Senior editor @TheAtlantic. Formerly @wired and @monthly, briefly @FTC.

Washington, D.C.
Joined June 2013
What if misaligned AI, instructed to become smarter than humans, is achieving this by making humanity dumber?
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The best TV show of the century is, in fact, KQED's "Jacques Pépin: More Fast Food My Way" (2008-2009)
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"Tech CEOs are calling for AI regulation, therefore I'm against it" is not a useful—or even usable—heuristic. Mark Zuckerberg is against regulation. You actually have to evaluate the ideas on the merits.
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Has anyone considered Web3 as a solution to AI
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MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students. A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet. Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle. The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable. The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust. Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates. The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output. The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
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I finally saw THE ODYSSEY. Disappointed that Nolan didn't manage to work in 39 more references to "Zeus's law"
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The Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin argues that the way to raise fertility is for men to shoulder more household work. The theory sounds good. There's just one problem, @MarcNovicoff argues: the data don't support it at all. theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0…
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This is an op-ed about the futility of medical price-setting that does not even mention the fact that Maryland sets prices and revenue caps for its hospitals, and it works! nytimes.com/2026/07/20/opini…
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“I fucking hate him; I think he’s a scumbag, and you can quote me on that,” one liberal said about @RichardHanania. And yet, “I think, bizarrely enough, that he and I probably share the same broad overall analysis of the American right.” Read my piece: theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0…
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This is pretty clearly written by AI
I'm not running for office. But if I were, these are some of the lessons I'd take away from what happened in NY yesterday. 1. Authenticity is measurable. Voters can smell a focus group from a mile away. 2. Endorsements from the current Democratic leadership now read like warnings. The establishment wing of the party is no longer a sword. It's a question mark. 3. Conviction beats caution. The candidates who said hard things about rent, about who pays for what, about Gaza, they won. The triangulators lost. 4. Cost of living is everything. Everything else is wallpaper. 5. The middle is not a strategy. It's an empty room. Voters reached past the establishment to grab someone who actually believes something. 6. Don't fear the base. Court it. The Democrats who ran from their own voters lost. The ones who ran toward them won. 7. If you want to lead a party you have to be willing to fight inside it. Mamdani didn't ask permission. He took the field. The lesson under the lessons: the country is tired of being managed. People want to be led.
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They're gonna need to start calling him Karl-Anthony Boroughs
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The actual correct light beer ranking: Bud Light Miller Light Coors Light raw sewage Corona Light
Miller Lite is the thinking man’s beverage of choice
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PSA to America's sportswriters: a player or team cannot be "in a different stratosphere" from another. There is only one stratosphere.
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I'm told they'll have to rebrand to Kars 4 Yids in order to resume operations
Kars4Kids has been banned from advertising in California as it has been deemed deceptive by a judge for helping exclusively Orthodox Jewish kids in the New York and New Jersey areas despite having eight year old actors of all races singing their jingle. static1.squarespace.com/stat…
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Regarding the DoorDash discourse, I think people are a bit overconfident in their reading of BLS data. Here's the survey from 1996. Notice it doesn't mention takeout or restaurant delivery at all; the only reference to delivery is actually for food at home:
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The D.C. National Guard deployment would have a 100 percent approval rating if they shoveled the damn snow
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Talking to 21 billionaires about a tax proposal, and getting not a single one to be quoted by name, is almost impressive—the journalistic equivalent of Houston missing 27 three-pointers in a row against Golden State
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