The Right’s New Bogeyman

​​A mysterious pro-choice group called Jane’s Revenge has drawn attention to itself in recent months with a short series of strongly worded “communiqués” promising violence. The first of these statements was posted to a radical-leftist blogging platform in early May, shortly after a draft of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked...

6d

Stop Putting Lasers in Joe Biden’s Eyes

The president is terrifying! He has laser eyes, or he has laser eyes and he’s screaming, or he has laser eyes and he’s commanding bolts of lightning, like God. He is drinking Republican tears with a splash of lime. He is eating Mitch McConnell’s head?Although Joe Biden has often been the subject of memes related to his friendship with Barack Obama or...

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The End of Manual Transmission

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.      I drive a stick shift. It’s a pain, sometimes. Clutching and shifting in bumper-to-bumper traffic wears you out. My wife can’t drive my car, which limits our transit...

2w

Are You Sure You’re Not Guilty of the ‘Millennial Pause’?

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.      It took me two years to post my first TikTok. I’d press “Record,” mumble into the camera, and hastily hit delete before anyone could see just how awkward I was on video....

2w

Seriously, What Are You Supposed to Do With Old Clothes?

In February, I ran out of hangers. The occasion was not exactly unforeseen—for at least a year, I had been rearranging the deck chairs on my personal-storage Titanic in an attempt to forestall the inevitable. I loaded two or three tank tops or summer dresses onto a single hanger. I carefully refolded everything in my dresser drawers to max out their...

3w

There Is No Reason to BeReal

Clearly, people want something from social media that they aren’t getting. It’s something they think they remember getting at one point, but which is now being held away from them by the machine. Some people describe that disappointment elliptically, saying that they are exhausted by “the algorithm” or by “surveillance capitalism.” What they’re really...

3w

The Horrors of No-News Facebook

In February 2021, Facebook abruptly wiped all of the news from its platform in Australia. The country’s lawmakers were trying to force the company to share its profits with media outlets, and this was the dramatic response. The gambit worked: After a nearly week-long blackout, which extended to pages from Australian nonprofits and government services,...

4w

What Are Abortion Code Words Even For?

“If you want to come ‘see my cows’ for the weekend, let me know,” Laurel Ysebaert, the owner of a small Ontario cattle ranch, posted on TikTok in May, as the U.S. Supreme Court prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade. “I can give you a safe space while you recover from ‘seeing my cows.’”You get it. Like many similar videos shared on the platform in the past...

Jul 2022

The Sheer Absurdity of Twitter v. Musk

This is exhausting, but I’ll attempt to bring you up to speed: Elon Musk tried to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Twitter accepted this offer, presumably because it was the best the social-media company’s directors thought they could do. Then Musk changed his mind and said he was pulling out of the deal, claiming that he couldn’t tell how many Twitter...

Jul 2022

Hard Seltzer Has Gone Flat

Over the past three years, hard seltzer has been as close to a sure thing as anything else in American life. Sales of the beverages first took off during the White Claw Summer of 2019, but greatly benefited from the early pandemic, when bored people looked for novelty on the shelves at grocery stores. They found it in a zillion colorful new cans of...

Jul 2022