Staff Writer, @TheAtlantic. I host Galaxy Brain, the first and only video podcast. Occasionally: @golfersjournal. charlie@theatlantic.com
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We’re all living through a crisis of agency, at least online. Bots, algorithms, clip armies, & the flood of AI stuff have scrambled notions of popularity, turned everything into a ‘psyop’. AI tools/ agents are reversing the fundamental human, collaborative promise of the internet
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i'm constantly surprised at how few politicians realize that she'll always be better at this than they are.
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the u.s. virus response feels so much like our response to gun violence. seems easy to prevent! others have! but it's not 'who we are.' a certain idea of freedom makes it impossible. so we move on and just learn to accept a level of human loss that other countries won't tolerate.
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know its obvious but the possible arc of supreme court justice dies weeks before election, asks not to be replaced, is immediately set to be replaced, resulting in celebration & the celebration becomes superspreader event sending president to hospital is difficult to fully grasp
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this is what innovation looks like: using generative AI to do things that you absolutely could do with very little effort but won't because you're unspeakably lazy
Trump just shared a fake AI-created image of himself praying on Truth Social forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2…
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i've found that, in my own dealings with people who like to think of themselves as contrarians, a lot of the time they're just assholes. it's not always very deep!
"Jackass" star Steve-O says he asked Bill Maher not to smoke pot during a potential interview and to respect his 16 years of sobriety. Maher allegedly refused.
"I found it kind of upsetting when the Bill Maher podcast reached out and he smokes pot the whole time while he interviews people. I said I’d happily go on there, but while I’m on, out of respect for my sobriety, could he refrain from smoking pot. He said no and that’s a dealbreaker.”
“I’m a clean and sober guy. It’s very important that I maintain my sobriety, it’s approaching 16 years. I am about to be sweet 16. Really, there’s nothing I value more than my sobriety. There’s nothing more that I protect than my recovery."
Read more here: variety.com/2024/digital/new…
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my dad called me unexpectedly this morning and when i picked up he sighed and paused. i panicked and said ‘is everything ok?’ and he responded gravely ‘well, i’ve got a real problem.’ and then proceeded to tell me he’s having trouble scanning documents with his printer 😐😐😐
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Wrote about the Musk texts. What I found illuminating about the messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Just overconfident dudes winging it theatlantic.com/technology/a…
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buzzfeed news shuttering the day twitter gets rid of the checks is some very real 'the long 2010s ended today' shit
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I sat in on a 90 min interview with Biden in December and left with no clear understanding of what his policies are on most everything
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my only real experience with @ewarren is that in the ed board interview my exchange with her about Big Tech was cut off and it somehow bothered her *days later* and she unexpectedly called me up and talked to me for 30 min in depth and i greatly appreciated it
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kinda wild how via one debate exchange @ewarren showed everyone that she can use an elevated platform and rhetorical chops to pressure powerful corporate leaders to do right by their employees
I’ve decided that for as long as I’m running Bloomberg LP, we won’t offer confidentiality agreements to resolve claims of sexual harassment or misconduct going forward. This goes the same for our campaign.
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7 months ago a source gave @nytopinion a trove of data. They were alarmed at what they'd seen. It sparked an investigation that sent us around the country from Mar-a-Lago to California. Tomorrow we'll start publishing what we found. It might change how you see your phone forever.
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love to die younger to help my employers!
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nothing insightful here but just so deeply overwhelmed by how so many dark forces and broken systems are coming together in this moment to cause so much damage and suffering. it's honestly a bit hard to hold in one's head at once
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this photo dredges up a similar feeling to the beginning of the week & the $750 tax figure. you’re staying at home, not seeing loved ones. making big sacrifices for the greater good. but that’s a *you* thing. *they* do what they want always. it makes you feel like a sucker.
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i cannot get over the google lie and how public health officials stood up there and nodded along and endorsed it.
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yep this is basically where we are i think. unsustainable and maybe an existential threat.
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what's happening in texas makes me despair for the future. not just how weather events are getting more unpredictable/intense but how it is immediately weaponized into a culture war narrative by the most shameless leaders. if this is the template going fwd we stand no chance
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this roll call is a fantastic reminder that the best part of America is how each state is indescribably, endearingly weird in its own basically illegible to outsiders way
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since i moved west/experienced fire seasons ive wondered what coverage of climate would be like if the east really experienced how apocalyptic these feel. east is not immune to disasters by any stretch but also have u seen twitter when there's a thunderstorm in nyc or snow in dc
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New: I found a group of people who entered the Grand Canyon to go rafting for 25 days. No service. No news. Nothing. They got out this Saturday afternoon and the world was totally different. nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opini…
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lol the last year of twitter is essentially just an experiment in taking a website that revolves around news/information and making it as hostile as possible to the people and organizations that do news gathering
Twitter/X has officially removed article headlines on links shared to the platform, now just displaying the image and website.
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in just over 3 hours this column has set the record for the number of emails received telling me i need to resign in disgrace from my job (believe me, the bar is high). nytimes.com/2020/03/14/opini…
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here’s a fun sunday example of the twitter hellscape: person tweets *false* meme claiming george soros was nazi (not him) 6.5k RTs. Auschwitz Memorial acct attempts to debunk (1k+ RTs). Ppl report the account but no option for spreading false news. So account/tweet stays up. Fun!
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kind of amazing to watch the anti-mask argument go from 'they project weakness' to 'help! this soft layer of cloth is going to end my life'
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I wrote about the fires and how no amount of empathy or understanding can adequately prepare you for the psychological, physical and sensory trauma of having the world immolate before your eyes nytimes.com/2020/09/09/opini…
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increasingly having this a convo this summer that leads to the same scary place: the vast majority of those in power right now grew up during a golden age of relative social/political stability and believe that stability is the norm and thus are deeply unprepared for this moment
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Steve is 1 today so we got him a glacial lake swim yesterday. Say happy birthday to Steve.
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the rule of being alive right now is to not bet against the dumbest possible outcome coming to fruition
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not to pick nits too much here but in my lifetime for me personally it quite literally has never been less safe to leave my house than rn
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i'm always amazed how you only need to step away from twitter for like 6 hours to realize that none of the micro obsessions everyone's tweeting about in the moment matter even the littlest bit
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my expectation news wise for october is that it is actually going to exist outside the space time continuum and things that shouldn’t be physically possible will happen. gravity itself is in play as far as i’m concerned
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just a bunch of motionless cardboard cutouts of fake humans watching baseball players in a pandemic hit dingers into smoke so dense it looks like fog. really standard stuff
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Yesterday Alex Jones accused Robert Mueller of participating in a child rape ring and pantomimed shooting him. It was broadcast live on Facebook (46,000 views). I asked last night and Facebook said the rant did not violate its community guidelines buzzfeednews.com/article/cha…
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finding it hard to wrap my head around this year to date. basically 70 days in & we've had: impeachment vote, assassination of a foreign leader/retaliatory strike and fears of a new war, super divisive presidential primary, and the slow creeping spread of a global pandemic. 2020!
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spoke to a 5th grade class doing a journalism unit. they told me about the stories they are doing. One girl's topic was 'dead animals' & i asked how she chose it. she said she couldnt think of anything panicked & pitched it at the last min. i told her she's a real journalist now.
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can’t help thinking that, if you’re on the fence, now might be a great time to adopt a dog from a shelter. they’ll prob be strained staffing wise. you’re going to be hunkered down for a while and wfh. dogs are amazing companions during trying times/nuggets of joy!
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breitbart being in Facebook's trusted partners is clarifying. it's the same principle as dinner w/ Tucker, etc. FB's perspective seems to be that if you achieve a certain amt of scale & influence then the company will engage earnestly w/ you. it's an outdated idea of media power.
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The coronavirus scenario I can’t stop thinking about is the one where we simply get used to all the dying. There’s a national precedent: America’s response to gun violence. nytimes.com/2020/05/05/opini…
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the one rule of reporting i've learned is that if a subject sounds really dry or nuanced or boring just call up three people who have made that subject area the focus of their professional lives and listen to everything they say and 95% of the time you come away like HOLY SHIT
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it’s a horrible day to be online so here are peggy and steve having a competition over who can drink more water out of the same bowl
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“No matter how long I live, I don’t think I will ever get over how the U.S., with all its wealth and technological capability and academic prowess, sleepwalked into the disaster that is unfolding,” says Kai Kupferschmidt, a German science writer. apnews.com/3adf5722134f03d86…
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i've hugged 1 human in the last 6 months
Video of the ACB announcement event on Saturday at the WH featuring Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who has now tested positive for Covid-19. nitter.app/bubbaprog/status/13099… via @bubbaprog
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i feel like all i do on here is sound alarmist but i suggest being quite alarmed right now by this news. huffpost.com/entry/democrats…
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this line from the Capital One press release on their massive data breach is pretty unreal. Nothing compromised! Except, you know, all the stuff that was compromised.
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they say you’re not supposed to put your puppy on the bed because they’ll wanna go there all the time or pee on it or i dunno but let me offer a counterpoint
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New: I wrote about how Alex Jones’ deposition vid exposed him like never before. And how the legal system may be the only way to defang a conspiracy theorist at the height of his powers. nytimes.com/2019/03/31/opini…
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this is the smart take on Rogan/Sanders "This is why it’s impossible to “amplify” Joe Rogan: He has an audience bigger than nearly anyone in the country, and to ignore that he exists and that people like him is to remove yourself from reality." vice.com/en_us/article/jgep9…
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this is bananas. i asked a senior engineer at google about a nationwide program this afternoon and they told me “No comment because there is nothing to comment on”
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been thinking about this tweet and how galactically wrong the 'Musk is many things but he's not boring' take is. like, if there's one defining thing about the man this last year it is how he is the 'quiet part out loud' embodiment of every stereotype of a rich/insecure dullard
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the nyt reporter who profiled the ohio nazi basically confesses he didn't get much. and that the intvws didn't connect any dots for him. sometimes you gotta know when to kill a story. mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/2…
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i imagine that we'll just (the WH leak just now seems to suggest this too) get used to a certain number of deaths happening as we do w/ gun violence/school shootings. & we'll hang our heads when it happens and do thoughts & prayers for families and hope it doesn't come OUR way
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i'll be honest that i'm pretty confused as to the best way to responsibly navigate this phase of the pandemic right now!
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Here's some big breaking Sunday news: Apple has removed nearly all episodes of Alex Jones and Infowars' podcasts from iTunes and the Podcast app (save for one news show called "Real News") buzzfeednews.com/article/joh…
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my takeaway from tonight is that Harris is really his first opponent to embody a 'post-trump' ethos. like, the first person who wasn't treating him as the Sun of the US political solar system and more like a guy who has overstated his welcome at a party. this body language helps
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just posting this again for the second day because it should continue to be in the news splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019…
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this is maybe the best visual explanation for infection scenarios that i've encountered. winter is gonna be real hard/lonely. english.elpais.com/society/2…
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this strikes me as the crucial 'reopening' point: scared people aren't going to just start eating in restaurants/traveling en masse just because the economy is 'open' again vox.com/2020/4/22/21228651/o…
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what strikes me watching this is how— despite the near constant rebuttals and pressing by @jonathanvswan — there were still dozens and dozens of wild lies that slid past unacknowledged because the lies per sentence ratio was basically unnavigable
WATCH: Full #AxiosOnHBO interview between President Trump and @jonathanvswan axios.com/full-axios-hbo-int…
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the fact that Alex Jones is seeking over $100,000 in court costs from the parents of a child who died at Sandy Hook is awful. and it's made all the worse when you realize how much money Jones and Infowars rake in from its audience.
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i find it really strange that people mad enough to ~deface~ bloomberg HQs spray painted onto signs and not the actual buildings. seems unusually thoughtful for enraged protesters!
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looking at everyone here tweeting at a certain former fox news primetime host and just urging more people to start using their attention as a weapon nytimes.com/2020/07/23/opini…
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Today @stuartathompson and I pubbed the 1st in a series on location tracking. Based off more than 50 billion location pings we obtained covering 12 million phones. It's the culmination of months of reporting. We'll be publishing 7 stories in all this week. nytimes.com/interactive/2019…
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the speech was good for other reasons but truly there is nothing more effective for an american politician right now than to talk about profound grief honestly and directly
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the one thing that can't be beat on this site is the sensation of logging on and it is immediately clear something has happened
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wrote about Elon, this website, and this weekend. theatlantic.com/technology/a…
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hey who knows about the election but i feel it’s my anecdotal duty to inform you that my 90+ year old grandmother — a life long Ohio republican who voted for trump — just texted “lock him up” (about trump)
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just █████ ██ ███████ ████. ███ ███ remember
██████ that ████████
today ███ is ████████
probably ████ going to ███ suck ██ on ███ ███ here
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remember, it is critically important we actively monitor and vet who is allowed to feel bad while knowing virtually nothing about them other than their profession. this is the work.
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reading this makes me just achingly sad. i get concerns about shutdowns and fears about the economy. i get that this feels unfair and oppressive and painful. i am scared & sad, too. but the anti-mask behavior is effectively holding the country hostage to score culture war points
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i feel compelled to say that i disagree with every word in that Tom Cotton op-ed and it does not reflect my values. this piece does though nytimes.com/2020/06/02/opini…
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Breaking: Twitter is permanently suspending Infowars and Alex Jones from the platform for violating its abusive behavior clause. buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/t…
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future of protest = 15 people up in each others' face but not looking @ each other b/c they r all livestreaming the event to their followers
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*taps the sign* theatlantic.com/technology/a…
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reason why this is so big is obvious and that is that @AOC is doing what she wants earnestly and without spending so much time worrying about/focus grouping it that it becomes cringey. its just somebody who gets that the fundamental thing online is authenticity
More than 400,000 people tuned into Twitch on Tuesday to watch @AOC and @IlhanMN battle it out at Among Us as part of a GOTV effort. axios.com/aoc-ilhan-omar-dra…
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this isn't breaking news but also not sure why this isn't the only story in the world right now. if i were in charge of all newspapers i would put it in the 'oh shit' headline font and run it so it's the only thing you see above the fold i'm sort of kidding but sort of not
“Vaccinated people do not carry the virus" nymag.com/intelligencer/2021…
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