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The Political Dysfunction Facing Congress

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. Ahead of next week’s closing arguments for Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, the former president’s allies took turns appearing o

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Why the Internet Is Boring Now

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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.Ian Bogost has lived through more than a few hype cycles on the internet. The Atlantic contributing writer has been online, and building websites, since the early days of the World Wide Web. I spoke with him about what happens when new technologies age into the mainstream, how the web has in some ways been a victim of its own success, and the parts of the internet that still delight him.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The spat that made Congress even worse The “America First” chaos caucus is forcing a moment of truth. Your childhood home might never stop haunting you. The Web Is FineLora Kelley: Is it fair to say everything online is deteriorating? Or is that too dramatic?Ian Bogost: It’s easy to focus on the stuff that seems bad or broken, because it is noticeable and also because the internet is built for complaining about things. And it’s natural that one of the things we like to complain about the most on the internet is the internet itself. But there’s a lot of stuff online that’s really amazing, and we should be careful to keep that in mind.The things that feel like deterioration are the result of a saturated market. There’s no longer any incentive for tech products to be as good for consumers as they once were. That’s in part a cost issue—a lot of tech was effectively subsidized for years. But also, the delightful or even just straightforwardly functional services created years ago don’t have to be quite so friendly and usable. Because of their success, there’s not as much of a need to satisfy people anymore.These products are now like a lot of other things in our offline lives—fine. When you go to buy a car or a mattress or whatever, it’s just kind of the way it is. We’ve reached that level of cultural ubiquity with computers.Lora: Is it inevitable that products will become boring once they become the mainstream? Is there any way around that, or are we stuck in a cycle of novelty to boredom?Ian: That’s the cycle, and it’s good. Boredom means that something is successful. When things are new, they feel wild and exciting. We don’t know what they mean yet, and there’s a lot of promise—maybe even fear.But for something to truly become successful at a massive scale—for millions or billions of people to develop a relationship with a product or service—the product has to recede into the background again and become ordinary. And once it reaches that point, you stop thinking about it quite so much. You take it for granted.Lora: You have written about your experience using, and building websites on, the internet in the ’90s. What parallels do you see between the early web and this current moment of generative AI?Ian: I remember living through the early days of the web, and we never had any idea that millions and billions of people would be using these data-extraction services. None of that occurred to us at the time. I don’t think there’s a very strong cultural memory of the early days of the web. We have a lot of stories about the excesses of the dot-com era, but the more ordinary stuff didn’t get recorded in the same way.Everything that we did, we had to convince some old-world business that it was worth doing. It was a process of bringing the offline world online. In the decades since, technologists have started disrupting the legacy businesses and sectors through innovation. And that worked really well from the perspective of building markets and building wealth. But it didn’t necessarily make the world better.Generative AI feels more like those early days of the web than social media or the Web 2.0 era did. It’s my hope that maybe we’ll go about this in a way that draws from the lessons learned over the past 30 years—which, of course, we probably won’t. Technologists shouldn’t be trying to blow things up; rather, they should make use of what technology allows in order to do things better, more equitably, and more effectively.Lora: In 2024, do you still find the web to be a site of wonder?Ian: Being able to talk to family and friends as much as I want, for free, is still historically unusual and delightful. The fundamental feature of the internet still exists: I can look out and get a little buzz of delight just from seeing something new.Related: The web became a strip mall. Social media is not what killed the web. Today’s News A New York Times report found that an upside-down flag, a “Stop the Steal” symbol, flew at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house in January 2021, when the Supreme Court was considering whether to hear a 2020 election case. The man who bludgeoned Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022 was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. He is awaiting a state trial later this month. Daniel Perry, a former Army sergeant who was convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020, was released from prison yesterday after Texas Governor Greg Abbott granted him a pardon. Dispatches The Books Briefing: Alice Munro’s death was an occasion to praise her life as a writer as much as her actual work, Gal Beckerman writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by Max Guther The One Place in Airports People Actually Want to BeBy Amanda Mull On a bright, chilly Thursday in February, most of the people inside the Chase Sapphire Lounge at LaGuardia Airport appeared to be doing something largely absent from modern air travel: They were having fun. I arrived at Terminal B before 9:30 a.m., but the lounge had already been in full swing for hours. Most of the velvet-upholstered stools surrounding the circular, marble-topped bar were filled. Travelers who looked like they were heading to couples’ getaways or girls’ weekends clustered in twos or threes, waiting for their mimosas or Bloody Marys … While I ate my breakfast—a brussels-sprout-and-potato hash with bacon and a poached egg ordered using a QR code, which also offered me the opportunity to book a gratis half-hour mini-facial in the lounge’s wellness area—I listened to the 30-somethings at the next table marveling about how nice this whole thing was. That’s not a sentiment you’d necessarily expect to hear about the contrived luxury of an airport lounge. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic Graeme Wood: The UN’s Gaza statistics make no sense. Many Indians don’t trust their elections anymore. Giant heaps of plastic are helping vegetables grow. Culture Break Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. RIP. The dream of streaming is dead, Jacob Stern writes. The bundles are back.Pick apart. The sad desk salad, a meal that is synonymous with young, overworked white-collar professionals, is getting sadder, Yasmin Tayag writes.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Spat That Made Congress Even Worse

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Three high-profile women in Congress got into it last night during a meeting of the House Oversight Committee, in what some outlets have described as a “heated exchange.” But that label feels too dignified. Instead, the whole scene played out like a Saturday Night Live sketch: a cringeworthy five-minute commentary on the miserable state of American politics.Unless you are perpetually online, you may have missed the drama. I’ll recap: The scene unfolded during a meeting held to consider a Republican motion to—what else?—hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to release audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur. So things were already off to a wild start. Then, after her line of questioning went off the rails, Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene took a jab at Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas: “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”The personal remark was rude and certainly lacked decorum, which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rightly pointed out: “How dare you attack the appearance of another person?” And she demanded that the words be struck from the record. Greene, of course, was not chastened.“Aww, are your feelings hurt?” the Georgia Republican shot back at Ocasio-Cortez, in a pitch-perfect impression of a schoolyard bully.“Oh, girl. Baby girl, you do not want to play,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, letting decorum slip on her side. It looked as if the committee was about to witness fisticuffs. Moments later, Crockett chimed in with a question for the committee’s Republican chairman, Jim Comer of Kentucky, that was actually an idiosyncratic barb directed toward Greene. “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”Comer was clearly confused, “A what now?”The exchange felt like a bizarro session of British Parliament’s famously combative, point-scoring Prime Minister’s Questions, only the accents were worse, the insults were at least 50 percent less clever, and instead of congressional business as usual, it felt like watching business fall apart.At first, admittedly, seeing people stand up to Greene’s bullying was heartening. An unabashed troll, she pulled the stunt of wearing a MAGA cap and heckling President Joe Biden at his State of the Union address. And mocking the eyelashes of a colleague at a congressional hearing? That’s next-level mean-girl garbage.Unfortunately, the unedifying display in the House Oversight Committee only produced more incentives for bad political behavior. Progressive posters on X praised Crockett’s alliterative insult. Even LeVar Burton, the former host of the children’s TV series Reading Rainbow, applauded her: “Words of the day; bleach, blond, bad, built, butch and body …” Burton wrote on X.Really, no one comes off looking good here. This may sound sanctimonious, but: Members of Congress should be better than personal insults and body-shaming commentary. And both Ocasio-Cortez and Crockett have to know by now that, as the idiom goes, wrestling with pigs makes everyone look sloppy. What would Michelle Obama—patron saint of Democrats, who famously instructed Democrats to high when Republicans go low—think about Crockett’s response?Zoomed out, this unseemly episode is just one more sad example of partisanship and performance politics, two forces that continue to rile Americans up and drive us apart. Our politicians are not exactly covering themselves in glory right now. Back in 2009, Joe Wilson shocked the country when he yelled “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during his State of the Union address. Cut to January of this year, when Republicans heckled Biden, and he swapped jibes with them like a comedian at a low-rent comedy club.While the leader of the Republican Party is on trial in New York, GOP lawmakers have been on a weeklong prostration tour, flying from all corners of the country to gather like eager groupies outside the courtroom, desperate for a chance to impress the boss. In addition, a Senate Democrat from New Jersey is on trial for taking bribes and acting as a foreign agent, and a Democratic congressman from Texas is facing his own charges of corruption.Biden, an institutionalist, likes to appeal to our better angels and assure Americans, This is not who we are. Maybe not. But this is definitely who we elected.Illustration Sources: Nathan Howard / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty.