Andrew Huberman, a neurobiology professor and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, attending INBOUND 2023 in Boston, Mass. | Photo by Chance Yeh/Getty Images for HubSpot The Huberman Lab has credentials and millions of fans, but it sometimes oversteps medical fact. Sometimes, misleading information is easy to spot, traveling in the same conspiracy-theory-slicked grooves it has for decades. The same ideas that undermined belief in the safety of Covid-19 vaccines have been around for more than a century, adapting the same message to suit new media formats, new epidemics, and new influential endorse ..read more

Nude images shared without consent can be traumatic, whether they’re real or not. | Getty Images/iStockphoto How do you stop deepfake nudes? There’s a lot of debate about the role of technology in kids’ lives, but sometimes we come across something unequivocally bad. That’s the case with AI “nudification” apps, which teenagers are using to generate and share fake naked photos of their classmates. At Issaquah High School in Washington state, boys used an app to “strip” photos of girls who attended last fall’s homecoming dance, according to the New York Times. At Westfield High School in New Jer ..read more

Getty Images Derek Thompson on what the end of monoculture could mean for American democracy. Is damn near everything a cult now? That’s a glib distillation of an interesting idea I recently encountered. The basic thesis was that the internet has shattered the possibility of a monoculture and the result of that is a highly fragmented society that feels increasingly like a loose connection of cults stacked on top of each other. To say that everything is a cult is a bit of an overstatement, but as a general framework for understanding the world at the moment, it is helpful. The way we consume co ..read more

Photo illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images  The potential TikTok ban is now law. What happens next? The bill to require TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company or face a nationwide ban made it to President Joe Biden’s desk on Wednesday as part of a huge foreign aid package that passed through Congress this week. And Biden, as he previously promised, signed the bill into law. ByteDance now has nine months to sell TikTok, a deadline that Biden can opt to extend once by 90 days. And while TikTok could avoid a ban with a successful sale or court challenge, the new law means Amer ..read more

Hollis Edmondson, age 7. | Paige Vickers/Vox; photos courtesy of Tracy Ross My 12-year-old daughter will inherit a warmer world — and, I fear, a lonelier one. When my son Hatcher and I started our hike down Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River during the fall of 2023, we feared what we might see. We were backpacking through our favorite place, the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness. It’s almost 2.4 million acres of central Idaho that shelters wolves, black bears, river otters, and lynx; the Salmon River threads through it for 200 breathtaking miles. One of America’s longest free-flo ..read more

Getty Images The internet is far less secure than it ought to be. One of the most fascinating and frightening incidents in computer security history started in 2022 with a few pushy emails to the mailing list for a small, one-person open source project. A user had submitted a complex bit of code that was now waiting for the maintainer to review. But a different user with the name Jigar Kumar felt that this wasn’t happening fast enough. “Patches spend years on this mailing list,” he complained. “5.2.0 release was 7 years ago. There is no reason to think anything is coming soon.”. A month later ..read more

The Zoomer tween in their natural habitat. | Leon Neal/Getty Images Did smartphones actually “destroy” a generation? The kids are not all right — and the device you are probably reading this on is to blame. So argues the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Haidt insists that smartphones and social media are fueling a “surge of suffering” that’s inundating teens all across the Western world. By Haidt’s account, smartphones and the addicting social media apps we download onto th ..read more

Rescue teams demolish a building which collapsed following an earthquake on April 3, 2024 in Hualien, Taiwan. | Annabelle Chih/Getty Images From Taiwan to South Korea to Silicon Valley, some of the most important nodes in the global tech economy are in disaster-prone places. When a 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit Taiwan’s eastern coast on April 3, the first concern involved the risk to people and property. Here, the news was not as dire as initially feared — only nine people have been reported killed as of Wednesday evening, along with hundreds of injuries. Considering that Wednesday’s quake was ..read more

Food delivery apps have recently added new fees in response to minimum pay rules in New York City and Seattle. | Getty Images/iStockphoto As delivery discourse rages, don’t forget the middlemen: apps like UberEats, DoorDash, and Grubhub. No one is happy about the delivery apps. Not the customers, who feel gouged by an avalanche of fees. Not restaurants, who feel gut-punched by the commission apps take from them. Certainly not delivery workers, who have long been rewarded with a pittance for doing a job that, in a city like New York, has a higher injury rate than that of construction workers. A ..read more

Will TruthSocial deliver the windfall Trump needs? | Anna Barclay/Getty Images Trump’s social network has made him one of the richest people in the world — at least on paper. Former President Donald Trump’s net worth has skyrocketed to about $7.5 billion since Trump Media, the parent company for his social network Truth Social, went public earlier this week. The question for Trump’s presidential bid — and his various legal troubles — is whether he can actually cash in on those gains. His 2024 campaign and the Save America political action committee supporting it have posted dismal fundraising ..read more