in the ceiling where air cycles out, but building in more returns and exits would help stop bad air from spreading around. In larger dining rooms, a matrix of virus-killing UV lights could hang from the ceiling, Bahnfleth said, to clean any remaining stale air. (He has one in his office at Penn State.)

None of these tweaks would completely pandemic-proof a restaurant. If you’re crammed into a bar and have to go hoarse just to mingle with your friend two feet away, no level of ventilation can zap the virus right out of your mouth before it has the chance to do some damage. But a swirl of indoor-air changes “can greatly reduce transmission,” Allen said. “You’re eliminating the potential for super-spreading events: If you have good ventilation, one person in the corner of your restaurant can’t infect someone on the other side of the room.”

[Read: The plan to stop every respiratory virus at once]

Plenty of engineers and public-health experts have been shouting about this for years, because a well-ventilated space isn’t just helpful for COVID purposes; it can also tamp down on other respiratory illnesses such as flu, and potentially even infections from E. coli and staph. Unfortunately, restaurants, just like pretty much every other institution in America, don’t seem to be going all in on ventilation on any sort of meaningful scale. “There’s been lots of discussion and not a lot of action,” Samuels said. Mike Tith, the executive vice president of Sanalife, a company that helps New England restaurants improve their ventilation, was only slightly more optimistic. He estimated that the percentage of businesses in the region that have put in air purifiers is somewhere in the “low double digits.”

Of course exceptions exist, particularly in left-leaning areas full of people who are concerned about the pandemic. Bluestone Lane, a coffee chain with $17 “rainbow bowls,” has installed disinfecting UV lamps in its stores, while Market Steer Steakhouse in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has portable HEPA filters in each of its outdoor-dining domes. One restaurant nestled against the California coast could be in the running for America’s best-ventilated restaurant: It has a revamped HVAC system, 10 standing HEPA purifiers, and 18 tabletop air cleaners. But on the whole, restaurants around the country have largely stuck with pandemic tweaks that are pointless or even counterproductive.

On the beneficial side, in terms of public health, takeout and delivery are so big now that even $30-per-entree joints are offering these options, and some new restaurants are being designed around them, David Henkes, a restaurant-industry analyst at the firm Technomic, told me. “You see a lot more restaurants putting in takeout windows or dedicated areas where a delivery driver or a consumer has a more seamless way to pick up,” he said. Less helpful: You’ll still find plexiglass snaking through dining rooms, even though it’s actively harmful to ventilation efforts. Instead of air purifiers, we have hygiene theater: Some of the outdated cleaning practices from the Purell-your-mail phase of the pandemic still haven’t gone away, Henkes said. The latest operating guide for businesses from the National Restaurant Association, the industry lobbying group, has a lot to say about ventilation, but it also recommends sticking to “contactless payment options” and “touchless hand-sanitizing solutions.”

In the long term, what seems poised to linger are changes that shore up the bottom line for restaurant owners rather than the safety of the actual dining experience. Expect to find fewer menu items, high prices, and noticeably fewer cooks, hosts, and waiters. Pandemic measures intended to minimize interactions between customers and staff seem to be sticking around not because of the pandemic, but because they can be used to cut down on costs. QR-code menus won’t save you from getting COVID, but (sorry!) they’re here to stay, according to a survey from the National Restaurant Association. If everyone wants the ricotta toast, restaurateurs can now hike the price in real time, and just wipe the item off the online menu when they’re all out. In fast-food and fast-casual restaurants, you’ll find a lot more touch-screen kiosks to take your order and a push to order on an app. “The once ‘high touch’ industry with a lot of staff and customer contact is moving to ‘high tech,’” Peter Nyheim, a restaurant consultant, said in an email.

[Read: The pandemic really did change how we tip]

Of course restaurants are twisting “safety” measures into cost-saving ones: After all, this is an industry that has lost 90,000 businesses to the pandemic, while many more are still trying to fully recoup their losses. Restaurants operate with razor-thin profit margins in normal times, so they’re built to eke their way into the black, not reinvent themselves wholesale. A small mom-and-pop might be able to afford 10 tabletop air purifiers, sure, but the incentives to invest in more long-term protective measures beyond what’s either mandated or profitable for the most part simply aren’t there. Stephani Robson, an emeritus Cornell professor who studies the restaurant industry, told me that the pandemic’s biggest lesson for restaurants has been “Be lean.” So far, that very much seems to be what restaurants are doing.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the pandemic has sprouted a garden’s worth of changes in the restaurant business. But this return to whatever “normal” is now hasn’t brought out many improvements that would make restaurants safer—against the inevitable next COVID variant, against a future virus that might strike down the line, against everything. Restaurants could be making better decisions, but so could the rest of us. At every turn, Americans have failed to grasp just how much indoor air matters for this pandemic. HEPA filters would be in every restaurant already if that’s what customers truly wanted, or if governments required them. “It’s business as usual until national codes dictate that you have to have HEPA filters, that you’ve got to make these changes,” Samuels, the HVAC-company president, said.

The quicker we move away from COVID’s crisis phase, the less appetite restaurants—and grocery stores, offices, convention centers, and all other indoor spaces—will have to make the fundamental changes that are necessary to help stop people from getting sick. Tith, of Sanalife, said that businesses already seem to be putting ventilation upgrades “on the back burner” now that Omicron is fading away. So the cycle will start anew: At some point, the virus will take a turn for the worse, and the country will again be unprepared for it. If there was ever a time for America to show that it’s learned something from such a long battle with the pandemic, it would be now.

There’s No Way Americans Will Cancel Their Travel Plans

2021-12-20T17:27:00-05:00

Variants are a little bit like breakups: There’s never a great time for one to strike, but there absolutely are terrible times. With Omicron, it’s hard to imagine a worse possible moment. The promise of this holiday season has long been that Americans would finally get to make up for all the getaways and family reunions that didn’t happen last winter. That’s exactly what Americans have been banking on: The country is entering its biggest travel moment of the entire pandemic.

Omicron introduced itself to the world only a few weeks ago, but it’s made quite an impression. In the United Kingdom, COVID-19 cases hit an all-time record on Thursday. And Friday. There’s much we still don’t know about the new strain, but as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written, we know enough to see that Omicron is about to tear through the United States. Here, Omicron cases are now doubling every two days, and the variant’s contagiousness—and knack for duping our vaccines—is ratcheting up breakthrough infections. Sports leagues have started rescheduling games, restaurants are closing for a little while, and some schools are going remote.

All of this has left many would-be travelers nervously glancing at their calendar and asking themselves another round of terrible pandemic questions: How bad will things be by Christmas? By New Year’s? And when do things get so bad that I need to cancel my holiday plans?

Whether you should travel over the next couple of weeks is not something Americans are getting an easy answer to at the moment. So far, the CDC is plowing forward with the same old guidelines: If you’re fully vaccinated and not experiencing any COVID symptoms, mask up and off you go. Anthony Fauci and other public-health figures, while urging caution with Omicron, have been reluctant to tell people to stay home. Unlike last year, when virtually no one was vaccinated and the CDC point-blank told Americans not to travel, the fuzzy messaging comes in part from the fact that so much now depends on people’s individual situations—whether they’re vaccinated, what precautions they’re taking, and whom they’re going to see. This year, everyone has to make a choice all on their own.

And yet all the signs make it clear that many Americans have already made up their mind. While some number of people might cancel, no matter what happens between now and the thick of the holidays, Omicron almost definitely will not compel a critical mass of people to change their travel plans. So if you are traveling, you can take several steps to make it as safe for everyone as possible.

[Read: We know enough about Omicron to know that we’re in trouble]

Thanks to Omicron, international jet-setters now have to navigate more travel restrictions, quarantine mandates, and testing rules. But beyond that, almost no evidence shows that Americans are rushing to change any plans. I fired up the TSA’s tracker of how many travelers are passing through its checkpoints each day, and airports are even busier now than pre-Omicron. “If you decide today that you want to travel in the U.S. for Christmas, you’re going to be seeing eye-popping airfares almost everywhere,” Henry Harteveldt, a travel-industry analyst at Atmosphere Research Group, told me. “Depending on where you’re going, the hotel prices or the rental-car rates may be through the roof. All of that is a sign that people really, really want to travel right now.”

United Airlines has said that it ferried 400,000 passengers a day during the Thanksgiving rush, and now it’s planning on even more for the year-end holidays. Meanwhile, the flight-search site Kayak saw a slight Omicron dip in searches within the U.S. when we first learned about the variant, but while the news has gotten only more worrying, searches are already back to where they were in late November.

For anyone who has been persuaded by Omicron to forgo holiday gatherings, airlines have stuck with the more flexible cancellation policies that popped up at the start of the pandemic, Harteveldt said. Most airlines won’t refund your money, but they’ll give you a voucher to use sometime in the future. That at least gives people some wiggle room if Omicron takes a turn for the worse and the CDC makes a last-minute plea for everyone to stay at home. (When I reached out to the CDC for comment on what would need to happen for the agency to come out against holiday travel, a spokesperson sent me back to the travel guidelines on the CDC website.)

Even so, Omicron is making its charge precisely at the moment when many Americans are heading off on their trips—and exactly when they’re least likely to endure the headache of fiddling with their plans. “Very few people are going to cancel the day before the flight,” says Scott Keyes, the founder of the travel website Scott’s Cheap Flights. “At this point, if we haven’t seen a wave of cancellations yet for Christmas—which we haven’t—I would expect that most people are still going to continue to take whatever holiday travel plans they already have on the books.”

The same goes for people who are planning on driving to their gatherings—which is how the overwhelming majority of Americans travel. Of everyone who travels at least 50 miles during the holiday season, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics estimates that just 5 percent fly. Paula Twidale, a senior vice president of AAA travel, told me that AAA is expecting 100 million travelers on the road during the holidays, just a sliver less than in 2019, which she called a “banner year” for travel.

Let’s be clear: That so many Americans seem poised to travel doesn’t mean it’s the right call. “I rather suspect that Omicron will take over from Delta across much if not most of the country during the Christmas period,” Bill Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, told me in an email. “And in January we will reap whatever whirlwind got seeded along with the eggnog.”

Just like before Omicron, however, the risk of travel has less to do with the act itself and more to do with how people from different households behave before they all meet up. You could take every precaution possible in getting to your grandma’s house halfway across the country, but if you packed into a bar the night before the trip and don’t plan on getting tested before you see her, you’re missing the point. Before you head out for the holidays, says Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at George Mason University, give yourself a cool-down period—a week, if still possible—by pulling back on activities that are especially prone to spreading COVID, such as indoor dining. If you work in person, wear a high-quality, non-cloth mask, and stick to wearing it as best as you can.

A. Marm Kilpatrick, a disease ecologist at UC Santa Cruz, is having his mom and sister over for the holidays, and he just made the unenviable decision of forgoing a sauna party that his friend was throwing. (Kilpatrick has cooler friends than I do.) “We were going to be tightly packed enough that I didn’t want to do that with three or four other households,” he told me. Kilpatrick reiterated the basics of Omicron 101: Get boosted! If you haven’t yet, it’s not too late. Because a booster shot kicks in more quickly than initial doses, you can get a shot today and receive the best Christmas present ever: a tangible immunity bump.

[Read: Fully vaccinated is about to mean something else]

How you travel also is less important than what you do en route. Driving gives you some control over your environment, but be wary of making pit stops to eat indoors and bringing along people from outside your household. Thanks to ventilation in airplanes, flying hasn’t been so risky throughout the pandemic. “But that doesn’t mean we should overcorrect and feel like the risk of being on an airplane is zero,” Popescu told me. “You still want to be mindful of the people right next to you.” That’s especially true now that planes are as full as they were pre-pandemic. If the passenger next to you has their mask off to eat or drink, Popescu said, wait a few minutes until after they’re done to do the same. Turning the overhead AC on full blast and pointing it toward your face can help disperse any bits of the virus that are floating around. And particularly with a more transmissible variant, it’s worth being even more cautious in less ventilated areas, such as when you’re sitting by the gate or lingering on the jet bridge.

Think hard about whom you’ll be seeing once you arrive, especially if your plans include older, immunocompromised, or unvaccinated people. Conversations about pandemic risk can sometimes be awkward, but they can be a good place to start: “A lot of this comes down to: Is the person you’re visiting vulnerable, and how do you feel about that?” Popescu said. “How do they feel about that?” If you’re going to be spending a lot of time indoors with someone who is vulnerable, Kilpatrick said it’s best to bring along at-home rapid tests—the ones you can buy at the pharmacy—for each day of your visit, especially if you have any inklings of COVID symptoms. Because Omicron appears to make people sick even more quickly than previous forms of the coronavirus did, don’t bank on a test result from a few days ago. “If I had a dinner party to go to on Christmas and took a rapid test 15 minutes before the party,” Kilpatrick said, “that’s going to catch a huge fraction of infections.” (Unfortunately, these tests don’t come cheap, and they’re in serious short supply right now.)

Even if Omicron had come at a less terrible time, it wouldn’t have changed the fatigue that Americans are feeling right now. Over time, the link between what’s going on with COVID and how we act about it is weakening, says David Lazer, a political scientist at Northeastern University who’s involved with the COVID States Project. “The problem is that we’ve become habituated,” he told me. When the Delta wave tore through the South, it led to only an incremental bump in protective measures such as mask wearing. Now, Lazer said, Omicron could potentially lead to even tinier changes.

But the pandemic is still here—more than 800,000 Americans are dead—and it is not ending anytime soon. Relish the holiday season, but don’t use it as an excuse to let your guard down going forward as Omicron gears up for its next twist and turn. Americans might be over the pandemic, but the pandemic is certainly not over us.