The IRS Finally Has an Answer to TurboTax
Saahil Desai
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 ans...
Flying Is Weird Right Now
Charlie Warzel
Somewhere over Colorado this weekend, while I sat in seat 21F, my plane began to buck, jostle, and rattle. Within seconds, the seat-belt indicator dinged as the pilot asked flight attendants to return to their seats. We were experiencing what I, a frequent flier, might describe as "intermediate turbulence"--a sustained parade of midair bumps that can be uncomfortable but by no means terrifying.Generally, I do not fear hurtling through the sky at 500 miles per hour, but at this moment I felt an unu...
Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem
Ian Bogost
Last year, 18 percent of Stanford University seniors graduated with a degree in computer science, more than double the proportion of just a decade earlier. Over the same period at MIT, that rate went up from 23 percent to 42 percent. These increases are common everywhere: The average number of undergraduate CS majors at universities in the U.S. and Canada tripled in the decade after 2005, and it keeps growing. Students' interest in CS is intellectual--culture moves through computation these days--b...
Elon Musk Just Added a Wrinkle to the AI Race
Matteo Wong
Yesterday afternoon, Elon Musk fired the latest shot in his feud with OpenAI: His new AI venture, xAI, now allows anyone to download and use the computer code for its flagship software. No fees, no restrictions, just Grok, a large language model that Musk has positioned against OpenAI's GPT-4, the model powering the most advanced version of ChatGPT.Sharing Grok's code is a thinly veiled provocation. Musk was one of OpenAI's original backers. He left in 2018 and recently sued for breach of contrac...
The Drama Kings of Tech
Ross Andersen
One Tuesday last month, Mark Zuckerberg uploaded a video to Instagram, but not to his Stories, where it would quickly disappear. This one was a keeper. He put it right on his permanent grid. It shows Zuckerberg sitting on his living-room couch in comfy pants and a dark T-shirt, while his friend Kenny records him through Meta's mixed-reality headset. Zuckerberg proceeds to rattle off a three-and-a-half-minute critique of Apple's new mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro. His tone is surprisingly c...
Of Course America Fell for Liquid Death
Jacob Stern
When you think about it, the business of bottled water is pretty odd. What other industry produces billions in revenue selling something that almost everyone in America--with some notable and appalling exceptions--can get basically for free? Almost every brand claims in one way or another to be the purest or best-tasting or most luxurious, but very little distinguishes Poland Spring from Aquafina or Dasani or Evian. And then there is Liquid Death. The company sells its water in tallboy cans branded...
End the Phone-Based Childhood Now
Jonathan Haidt
Photographs by Maggie ShannonThis article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you've likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States--fairly stable in the 2000s--rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.The probl...
What to Do About the Junkification of the Internet
Nathaniel Lubin
Earlier this year, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift were shared repeatedly on X. The pictures were almost certainly created with generative-AI tools, demonstrating the ease with which the technology can be put to nefarious ends. This case mirrors many other apparently similar examples, including fake images depicting the arrest of former President Donald Trump, AI-generated images of Black voters who support Trump, and fabricated images of Dr. Anthony Fauci.There is a tendency for media c...