Monday 13th May 2024

The Future of Electric Cars Hinges on a Dongle

Take a road trip in an electric car, and you’ll quickly realize that gas stations are incredible. Nothing in the world of EVs is as fast and easy as checking highway signs for the nearest Shell or BP, filling up your tank in just a few minutes, and getting on with your day. It’s not just that chargers are still hard to find. They can be dreadfully slow, adding as little as 25 miles of battery life every hour. Plenty of faster ones exist, yes, but there is no guarantee that they will work. A long-distance drive in an EV still requires a lot of planning and a lot of luck.But if you drive a Tesla, the experience is better. The company’s Superchargers are speedy—adding up to 200 miles of charge in just 15 minutes—and simple to use. Set up an account with Tesla and charging initiates automatically after plugging in. There’s no fumbling with screens or swiping a credit card. Superchargers consistently clock in as the most reliable EV chargers in the U.S.


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Prom Dresses Are Just Dresses Now

For high schoolers across America, prom season means heady nights of corsages, limousines, broken curfews, and gaudy, bedazzled gowns—except, maybe not that last part anymore. The words prom dress once conjured images of shimmering taffeta and poofy princess skirts and other cringeworthy fashion choices only teens would make. You can still buy those types of dresses, but these days, high-school dance floors are more refined, filled with slinky satin, garden-party florals, and corseted bodices—designs that women in their 20s, 30s, and beyond might wear.Over the past decade or so, the style divisions among age groups have become far more fluid. Social media has flattened the landscape of influence, so people of all ages are being fed similar content. Retail, meanwhile, has moved away from age-specific brands toward fast-fashion sites and online stores with wide appeal. The assimilation is especially clear in prom style. Teens will wear just about any fancy adult look to the dance, whether it be a relatively casual dress you might see at an Easter brunch, or a jumpsuit fit for the red carpet. This has spurred an existential crisis in teen fashion: What even is a prom dress anymore?


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What Happened to Stormy Daniels Is Not Salacious

It was something sadder, uglier, and—for many people who have lived in some way in the shadow of sexual violence—more familiar.One evening in March 2018, I joined some friends at a bar in Washington, D.C., to watch a live broadcast of Anderson Cooper’s interview with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels on 60 Minutes. For months, we’d all been reading news stories about Daniels’s reported sexual encounter with then-President Donald Trump, along with Trump’s efforts to pay her off in order to cover it up before the 2016 election—and now, finally, we were going to hear from the woman herself. The story itself seemed funny, an absurd dispatch from a faraway, brightly colored world of celebrity gossip.


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The ‘Lurid Metaphors’ of Illness

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Sickness, like love and grief, is a universal part of the human condition—but it also feels completely subjective, so much so that conveying the accompanying sensations and emotions can be hard. Doctors sometimes ask patients to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10: Are you at a 5 or an 8? My mind always freezes in such moments. How can I know what 5 is if I don’t know what 10 feels like?


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The Weird World of AI Voice Replicas

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.It’s a good bet that the generative-AI era will be stranger than anyone expects. In a new feature for The Atlantic, my colleague Charlie Warzel profiles ElevenLabs, an AI company that specializes in replicating voices.


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The Cat Who Saved Me

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.I have had cats since I was a boy, and all of them were wonderful, but one of them left a mark on my life forever.


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The Wrong Way to Fight Anti-Semitism on Campus

A well-intentioned bill making its way through Congress could chill speech at colleges across the country.The House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act last week in a bipartisan vote of 320 to 91. “Antisemitism is on the rise,” it declares, and is “impacting Jewish students.”


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The Sad Fate of the Sports Parent

A true sports parent dies twice. There’s the death that awaits us all at the end of a long or short life, the result of illness, misadventure, fire, falling object, hydroplaning car, or derailing train. But there is also the death that comes in the midst of life, the purgatorial purposelessness that follows the final season on the sidelines or in the bleachers, when your sports kid hangs up their skates, cleats, or spikes after that last game.The passage of time is woeful, and, for a parent, living your dreams through the progress of your progeny is as inevitable as the turning of the Earth. But the sports parent lives the experience in concentrate—a more intense version of the common predicament. You must give up your vicarious hope of big-league glory and let it die. You must part from what, if your kid pursued his passion seriously, had become a routine of away games and early-morning practices, hours in the car, a hot cup of coffee in your cold hand as the sun rose above the Wonderland of Ice, in Bridgeport, Connecticut; the Ice Arena in Brewster, New York; the Ice Vault, in Wayne, New Jersey—home of the Hitmen, whose logo is a pin-striped gangster with a hockey stick. And you’ll suddenly find yourself watching the Stanley Cup playoffs not in the way of a civilian but with the chagrin of knowing that the game’s upper ranks will never include your kid.


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Asteroids Could Fuel the Clean-Energy Transition

In April 2023, a satellite the size of a microwave launched into space. Its goal: to get ready to mine asteroids. Although the mission, backed by a company called AstroForge, ran into problems, it’s part of a new wave of activity by would-be asteroid miners hoping to cash in on cosmic resources.Potential applications of space-mined material abound: Asteroids contain metals such as platinum and cobalt, which are used in electronics and electric-vehicle batteries, respectively. Although plenty of these materials exist on Earth, they can be more concentrated on asteroids than on mountainsides, making them easier to scrape out. And scraping in space, advocates say, could cut down on the damaging impacts of mining on this planet. Space-resource advocates also want to explore the potential of other substances. What if, say, space ice could be used for spacecraft and rocket propellant? Or space dirt could be used for astronaut-housing structures and radiation shielding?


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What Kids Can Bring to Conversations

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.“During most of my early adulthood, philosophy had little appeal to me,” Elissa Strauss wrote in 2022. “As long as I treated people mostly kindly, what did it matter what I thought about right and wrong, or the nature of knowledge or the universe?”


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