It’s the golden age of AI slop, Charlie Warzel argues: AI slop rip-off books; “workslop,” in the form of bad emails and lifeless memos; slop in schoolwork, Spotify playlists, and TikTok feeds. “There is no realm of life that is unsloppable,” Warzel writes. theatln.tc/B9gNvH2o
“Synthetic content is not exactly new, but lately it has become a load-bearing part of the internet,” Warzel continues. “For instance, the SEO company Graphite recently found that, beginning around November 2024, the internet experienced a slop tipping point, in which the quantity of AI-generated articles being published on the web surpassed the quantity of articles written by humans.”
Announcing Sora 2, Open AI’s new app that features a TikTok-style feed of AI-generated content, the CEO Sam Altman wrote that “creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion” as a result of the tool. “The fact that you will be able to have an entire piece of software created just by explaining your idea is going to be incredible for humans getting great new stuff,” he said on a podcast.
Videos featuring the Sora 2 watermark include a man in a kitchen putting the Pokémon character Pikachu in a sous-vide machine, and a perfectly rendered fake ’90s toy commercial for a “Jeffrey Epstein’s Island” play set.
The idea is that Sora 2 “removes an enormous amount of friction between conception and completion in the creative process,” Warzel writes. “Ideas and imagination are universal to the human experience, but execution is learned, the result of energy and time spent to develop the skills necessary to bring an idea into the world. Altman’s definition of creativity seems to elide this second element altogether—so much so that it appears to be an animating principle behind most of OpenAI’s tools … What Altman is describing is a world of creativity without craft.”
“To live through this moment is to feel that some essential component of our shared humanity is being slowly leached out of the world,” Warzel continues.
American students are falling behind, and the most common explanations overlook the main problem, Idrees Kahloon argues. theatln.tc/jMK9nSDc
“The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education,” Kahloon writes. At the start of the century, American students steadily improved in math and reading. This progress began to stall around 2013—and then backslid dramatically. Test scores released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders and 40 percent of fourth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic.”
“The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it,” Kahloon writes. Some progressives blame insufficient spending, but school spending has not declined in the period when students have fallen behind. In fact, it has increased. Another theory is that smartphones are to blame. Although this hypothesis matches the timeline, it has other holes: Performance is declining for children of all ages, even those in elementary school, who are less likely to have smartphones. And even though smartphone use is almost universal among older kids, high-achieving students are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses.
“But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance,” Kahloon writes: “a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.”
When her grandmother died after a long illness, in Jaljulia—a small Palestinian town in Israel, near the West Bank—Reem Kassis was thousands of miles away, in her Pennsylvania kitchen. At the news, she struggled with how to process: “one peaceful death compared with the thousands of violent deaths happening in Gaza; a woman who lived nearly nine decades compared with the children suffering from malnutrition and starvation who might not live nine years; a death witnessed by family compared with entire families erased, no one left to carry their names.” theatln.tc/wo7QdyXB
“A name exists for this reflex: disenfranchised grief,” Kassis writes. “It is mourning that may feel unearned, inappropriate, underacknowledged, or too small for the world’s attention.”
“Grief never exists in a vacuum,” Kassis continues. “For most Palestinians, since 1948 and what Arabs call the Nakba (‘catastrophe,’ in English) … our private sorrows have been refracted through the lens of the public pain we carry. Usually I, like many Palestinians, can carry both personal and collective losses. But in this moment, which finds me living in relative safety as so much of Gaza has been razed, the scale of atrocity has left no room. My grief from witnessing what has been done to my people is so vast, so relentless, that sadness over my grandmother’s death feels like something too indulgent.”
Video and images since the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, and since Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, have deepened that shame for Kassis. “Each image recalibrates what feels worthy of my grief,” she writes. “But it’s not only Palestinians who carry this burden. Social media has democratized access to atrocity—anyone with a phone can witness Gaza’s devastation in real time.”
“Even when grief seems illegitimate beside mass atrocity, it doesn’t disappear—it just finds a different outlet,” Kassis writes. “After my grandmother’s death, mine kept getting rerouted by the sense that my sorrow was lavish when so many others weren’t allowed to mourn, when I had a lifetime of memories with my grandmother to look back on, while others died without the chance to start making theirs.”
Many people are taught that money can’t buy happiness. But that’s not necessarily true, Arthur C. Brooks argues. “Money can buy happiness—as long as you don’t try to buy happiness.”
Psychologists have found no negative association between well-being and acquiring money for the fundamental purposes of security or supporting family. “The problem comes from wanting to earn money for four particular motives: making social comparisons, seeking power, showing off, and overcoming self-doubt,” Brooks explains. “Put simply, if you are striving to get rich to feel superior to others, or because you’re trying to boost your self-worth, your efforts will lower your happiness.”
Read Brooks’s advice for the three positive changes you can make in order to spend in a way that will enhance your happiness: theatln.tc/uA4ihda6
“To the world, the news was astonishing, bordering on incomprehensible: Four Parisians were up and about early on a Sunday morning (well, 9:30),” Caity Weaver writes. “And not only that—they had robbed the Louvre.” theatln.tc/yAQ6hebO
The four thieves (two burglars and two accomplices) made off with two tiaras, two brooches, two necklaces, and 1.5 pairs of earrings. “The museum’s Apollo Gallery, which housed the stolen items, was monitored by a single outdoor camera angled away from its only exterior point of entry, a balcony,” Weaver writes. “In other words, a free-roaming Roomba could have provided the world’s most famous museum with more information about the interior of this space. There is no surveillance footage of the break-in.”
“How thrilling, upon hearing the news, to put oneself in the shoes of the thieves, and imagine making off with the diamonds scot-free. How inspiring to be reminded of what fun and potential profit there is to be had when one ditches one’s phone for a morning, and embarks on an outing with friends,” Weaver continues. “How nice to read about a heist rather than a massacre.”
The conservative influencer Jack Posobiec made a name for himself by pulling stunts and mainstreaming the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Now he’s positioned to become the next MAGA star, Ali Breland argues. theatln.tc/cl1tzLRz
Posobiec, who has millions of followers on social media, has an influence among the Republican base that is reminiscent of another high-profile voice within the contemporary right—Charlie Kirk.
Friends of Posobiec emphasized to Breland that he and Kirk have many differences. “Nobody can replace Charlie,” Raheem Kassam, the founder of The National Pulse, a right-wing media site, told Breland. Yet Kassam conceded that if there were any figure who could, “Jack has that ability.”
“Posobiec is better positioned than anyone else to fill at least some of the void Kirk has left as one of the most important figures on the contemporary right,” Breland argues. “He shares one of Kirk’s biggest strengths: his ability to simultaneously reach both the MAGA base and the most prominent Republicans in Washington.” “Posobiec is sufficiently unctuous to the correct people, he espouses the correct ideological positions to align himself with the administration, he triggers the libs, and he can rally the base,” Breland continues. “These are the things that matter to Trump, and Posobiec excels at them—as did Kirk.”
🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Dominic Gwinn / AFP / Getty.
Donald Trump is telling his own Department of Justice that it owes him $230 million—and his goal “is not just dictatorial power, but the ostentatious performance of dictatorial power as a middle finger to critics,” Quinta Jurecic argues. theatln.tc/7bwReOJ9
Yesterday, The New York Times reported that Trump claims that the DOJ owes him compensation for the federal investigations into his conduct related to the January 6 insurrection and his improper hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. “The corruption is so obvious that even the president himself seemed to acknowledge it,” Jurecic writes.
It will be up to Justice Department leadership—specifically Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche or Associate Attorney General Stan Woodward—to determine whether Trump is owed payment. Blanche led Trump’s criminal defense against the prosecutions for which Trump is now demanding payment, and Woodward has represented a number of Trump aides, including Trump’s co-defendant in the Mar-a-Lago case.
“Trump’s apparent confidence that he will be able to secure the money speaks to the degree of control he has secured over the Justice Department,” Jurecic argues. “The notion that Trump could simply tell the Justice Department to pay up, and that the department would have to do so, seems bizarre—but it shares an outlandish through line with the administration’s expansive view of consolidated presidential authority over the executive branch.”
There is a prevailing wisdom that Medicaid is a losing proposition for health facilities. But in Aurora, Colorado, a clinic is making enough money to sustain itself and pay staff well without relying on grants or donations. And it does so through Medicaid, Helen Ouyang reports. theatln.tc/aQoXkiY6
When P. J. Parmer founded Mango House—officially named Ardas Family Medicine—in 2012, “he wanted to reengineer how a clinic could run, designing systems that maximized efficiency and ease of access,” Ouyang writes.
About 70 percent of Mango House’s patients are on Medicaid, and almost all of the rest are seen for free. “The clinic’s ethos—just take care of patients—is both an ethical imperative and a practical tactic to keep the clinic running at full speed,” Ouyang writes. For a practice that relies on Medicaid, survival is ultimately a “volume game,” Parmar said. “That phrase would usually sound ominous,” Ouyang writes. “But the clinic does well on the state’s performance indicators and, from what I observed, is set up so that patients who need extra time get it.”
“When I first heard about Mango House, I was curious whether its model could be duplicated,” Ouyang continues. The fact that “it’s an independent clinic may be an asset: Some studies have found that physician-owned clinics achieve greater cardiovascular outcomes while also being associated with lower burnout for staff.”
Still, replicating clinics can be challenging. Not every state, for instance, allows medical assistants to give injections, which is one way that Mango House cuts costs. “Parmar himself acknowledged that the clinic’s casual, community-like style might not jibe with every population,” Ouyang writes. But for him, the true measure of patient satisfaction is how many return—and “for now, it’s more than enough.”
Demand for cultural commentary is higher than it’s ever been—but now that commentary is coming from unconventional new sources. Spencer Kornhaber spoke with the journalists, fans, and influencers redefining the field. theatln.tc/FRLxpJuW
“This year has been grim for criticism,” Kornhaber argues. The Associated Press stopped reviewing books; Vanity Fair winnowed its critical staff; The New York Times reassigned veteran critics to other jobs; and Chicago—the city of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel—lost its only remaining full-time print-media movie reviewer when the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips took a buyout.
Now “social media, streaming algorithms, and AI are undermining the role that salaried experts once played,” Kornhaber writes. “With the humanities and free speech under threat nationally, critical thinking itself can seem endangered. Pondering the things that entertain us—and what those things say about our world—requires a resource that’s in short supply: attention spans.”
“TikTok, Instagram, Substack, Letterboxd, and podcast apps teem with analyses of movies, books, Labubus—any cultural artifact you can think of,” Kornhaber continues. Yet he’s felt disillusioned with these platforms: “For every second of insight a video essay provided, there were 10 more seconds of filler: platitudes, plot summary, sponsor shout-outs. TikTok’s algorithm started swamping me with humanities grad students of varying cogency.”
Today’s critics and audiences clearly care about art and want to have serious conversations about it, Kornhaber writes. “But excellence and independence are all but impossible to consistently maintain without the steady backing of mentors or salaries, and when the incentives of the internet reward virality no matter how it’s achieved.”
Toward the end of the Biden administration, conservatives, fed up with the supposed imposition of liberal ideas by “woke capital,” tried to create a “parallel economy” in which one could buy “anti-woke” versions of goods such as beer and razors. Now, in Donald Trump’s second administration, “that parallel economy is just the economy,” Adam Serwer argues. “Trumpist culture wars have made almost everything more expensive, effectively forcing all Americans to pay an anti-woke tax.” theatln.tc/b2LB3hgY
Tariffs are the most obvious example, Serwer writes: “Trump has an economic argument for his tariffs, if a rather unconvincing one. But the tariffs make more sense if you look at them as a kind of anti-woke tax.” The administration has presented them as a “a promise—one impossible to fulfill—that America can return to some golden age of plentiful manufacturing jobs, the kind of manly work that soft-handed libs with email jobs took from you.”
But tariffs have actually cost the United States manufacturing jobs, Serwer continues, and hit the trucking industry particularly hard; tariffs on lumber and furniture means construction jobs will hardly fill the gap. “And, of course, the tariffs have driven up the price of food, because some food simply can’t be grown in the United States and must be imported,” Serwer writes. “Maybe bananas and coffee are woke?”
“There was nothing wrong with the idea of an anti-woke economy in which people could, if they chose to, shell out for Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right ‘100% woke-free’ beer. People are allowed to vote with their wallets,” Serwer continues. “The problem is that Trump-era conservatives don’t seem to believe in that kind of freedom. Instead, they are imposing their anti-woke tax on all of America, raising the cost of living for everyone.”
The Atlantic
The Atlantic
It’s the golden age of AI slop, Charlie Warzel argues: AI slop rip-off books; “workslop,” in the form of bad emails and lifeless memos; slop in schoolwork, Spotify playlists, and TikTok feeds. “There is no realm of life that is unsloppable,” Warzel writes. theatln.tc/B9gNvH2o
“Synthetic content is not exactly new, but lately it has become a load-bearing part of the internet,” Warzel continues. “For instance, the SEO company Graphite recently found that, beginning around November 2024, the internet experienced a slop tipping point, in which the quantity of AI-generated articles being published on the web surpassed the quantity of articles written by humans.”
Announcing Sora 2, Open AI’s new app that features a TikTok-style feed of AI-generated content, the CEO Sam Altman wrote that “creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion” as a result of the tool. “The fact that you will be able to have an entire piece of software created just by explaining your idea is going to be incredible for humans getting great new stuff,” he said on a podcast.
Videos featuring the Sora 2 watermark include a man in a kitchen putting the Pokémon character Pikachu in a sous-vide machine, and a perfectly rendered fake ’90s toy commercial for a “Jeffrey Epstein’s Island” play set.
The idea is that Sora 2 “removes an enormous amount of friction between conception and completion in the creative process,” Warzel writes. “Ideas and imagination are universal to the human experience, but execution is learned, the result of energy and time spent to develop the skills necessary to bring an idea into the world. Altman’s definition of creativity seems to elide this second element altogether—so much so that it appears to be an animating principle behind most of OpenAI’s tools … What Altman is describing is a world of creativity without craft.”
“To live through this moment is to feel that some essential component of our shared humanity is being slowly leached out of the world,” Warzel continues.
🎨: Illustration by The Atlantic
1 day ago | [YT] | 76
View 7 replies
The Atlantic
American students are falling behind, and the most common explanations overlook the main problem, Idrees Kahloon argues. theatln.tc/jMK9nSDc
“The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education,” Kahloon writes. At the start of the century, American students steadily improved in math and reading. This progress began to stall around 2013—and then backslid dramatically. Test scores released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders and 40 percent of fourth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic.”
“The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it,” Kahloon writes. Some progressives blame insufficient spending, but school spending has not declined in the period when students have fallen behind. In fact, it has increased. Another theory is that smartphones are to blame. Although this hypothesis matches the timeline, it has other holes: Performance is declining for children of all ages, even those in elementary school, who are less likely to have smartphones. And even though smartphone use is almost universal among older kids, high-achieving students are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses.
“But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance,” Kahloon writes: “a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.”
🎨: Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic
1 day ago | [YT] | 204
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The Atlantic
When her grandmother died after a long illness, in Jaljulia—a small Palestinian town in Israel, near the West Bank—Reem Kassis was thousands of miles away, in her Pennsylvania kitchen. At the news, she struggled with how to process: “one peaceful death compared with the thousands of violent deaths happening in Gaza; a woman who lived nearly nine decades compared with the children suffering from malnutrition and starvation who might not live nine years; a death witnessed by family compared with entire families erased, no one left to carry their names.” theatln.tc/wo7QdyXB
“A name exists for this reflex: disenfranchised grief,” Kassis writes. “It is mourning that may feel unearned, inappropriate, underacknowledged, or too small for the world’s attention.”
“Grief never exists in a vacuum,” Kassis continues. “For most Palestinians, since 1948 and what Arabs call the Nakba (‘catastrophe,’ in English) … our private sorrows have been refracted through the lens of the public pain we carry. Usually I, like many Palestinians, can carry both personal and collective losses. But in this moment, which finds me living in relative safety as so much of Gaza has been razed, the scale of atrocity has left no room. My grief from witnessing what has been done to my people is so vast, so relentless, that sadness over my grandmother’s death feels like something too indulgent.”
Video and images since the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, and since Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, have deepened that shame for Kassis. “Each image recalibrates what feels worthy of my grief,” she writes. “But it’s not only Palestinians who carry this burden. Social media has democratized access to atrocity—anyone with a phone can witness Gaza’s devastation in real time.”
“Even when grief seems illegitimate beside mass atrocity, it doesn’t disappear—it just finds a different outlet,” Kassis writes. “After my grandmother’s death, mine kept getting rerouted by the sense that my sorrow was lavish when so many others weren’t allowed to mourn, when I had a lifetime of memories with my grandmother to look back on, while others died without the chance to start making theirs.”
📸: Images courtesy of Reem Kassis
1 day ago | [YT] | 142
View 9 replies
The Atlantic
Many people are taught that money can’t buy happiness. But that’s not necessarily true, Arthur C. Brooks argues. “Money can buy happiness—as long as you don’t try to buy happiness.”
Psychologists have found no negative association between well-being and acquiring money for the fundamental purposes of security or supporting family. “The problem comes from wanting to earn money for four particular motives: making social comparisons, seeking power, showing off, and overcoming self-doubt,” Brooks explains. “Put simply, if you are striving to get rich to feel superior to others, or because you’re trying to boost your self-worth, your efforts will lower your happiness.”
Read Brooks’s advice for the three positive changes you can make in order to spend in a way that will enhance your happiness: theatln.tc/uA4ihda6
🎨: Jan Buchczik
2 days ago | [YT] | 186
View 9 replies
The Atlantic
“To the world, the news was astonishing, bordering on incomprehensible: Four Parisians were up and about early on a Sunday morning (well, 9:30),” Caity Weaver writes. “And not only that—they had robbed the Louvre.” theatln.tc/yAQ6hebO
The four thieves (two burglars and two accomplices) made off with two tiaras, two brooches, two necklaces, and 1.5 pairs of earrings. “The museum’s Apollo Gallery, which housed the stolen items, was monitored by a single outdoor camera angled away from its only exterior point of entry, a balcony,” Weaver writes. “In other words, a free-roaming Roomba could have provided the world’s most famous museum with more information about the interior of this space. There is no surveillance footage of the break-in.”
“How thrilling, upon hearing the news, to put oneself in the shoes of the thieves, and imagine making off with the diamonds scot-free. How inspiring to be reminded of what fun and potential profit there is to be had when one ditches one’s phone for a morning, and embarks on an outing with friends,” Weaver continues. “How nice to read about a heist rather than a massacre.”
🎨: Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic
2 days ago | [YT] | 87
View 14 replies
The Atlantic
The conservative influencer Jack Posobiec made a name for himself by pulling stunts and mainstreaming the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Now he’s positioned to become the next MAGA star, Ali Breland argues. theatln.tc/cl1tzLRz
Posobiec, who has millions of followers on social media, has an influence among the Republican base that is reminiscent of another high-profile voice within the contemporary right—Charlie Kirk.
Friends of Posobiec emphasized to Breland that he and Kirk have many differences. “Nobody can replace Charlie,” Raheem Kassam, the founder of The National Pulse, a right-wing media site, told Breland. Yet Kassam conceded that if there were any figure who could, “Jack has that ability.”
“Posobiec is better positioned than anyone else to fill at least some of the void Kirk has left as one of the most important figures on the contemporary right,” Breland argues. “He shares one of Kirk’s biggest strengths: his ability to simultaneously reach both the MAGA base and the most prominent Republicans in Washington.”
“Posobiec is sufficiently unctuous to the correct people, he espouses the correct ideological positions to align himself with the administration, he triggers the libs, and he can rally the base,” Breland continues. “These are the things that matter to Trump, and Posobiec excels at them—as did Kirk.”
🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Dominic Gwinn / AFP / Getty.
2 days ago | [YT] | 52
View 13 replies
The Atlantic
Donald Trump is telling his own Department of Justice that it owes him $230 million—and his goal “is not just dictatorial power, but the ostentatious performance of dictatorial power as a middle finger to critics,” Quinta Jurecic argues. theatln.tc/7bwReOJ9
Yesterday, The New York Times reported that Trump claims that the DOJ owes him compensation for the federal investigations into his conduct related to the January 6 insurrection and his improper hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. “The corruption is so obvious that even the president himself seemed to acknowledge it,” Jurecic writes.
It will be up to Justice Department leadership—specifically Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche or Associate Attorney General Stan Woodward—to determine whether Trump is owed payment. Blanche led Trump’s criminal defense against the prosecutions for which Trump is now demanding payment, and Woodward has represented a number of Trump aides, including Trump’s co-defendant in the Mar-a-Lago case.
“Trump’s apparent confidence that he will be able to secure the money speaks to the degree of control he has secured over the Justice Department,” Jurecic argues. “The notion that Trump could simply tell the Justice Department to pay up, and that the department would have to do so, seems bizarre—but it shares an outlandish through line with the administration’s expansive view of consolidated presidential authority over the executive branch.”
🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Alex Wong / Getty.
3 days ago | [YT] | 306
View 35 replies
The Atlantic
There is a prevailing wisdom that Medicaid is a losing proposition for health facilities. But in Aurora, Colorado, a clinic is making enough money to sustain itself and pay staff well without relying on grants or donations. And it does so through Medicaid, Helen Ouyang reports. theatln.tc/aQoXkiY6
When P. J. Parmer founded Mango House—officially named Ardas Family Medicine—in 2012, “he wanted to reengineer how a clinic could run, designing systems that maximized efficiency and ease of access,” Ouyang writes.
About 70 percent of Mango House’s patients are on Medicaid, and almost all of the rest are seen for free. “The clinic’s ethos—just take care of patients—is both an ethical imperative and a practical tactic to keep the clinic running at full speed,” Ouyang writes. For a practice that relies on Medicaid, survival is ultimately a “volume game,” Parmar said. “That phrase would usually sound ominous,” Ouyang writes. “But the clinic does well on the state’s performance indicators and, from what I observed, is set up so that patients who need extra time get it.”
“When I first heard about Mango House, I was curious whether its model could be duplicated,” Ouyang continues. The fact that “it’s an independent clinic may be an asset: Some studies have found that physician-owned clinics achieve greater cardiovascular outcomes while also being associated with lower burnout for staff.”
Still, replicating clinics can be challenging. Not every state, for instance, allows medical assistants to give injections, which is one way that Mango House cuts costs. “Parmar himself acknowledged that the clinic’s casual, community-like style might not jibe with every population,” Ouyang writes. But for him, the true measure of patient satisfaction is how many return—and “for now, it’s more than enough.”
📸: Jimena Peck for The Atlantic
3 days ago | [YT] | 172
View 3 replies
The Atlantic
Demand for cultural commentary is higher than it’s ever been—but now that commentary is coming from unconventional new sources. Spencer Kornhaber spoke with the journalists, fans, and influencers redefining the field. theatln.tc/FRLxpJuW
“This year has been grim for criticism,” Kornhaber argues. The Associated Press stopped reviewing books; Vanity Fair winnowed its critical staff; The New York Times reassigned veteran critics to other jobs; and Chicago—the city of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel—lost its only remaining full-time print-media movie reviewer when the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips took a buyout.
Now “social media, streaming algorithms, and AI are undermining the role that salaried experts once played,” Kornhaber writes. “With the humanities and free speech under threat nationally, critical thinking itself can seem endangered. Pondering the things that entertain us—and what those things say about our world—requires a resource that’s in short supply: attention spans.”
“TikTok, Instagram, Substack, Letterboxd, and podcast apps teem with analyses of movies, books, Labubus—any cultural artifact you can think of,” Kornhaber continues. Yet he’s felt disillusioned with these platforms: “For every second of insight a video essay provided, there were 10 more seconds of filler: platitudes, plot summary, sponsor shout-outs. TikTok’s algorithm started swamping me with humanities grad students of varying cogency.”
Today’s critics and audiences clearly care about art and want to have serious conversations about it, Kornhaber writes. “But excellence and independence are all but impossible to consistently maintain without the steady backing of mentors or salaries, and when the incentives of the internet reward virality no matter how it’s achieved.”
🎨: Pete Gamlen
3 days ago | [YT] | 154
View 18 replies
The Atlantic
Toward the end of the Biden administration, conservatives, fed up with the supposed imposition of liberal ideas by “woke capital,” tried to create a “parallel economy” in which one could buy “anti-woke” versions of goods such as beer and razors. Now, in Donald Trump’s second administration, “that parallel economy is just the economy,” Adam Serwer argues. “Trumpist culture wars have made almost everything more expensive, effectively forcing all Americans to pay an anti-woke tax.” theatln.tc/b2LB3hgY
Tariffs are the most obvious example, Serwer writes: “Trump has an economic argument for his tariffs, if a rather unconvincing one. But the tariffs make more sense if you look at them as a kind of anti-woke tax.” The administration has presented them as a “a promise—one impossible to fulfill—that America can return to some golden age of plentiful manufacturing jobs, the kind of manly work that soft-handed libs with email jobs took from you.”
But tariffs have actually cost the United States manufacturing jobs, Serwer continues, and hit the trucking industry particularly hard; tariffs on lumber and furniture means construction jobs will hardly fill the gap. “And, of course, the tariffs have driven up the price of food, because some food simply can’t be grown in the United States and must be imported,” Serwer writes. “Maybe bananas and coffee are woke?”
“There was nothing wrong with the idea of an anti-woke economy in which people could, if they chose to, shell out for Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right ‘100% woke-free’ beer. People are allowed to vote with their wallets,” Serwer continues. “The problem is that Trump-era conservatives don’t seem to believe in that kind of freedom. Instead, they are imposing their anti-woke tax on all of America, raising the cost of living for everyone.”
🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Shutterstock.
4 days ago | [YT] | 481
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