THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

Updated at 8:25 p.m. on January 30, 2026Reporters, lawmakers, and ordinary Americans are poring over a deluge of new files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case today, following the latest release from the Department of Justice. This release is substantially larger than any previous ones, with 3 million pages of documents, more than 180,000 photos, and more than 2,000 videos, according to the DOJ. The website they were uploaded to—which has the elegant URL Justice.gov/Epstein—is not intuitive to operate and offers a search box as its primary navigation tool.But a search box was the only thing many viewers needed, as they were diving into the files in pursuit of information on specific people—President Trump in particular. Thousands of the documents appear to mention Trump, though not all of them in any significant way (for example, The New York Times notes that some of the documents are copies of news articles… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Before Elon Musk, most electric vehicles seemed less like an alternative to gasoline than an argument in its favor. The sad state of affairs for EVs for many years was that they were slow, impractical, and largely enticing only if you lived with copious guilt over your carbon emissions.Then Tesla came out with the Tesla Model S. The speedy, high-tech sedan didn’t just leave other EVs in the dust; it could compete with the likes of BMW and Mercedes-Benz. “EVs went from ‘eating your vegetables’ to getting you super-car performance in a vehicle that’s luxurious and quiet,” Jake Fisher, the senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports, told me. The Model S proved something that’s now easy to take for granted: EVs can work, and ordinary people might actually want one. A year after the Model S’s 2012 debut, Musk personally drove one coast-to-coast to prove that it was… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

In the waning heat of last summer, freshly back in my office at a major research university, I found myself considering the higher-education hellscape that had lately descended upon the nation. I’d spent months reporting on the Trump administration’s attacks on universities for The Atlantic, speaking with dozens of administrators, faculty, and students about the billions of dollars in cuts to public funding for research and the resulting collapse of “college life.”At the same time, I’d been chronicling the spread of AI-powered chatbots that have already changed undergraduates forever.Initially, I surveyed the situation from the safe distance of a journalist who happens to also be a career professor and university administrator. I saw myself as an envoy between America’s college campuses and its citizens, telling the stories of the people whose lives had been shattered by these transformations. By the summer, though, that safe distance had collapsed back on me.… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Over the past several days, TikTok users have found themselves at a loss. Literally, I mean: They lost their audiences, and their view counts showed “0.” Some people who attempted to upload content about anti-ICE protests or the killing of Alex Pretti alleged that the platform was intentionally blocking them from doing so. Others were able to get their videos uploaded, but alleged that TikTok was not distributing them. Still others noticed that they were unable to send the word Epstein in a direct message, a quirk so bizarre that it incited California Governor Gavin Newsom to repost a screenshot shared by an anonymous X account using the handle @intelligentpawg.For many of these people, the explanation was obvious: “MAGA censorship.” Newsom said in his post that he would be launching a review “into whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring Trump-critical content,” and the concern isn’t totally random. TikTok’s… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

These are not the words you want to hear when it comes to human extinction, but I was hearing them: “Things are moving uncomfortably fast.” I was sitting in a conference room with Sam Bowman, a safety researcher at Anthropic. Worth $183 billion at the latest estimate, the AI firm has every incentive to speed things up, ship more products, and develop more advanced chatbots to stay competitive with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and the industry’s other giants. But Anthropic is at odds with itself—thinking deeply, even anxiously, about seemingly every decision. Anthropic has positioned itself as the AI industry’s superego: the firm that speaks with the most authority about the big questions surrounding the technology, while rival companies develop advertisements and affiliate shopping links (a difference that Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, was eager to call out during an interview in Davos last week). On Monday, Amodei published a lengthy… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.