Illustration: Maria Contreras Twenty years ago this month, Google launched Gmail. At first, user numbers were deliberately kept low, and those with access would hoard invitations and bestow them on friends like precious gifts. Once you were on the inside, though, a whole new world opened up. It’s difficult to remember now (if you’re old enough to remember), but we used to delete our emails. The big-name providers — AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! — were so stingy with storage that users had to regularly scrub their inboxes, tossing messages into a digital burn box like diplomats abandoning an embassy. Go ..read more

Photo: Frankie Alduino Professor Shai Davidai woke up on Sunday morning and asked Columbia University for backup. In an email to top administrators, he requested a police detail “of at least 10 cops” to accompany him to the edge of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the Morningside Heights campus, where he intended to shout the names of the 133 hostages held by Hamas inside Gaza. Cas Holloway, the university’s chief operating officer, made a counteroffer: no police detail, and Davidai would be cordoned off on a small lawn far from the students, who had been demonstrating for five days. When his ..read more

Photo: Kirby Lee via AP Last week, the NYPD arrived on Columbia University’s campus and arrested students involved in a pro-Palestine encampment. Earlier this week, police officers arrested demonstrators at Yale and the University of Minnesota. And on Wednesday, law enforcement broke up protests at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern California. On Wednesday, hundreds of protesters gathered on UT Austin’s campus as part of a scheduled class walkout by the school’s chapter of the Palestine Solidarity Committee. The event called for participants to occupy the univers ..read more

Photo: Tolga Akmen/Bloomberg via Getty Images By the time Elon Musk held a conference call with Wall Street on Tuesday night, he had spent most of the last year on the defensive. The call was nominally to discuss Tesla’s historically bad earnings that saw net income drop 55 percent last quarter. His largest and most important company has lost half of its value since July and more than two-thirds since its 2021 peak. Some of this could be blamed on factors affecting any electric-vehicle company — interest rates are high, subsidies are drying up, and the buying public is losing their enthus ..read more

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty For a while there, the independent ticket of ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan seemed to be taking crucial votes away from Democrat Joe Biden, at least as indicated by comparing three-way and five-way (with Cornel West and Jill Stein) polls to head-to-head matchups of the incumbent and Donald Trump. Now, even as Biden has all but erased his polling deficit against Trump, he’s getting some more good news in surveys that include other candidates. Two recent major national polls show Biden running better in a five-way than a tw ..read more

Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images There’s no question that the passage of a foreign-aid package similar to what Joe Biden requested last October was a setback for America First diehards and the confrontation-above-all hyperpartisans of the House Freedom Caucus. It also represented a personal vindication for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who until recently looked a little lost in his job. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s threats to take away Johnson’s gavel for the grievous heresy of selective bipartisanship now look hollow. The successful appropriation of crucial aid for Ukraine was even more obviously a b ..read more

Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/The Washington Post via Getty Images There’s a real conundrum affecting early predictions on the level of turnout for the presidential election this year. On one hand, we are in an era of historically high turnout, as a Pew Research Center report last year confirmed: The elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 were three of the highest-turnout U.S. elections of their respective types in decades. About two-thirds (66%) of the voting-eligible population turned out for the 2020 presidential election — the highest rate for any national election since 1900. The 2018 elec ..read more

Photo: RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/Denver Post The days of airlines leaving customers in the financial lurch after canceling their flights may be coming to an end. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued two new rules that are aimed at tackling delayed refunds and hidden junk fees for consumers. Airlines will be required to promptly refund customers who are owed money and to inform customers about service fees before they purchase their fares and additional services. “Passengers deserve to know upfront what costs they are facing and should get their money back when an airlin ..read more

Photo: Alex Kent/AFP via Getty Images What is a university for? At Columbia University and its affiliated women’s college, Barnard, it is ostensibly to value critical thought, a broad mind, and a commitment to reason. Only look at their websites, as any prospective student might do. Columbia’s says the school wants “to educate future generations, create knowledge that will take humanity forward, and invest in community, both locally and globally,” adding that it will “teach students how to think, not what to think.” Or so it claims. Platitudes often fall short of reality, and that’s true at Co ..read more

Photo: Tim Gruber Twitter isn’t real life” is something people say a lot on X, the social-media platform owned by Elon Musk that many of us still prefer to call Twitter. The journalists we see posting most often on Twitter aren’t necessarily the ones with the most power in the industry, the politicians with the largest Twitter followings aren’t necessarily the ones who win elections, and the conventional wisdom that congeals on Twitter is not what the vast majority of people regard as conventional wisdom. But it’s easy to forget all that when you’re one of the site’s “power users” — those with ..read more