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The Atlantic is a magazine about the imminent loss of all that we hold dear. That’s a business model likely pitched to older readers, whose keener understanding of their own mortality can sometimes make them project it onto the world around them. The median age of an Atlantic reader, according to an August 2025 Pew survey, is 51, or eight years more than The New York Times, seven years more than The Washington Post, and four years more than The Wall Street Journal. The only print publication in Pew’s survey with an older median reader was Newsweek (57). The median age of readers of The New Republic, which was not included in Pew’s survey, is somewhere between 45 and 54, according to a sampling of roughly one-fifth of the total audience.I don’t dispute that some things in life end, or that the United States right now has a very serious governance problem, or that the humanities are going through a pretty gruesome patch. Many aspects of life that I cherish are under siege. Independent coffee shops are disappearing, newsstands are repurposed to sell candy and snacks, and movie theaters are shuttering. On the other hand, an Oxford mathematician named Andrew Wiles finally cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem; deaths from heart disease are down 66 percent since 1970; the Democrats will likely win back the House in November; and Ann Patchett’s latest bestselling novel is a delight. I mention this last because the latest Atlantic cover story announces “The Age of Reading Is Over,” and the story itself is headlined “The End of Reading Is Here.” Everything is always ending in The Atlantic. Did you know, for instance, that “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending”? Neither did I. An otherwise strong March 2024 piece by Franklin Foer, about the troubling recent rise in antisemitism, went haywire in its final paragraph.“The forces arrayed against Jews, on the right and the left, are far more powerful than they were 50 years ago,” Foer wrote. OK, but that’s an unexceptional observation because antisemitism was negligible in 1974. The better point of comparison would be 70 years ago, which was right around the time my Jewish father spent a whole interview with a Madison Avenue personnel chief dodging the question, “What kind of a name is ‘Noah’?” Or maybe even 60 years ago, when it was still common to change your surname to sound less Jewish. Antisemitism is on the rise, and that’s worrying. But it’s nowhere near the level that pervaded the U.S. as late as 1964.Foer went on to argue that antisemitic societies “are prone to decline” in other ways. “England entered a long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290.” But excepting an epidemic of bubonic plague that crashed ashore 58 years later, I can’t fathom what Foer’s talking about. “Czarist Russia limped toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s.” That’s more plausible, because many of the revolutionaries were Jewish, including Leon Trotsky. “If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.” Yes, it would be bad for the Jews. But we’re only 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, and America, sad to say, prospered through a much more fierce surge of antisemitism stretching from the Gilded Age through the roaring twenties. Can’t a recent increase in antisemitism be evaluated as its own specific problem?Other things that The Atlantic has declared to be ending: “The End of Men” (July/August 2010), “The End of Diplomacy” (February 2026), The End of High-School English” (December 2022), “The End of Minimalism” (July/August 2020), “The End of Trust” (November 2021), “The End of Human Rights” (March 2026), “The End of Democracy Has Already Begun” (September 2024), “This is the Way a World Order Ends” (April 2025), “The End of Rule of Law in America” (May 2025), “How America Ends” (December 2019), “The End of the West” (November 2002), and, most hyperbolically of all, Francis Fukuyama flagging “More Proof That This Is Really the End of History” (October 2022). Only very occasionally does the thing that’s ending merit a “good riddance,” but in September 2025 The Atlantic did post a Hanna Rosin podcast under the heading, “Is This the End of Kids on Social Media?” Alas, it wasn’t, except on Facebook.Sexual activity declines as people age (including, presumably, Atlantic readers), so it shouldn’t surprise us that The Atlantic repeatedly announces the end of sexual congress. “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” was a reasonable question to ask in December 2018, as the word incel was starting to acquire currency. But did we also need “The Bored Sex” (i.e., women, sexually) in February 2019 and “The Death of the Sex Scene” in February 2023 and “The Slow, Quiet Demise of American Romance” in December 2024 and “Sex Without Women” (about hetero male preference for porn) in March 2025? After all, Atlantic readers had already been fed “Dear Therapist: My Husband Doesn’t Want to Have Sex Anymore” in 2018 and “The Real Problem With Hookup Culture: Bad Sex” in 2013. What’s it going to take to get a little fucking going in The Atlantic?I asked Google AI: “How often has The Atlantic announced the end of something?” The bot turned out to be even more fed up than I am:The Atlantic has proclaimed “the end of” various cultural, political, and societal concepts hundreds of times over its long history. It is one of the magazine’s most famous and frequently deployed headline tropes, framing everything from macro-political shifts to tiny cultural trends as a grand finale. The publication has a well-documented fondness for “apocalypse stories,” routinely declaring that an era, a habit, or an institution has officially reached its expiration date.In fairness, neither of the sources Google AI cited supported this interpretation, and the one used to undergird the claim that The Atlantic fancies “apocalypse stories” was neither an apocalypse story nor an assertion that The Atlantic runs a lot of them. Rather, it was a characteristically excellent analytical essay by Adam Kirsch about the appeal of apocalypse stories, under a headline (“Apocalypse, Constantly”) that would serve just as well for the piece you’re reading now. So Google AI’s assessment framed the guilty. On the other hand, Google AI had no trouble finding “end of” Atlantic stories. It furnished many of the examples I’ve cited already. (For the record, in anticipation of glass-house accusations, I acknowledge that The New Republic also has used “The End of ...” in a handful of headlines over the years, but nowhere near as frequently as The Atlantic.)I then asked Google AI: “Has The Atlantic ever announced the beginning of anything?” Yes, it replied. But then I looked at its examples. The first was “The Beginning of a New DOJ” from last October, about the wrecking ball the Trump administration is taking to rule of law at the Justice Department, so really that was about the end of responsible prosecutions. Strike one. The second was “The Beginning of the End of NATO” from last September. Strike two. The third was “Caitlin Clark Is Just the Beginning.” That was a genuine “beginning of” piece about the (hopeful) future for female college athletics. But Google AI had to admit that beginnings in The Atlantic tend to be endings in disguise:The publication frequently uses the beginning-of-a-new-era narrative to document profound changes in society. For instance, their writers have pondered whether we are witnessing the beginning of a postliterate or post-reading age, or the beginning of entirely new, reality-altering conspiracy networks.In other words, The Atlantic published pieces about the end of reading and the end of accurate perception of reality. Please don’t mistake my criticism for an argument on behalf of chirpy good-news stories. Rather, it’s an argument against doom porn (for which I’ve criticized The Atlantic before) and overgeneralization. Part of the difficulty is that The Atlantic cut back on-scene reporting decades ago, I presume to save money, though money doesn’t appear to be in short supply lately. It’s harder to issue grand pronunciamenti, either optimistic or pessimistic, after you’ve interviewed a lot of people face to face. Even if you don’t circle the globe, though—I certainly don’t—you can report and write about bad stuff in a spirit not of defeat but defiance. While I was reporting early last year a comprehensive guide to resisting President Donald Trump, I felt in a near panic that some other news organization—maybe even The Atlantic—would scoop me. I needn’t have worried. Neither did The New Republic have to fret about being scooped by The Atlantic (or many others) when it initiated a series of short profiles about people who were resisting Trump in promising ways.This is not a piece about The Atlantic’s new “End of Reading” piece. I haven’t read it, and for all I know it’s superb. Certainly it’s a legitimate social problem that high school and even college teachers struggle to get young people to read books (especially those published before 1900). The protagonist of Patchett’s novel Whistler is a middle-aged woman named Daphne Fuller who teaches English at an exclusive all-girls private school in New York modeled on Spence or Chapin. Her students, Fuller tells her stepfather, who’s a longtime editor at Random House, still read books. “When they read David Copperfield,” she says, “they read the whole thing. They read The Return of the Native. The AP girls read Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick last semester. Moby-Dick!” This is the only part of Patchett’s narrative that required, from me, a willing suspension of disbelief.I’ve valued some of The Atlantic’s End-ist pieces in the past (Foer’s antisemitism piece minus its End-ism; Hanna Rosin’s “End of Men” piece, which was really about economic displacement; Kate Julian’s Young-People Sex piece, which persuasively identified the problem as a “sex recession”; recessions don’t last forever). But The Atlantic is addicted to framing these and other stories as the End of Something. You’d think that a magazine that’s been around for 169 years would possess a better sense of life’s continuities. What I’d like to see end is “end of” pieces in The Atlantic as it sails into its next 169 years.

In 2012, as a 33-year-old staff writer at The American Prospect in D.C., I had the opportunity to travel around the country, looking for stories that would show how real people were connected to the decisions made by politicians inside the Beltway. On a trip to Colorado, while interviewing voters in a suburban swing district just west of Denver, I met a young couple staying in a homeless shelter who mentioned that they had previously stayed at a slightly rundown hotel, paying weekly rent, until they could no longer afford it. I had been looking for a chance to write a long narrative feature on the rise of suburban poverty during the Great Recession, and when I checked out the hotel, I found many other families living in it and in other hotels nearby. Back in D.C., I pitched my editor and later returned to the Denver area to live in the hotel for about five weeks. I got to know the people living there—how they lost their home and what life living in a hotel was like. My article, “The Weeklies,” ran in March 2013. I remain incredibly proud of it, because it highlighted the struggle ordinary Americans were facing as the economy slowly recovered from the housing crash. I thought of all of this recently when I came across a link to a website called In the Weights. Designed to look like a 1980s computer game, it’s a database where you can “find out whether you live on” in large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, and assigns a score based on your prominence. That’s how In the Weights frames it, anyway—a naked appeal to vanity. In reality, the site shows you how much of your work has been used to train AI chatbots. I found that a lot of mine was: I was given a “strength” score of 735, which put me in the top 5 percent.So I turned to the chatbots themselves for details. Some would not divulge which works of mine were used in their training, but Gemini cited my work at The American Prospect and TNR: Your Reporting on Class and Poverty: I have access to the core concepts and reporting from your career, such as your pieces for The American Prospect covering the shredded social safety net, food insecurity among military families, and health disparities, as well as your recent coverage of working-class politics and economic anxiety for The New Republic. There have been more than a few times lately when I wanted to throw my laptop across the room, drop everything, and go live in the woods. This was one of them. “The Weeklies” wasn’t just a 7,000-word article; it was months of work. In fact, you could say I’d begun work on it even before I’d formed the idea. I had spent most of my twenties in low-paid, low-level journalism jobs, building up the reporting and writing expertise to even contemplate tackling such a story. Journalism jobs famously do not pay well: Into my mid-thirties, by the time I was writing long narratives, my salary remained $50,000. I struggled to pay rent in D.C. while also repaying my student loans from journalism graduate school. (I am still making $611.31 monthly payments and likely will continue to do so until I retire.)I don’t want to throw too much of a pity party, but as someone who went to college thanks to financial aid and then borrowed to go to graduate school because I didn’t know how else to move into my desired career, I never had family money or connections to rely on. During these years, I struggled to keep up with my bills and to stay one step ahead of the layoffs devastating the entire industry. At various times, I put my student loans in forbearance, had a Honda Civic repossessed, and defaulted on credit cards. It took me years to dig out of that financial hole.These are fairly common ups and downs for someone who grows up working-class in the U.S. These are also the kinds of trade-offs many people make early in their careers, as they hope to cash in on the experience later. Working hard at a low-paying job is supposed to allow you to step up a ladder to a more stable career. At least, that’s what we’re promised when we borrow money to get an education and then live on ramen, with multiple roommates, as we embark on a career.AI is not the first technology to upend that promise, but it is the latest—and the one that has touched me most personally. It makes sense that I would be In the Weights. I wrote a lot of words during the early years of internet publishing, creating a body of work that is easy to find and offers free material for the LLMs to suck into their gaping maw. But it is a mistake to think of everything I published under my name as just internet writing. Each word came from years and years of labor.A number of organizations are trying to tackle how AI is used in the workplace, and how workers might have say in its use and be protected from job loss. The AFL-CIO, in a platform released after its national convention last month, demanded that “working people have a say in how and whether AI and other advanced technologies are developed and deployed.” Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is working with states, policymakers, industries, and Big Tech to design policy, training, and payment programs that help transition workers who may be displaced by AI. New America released a report late last month about “centering workers in the AI economy,” using lessons learned from major labor disruptions of the past. Even the pope has weighed in.We definitely need to talk about where we’re headed, but what about where we’ve been? Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is the rare voice on Capitol Hill to acknowledge that AI “is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and the creative work of tens of millions of people.” Last month, he introduced a bill that would levy a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the largest AI firms to create a $7 trillion sovereign wealth fund, which every year would pay out more than $1,000 to everyone in the U.S. It would also give the federal government voting shares and positions on company boards to allow the public to have a say in its future use.This legislation recognizes the real problem. I lived paycheck-to-paycheck to create the work that helps fuel LLMs today, yet I get zero compensation for it while global investment in AI is in the billions and it’s making Silicon Valley even richer. Elon Musk’s SpaceX absorbed his AI model, Grok, to increase the aerospace company’s value ahead of an IPO that briefly made Musk the world’s first trillionaire. AI may be a bubble, and I agree with the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci that AI can’t possibly steal all of our jobs, but it will make many people extremely rich no matter what. And they will have gotten rich because AI relied on the labor of working people without paying a cent for it.Of course, this is part of a broader trend in which executives and investors mint millions while workers get an increasingly thin sliver of the pie. If you want one chart to explain why people are mad about the economy right now, look at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s chart showing how labor’s share of gross domestic product has declined since the 1950s. These trends are global, but in the U.S. the divide is more extreme than in other countries. Our productivity keeps going up, but the gains are rewarding capital and pumping up CEO salaries. If the past is any guide, the people who will be the most hurt by AI disruptions are the workers who are later on in their careers who have built up a specific expertise and don’t easily transition into new jobs at the same salary as their previous jobs—and this chart shows that these are the workers who’ve been underpaid this whole time.While anger at Big Tech is growing, I don’t know if people are angry enough, and I wonder if that’s partly because a lot of the work that has fueled social media platforms and now AI is in creative fields like art and writing, which are misunderstood or esoteric to many Americans. The writing that many people do in their own working lives might be annoying paperwork, like a self-evaluation, or a cover letter in a job application—typing, basically. But writing, whether a quick take on the day’s news or months of reporting, is really the product of months or even years of labor. Writing also demands thinking, which is work in itself. Generative AI can write, albeit very poorly, but it can’t really think—not as humans do. The best it can do is scan all of its inputs—the result of human beings’ thoughts—in order to approximate the output a human would provide.Big Tech wants us to believe they’re concerned about the effects their models might have on real people, like creating mass unemployment. Anthropic positions itself as an ethical AI company, and its CEO, Dario Amodei, has aligned with the Vatican on its concerns about the human costs of AI. Other tech CEOs make noises about policies like guaranteed income that would allow people to earn salaries even without jobs. But that kind of generosity is at odds with the way they built their models in the first place—by stealing others’ intellectual property.Only politics can address the problems with AI, but for the past 50 years our leaders in Washington have largely abandoned labor in favor of companies’ capital growth. Wages, taxes, and regulations have undervalued the work and safety of real people, driving the K-shaped economic growth we see now. Political and economic systems won’t change course unless we force them to. To use an example from the past, the Luddite rebellion was not a wholesale rejection of modern advances. The Luddites were textile workers angry about how mechanization was being used to exploit working people, and they protested by destroying automated power looms. My desire to smash my laptop comes from an old tradition.

How the American Diabetes Association tried to hide a critical editorial published in its own journal—to no avail The post Appeasing Trump Is a Futile Sugar High appeared first on The American Prospect.

Senator Mitch McConnell was inexplicably admitted to the hospital nearly a month ago, a stretch of time that has even the far-right media machine growing suspicious of the Kentucky Republican’s true medical condition.McConnell was hospitalized after he was found unconscious in his Washington residence on June 14. But as the weeks have dragged on without a clear explanation from his team as to his mysterious absence, speculation about McConnell’s health has become increasingly grave. Earlier this week, far-right influencer Laura Loomer claimed on X that an unnamed “high level source close to the White House” told her that McConnell was suffering from severe organ failure and “is officially brain dead.”By Thursday, hosts of the far-right news network Newsmax had joined the expanding choir. “Republicans are doing the same bullshit with McConnell that Dems did with [Joe] Biden. No one has actually spoke to him, they are just trying to carry this on to keep @RepThomasMassie from running for his seat,” Carl Higbie posted to X on Thursday morning, referring to the highly dependent dynamic the previous president was rumored to rely on in the waning days of his term. Newsmax anchor Rob Finnerty took his concerns to his show, questioning on air: “Where is Mitch McConnell? What is going on?“When you factor this in under Kentucky state law, if McConnell resigned or died, a special election would have to happen within 90 days, meaning before the November elections, meaning someone like Congressman Thomas Massie could run in that race and potentially win, which is not something Republicans want,” Finnerty said.Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear got involved in the matter Wednesday, penning a letter to McConnell’s office demanding a formal update on the senator’s health.The 84-year-old Republican has represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate since 1985, and remained on Capitol Hill through several recent health scares, particularly since 2023. In March of that year, McConnell fell at a dinner event at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, fracturing his rib and suffering a concussion in the process. He fell again that July. He also publicly froze mid-sentence twice that year, dissociating for 20 to 30 seconds each time, sparking concerns that the aging lawmaker had suffered a stroke. In December 2024, McConnell fell for a third time in a public setting, and again in October 2025 while on his way to vote in the Capitol. He has since been transported via wheelchair by his aides as a health precaution.In February, McConnell’s staffers shared that the lawmaker had spent roughly eight days in the hospital with “flu-like symptoms.”

The Trump administration is attacking journalists for reporting on President Trump ditching his new Qatari jet for security reasons. MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig reported Wednesday evening that the president abruptly swapped the new jet for his old Air Force One on his trip from the NATO summit in Turkey to the U.K. due to concerns about the aircraft’s defense systems. She noted the new Air Force One didn’t have the necessary communications and defensive capabilities for “safe travel amid Iran hostilities.”Leonnig’s post was angrily singled out by White House communications director Steven Cheung, even though multiple other outlets reported the same information. “Carol Leonnig is a liar and this article is complete Fake News. She has no idea what she is talking about. She says the White House declined to comment. Not true. We gave comment to The New York Times and many other outlets,” he wrote Thursday on X. “Carol is not a real journalist. A complete fraud.”Cheung never actually disputed any of Leonnig’s reporting in the post—he just called it fake news without offering up any response. And if his issue is with Leonning not attributing his comment, all he said to The New York Times on a similar story was “the new Air Force One is a state-of-the-art aircraft that has been fitted with high-level security protocols that ensure the safety of the president and his staff.” He also mentioned that “there are many enemies of America who have their sights on [Trump], and we use every tool at our disposal—including distraction and misdirection—to address those threats.” But none of that language addressed the reason Trump switched planes. Trump himself claimed rather unconvincingly that the Qatari jet was going to a U.S. military base in Europe “so the soldiers can see it.” In reality, the new jet simply doesn’t have the same command-and-control functions of the original Air Force One. And while experts have said that it would take years and billions of dollars to upgrade the Qatari jet’s defenses to the presidential level, the Trump administration did it in weeks—all before ditching it partway through its first official trip.