A federal judge has declared Google a monopolist. In a 277-page decision released yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta concluded that the online-search company abused its dominance and suffocated competitors—in part by paying Apple and Samsung tens of billions of dollars a year to make Google the default search engine on mobile devices.| Bogost.com
Lithium-ion batteries are miraculous. They’re strong enough to run a vehicle, and they can be recharged at any outlet. Their commercial debut, in 1991, and popularization over the next two decades, has helped create a golden age of high-end consumer tech: We now have plenty of e-bikes and electric cars, and also phones, smartwatches, computer mice, and earbuds that can last for a day or more on a single charge. The spread of these batteries has produced a global race for mineral dominance. ...| Ian Bogost
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“Democrats say that it is racist to believe … well, they say it’s racist to do anything,” J. D. Vance proclaimed during a campaign rally this week, after bringing up the need for voter-ID requirements. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too,” he said, adding, “But—it’s good.” His audience laughed, and Vance laughed before punctuating the moment: “I love you guys.”| Ian Bogost
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Why can it feel like there’s never enough time in a day, and why are so many of us conditioned to believe that being more productive makes us better people? On How to Keep Time, co-hosts Becca Rashid and the Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost talk with social scientists, authors, philosophers, and theoretical physicists to learn more about time and how to reclaim it. How to Keep Time launches in December 2023.| Ian Bogost
What if The Atlantic owned a train car? I wondered. Amtrak, I had just learned on the internet, allows owners of private railcars to lash onto runs along the Northeast Corridor, among other routes. “We should have a train car,” I slacked an editor. Moments later, it appeared on my screen, bright red with our magazine’s logo emblazoned in white, just like I’d ordered. It’s an old logo, and misspelled, but the effect was the same: A momentary notion—one unworthy of relating to someo...| Ian Bogost
I drink the Pumpkin Spice Latte to commune with autumn. Not first for its taste, warmth or color, though also for those things. I order pumpkin spice to fuse my body with the leaves, the crisp air, the gentle reminders of death, and all the other trappings of fall. Twenty years ago this month, Starbucks brought this flavor to the world. In so doing, autumn was perfected.| Ian Bogost
When The Atlantic revealed last month that tens of thousands of books published in the past 20 years had been used without permission to train Meta’s AI language model, well-known authors were outraged, calling it a “smoking gun” for mega-corporate misbehavior. Now that the magazine has put out a searchable database of affected books, the outrage is redoubled: “I would never have consented for Meta to train AI on any of my books, let alone five of them,” wrote the novelist Lauren Gr...| Ian Bogost
“Oh,” I slacked my Atlantic colleagues earlier this week, beneath a screenshot of a pop-up note that Slack, the group-chat software we use, had presented to me moments earlier. “A fresh, more focused Slack,” it promised, or threatened. On my screen, the program’s interface was suddenly a Grimace-purple color. I sensed doom in this software update.| Ian Bogost