Charlie Warzel
Verified
(He/Him)
As seen in:
Galaxy Brain,
The Atlantic,
Next Big Idea Club Podcast,
CNN Business,
Medium,
MSN,
MSN Malaysia,
MSN Philippines,
The New York Times,
CorranCast,
HuffPost,
Post Outlook
and
Covers:
digital politics, future of journalism, online publishing, digital media
Staff Writer, @TheAtlantic. I host Galaxy Brain, the first and only video podcast.
Articles by Charlie Warzel
The Zealousness of the New Tech Right
Listen1.0x 0:0049:05 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube It can feel like an existential moment right now—one where many tech leaders are both warning against and accelerating the destructive forces of AI. But Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue that this could also be a turning point toward building something better.
The Man Who Saved the Internet Yesterday
On Tuesday, the world found out about two massive security vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language that is used by roughly 70 percent of websites. The flaw was discovered by cybersecurity researchers using a frontier model from OpenAI. If they exploited it, attackers could gain full control of servers, stealing or copying anything inside or simply taking sites offline.
‘If Anything Happens to This Guy … Everyone Is Screwed’
4 hours ago iOS 27 is packed with new features for apps like Notes, Wallet, Maps, Messages, and more. But one iOS 27 addition that’s especially impressed me is a new Phone feature: Call Context. iOS 27’s Call Context feature puts key info on-screen when you’re on the phone with a business I’m not a big fan of …
You Can Believe Everything
It was fitting that, just hours after the first public screenings of the Elizabeth Holmes documentary began last Thursday, Elon Musk put on a show of his own. That night, in Texas, Musk unveiled the company’s new Roadster prototype, a car that would defy gravity. Tesla built what was roughly one-half of a roller-coaster loop, which the Roadster climbed before momentarily hanging upside down and then executing a controlled flip and gliding down to Earth. The demo worked.
You Can Believe Everything
A Former Theranos Employee Watched You Can See Everything. What He Saw Made Him Want To Scream At The Screen Could it be that everything is fake? Share this article Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Subscribe to our newsletter There are …
Will the New ‘Grand Theft Auto’ Be a Weapon in the Culture Wars?
Listen1.0x 0:0052:00 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube In the newest Grand Theft Auto installment—13 years and estimated billions of dollars in the making—people in a fictionalized version of Florida can exercise, drink smoothies, pet their dog, go to the club, and so much more. The main characters are in a relationship, and players will have to tend to that too.
Musing Ourselves to Death
Close your eyes, and imagine a frictionless day. You wake up to a notification that a grocery-store employee will deliver all of the ingredients for the three recipes you saved last night to your “Weeknight Dinner” folder. While you brew your coffee, a program browses online retailers to compare toilet-paper prices, and another solicits competitive bids for Sheetrock work you need done in the garage. During your commute, a bot moves your upcoming dentist appointment to avoid a scheduling conflict.
Imagine Every AI Agent on Earth Buying the Same Cheap Paper Towels
Close your eyes, and imagine a frictionless day. You wake up to a notification that a grocery-store employee will deliver all of the ingredients for the three recipes you saved last night to your “Weeknight Dinner” folder. While you brew your coffee, a program browses online retailers to compare toilet-paper prices, and another solicits competitive bids for Sheetrock work you need done in the garage. During your commute, a bot moves your upcoming dentist appointment to avoid a scheduling conflict.
Is Crypto Dead? Or More Influential Than Ever?
Listen1.0x 0:0048:10 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube The hype over cryptocurrency may have faded since the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, but beneath the surface, a lot of real money is involved, including the millions being funneled into the American political system.
An Argument Against AI Doom
Listen1.0x 0:0056:16 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube The flood of reports about AI agents escaping and hacking websites can feel scary. But is this actually just a matter of needing better security to match the evolving technology? Zack Korman, the CEO of Embroidery, thinks so. He works in cybersecurity and argues that “rogue” AI agents are less frightening and complicated than they may seem.
An Argument Against AI Doom
3 Songs From 1975 That Feel Like a Day You Don’t Want To End If you play any of these 1975 songs, someone will have to drag you home at the end of the night. Whether they are uppers or a bit more bittersweet, …
Treat AI Like a Normal Crisis
Listen1.0x 0:0013:50 One 27-year-old quit his job, and everybody (including but not limited to the singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow) appears to have lost it. The past two weeks have been dizzying. The 27-year-old, Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, went public with an alarming allegation: That the people inside Silicon Valley’s leading AI companies truly believe their products might pose an extinction-level threat to humanity. This claim isn’t exactly new.
Lina Khan on Doomer Panic and Ending AI Exceptionalism
Listen1.0x 0:0031:22 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube As “rogue” AI agents hack systems and leaders warn of catastrophe, who should be held responsible? Former FTC Commissioner Lina Khan argues that the United States already has a lot of the regulatory tools needed.
AI Writing Has Entered Its Post-Shame Era
Listen1.0x 0:0042:52 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube AI-infused writing is suddenly everywhere: not just in automated email responses or meeting summaries, but in books and even the pages of mainstream newspapers. When an editor at The Wall Street Journal recently defended an op-ed that was 100 percent written by AI, it felt like a possible turning point, at which people are no longer apologizing. So is AI-assisted writing in its post-shame era?
Why So Many Men Are Unraveling
Listen1.0x 0:0047:12 Jon Ronson had never really thought about the term masculinity until a strange series of events led him down a rabbit hole involving castles, cage fights, and an actor playing a horse. Host Charlie Warzel talks to Ronson about the disinhibited men who are looking for purpose in all the wrong places.
The Singularity Is Not What It Seems
Listen1.0x 0:0017:26 One evening in early August, Sam Stowers and several neighbors packed into an apartment near San Francisco’s Alamo Square and pondered the beginning of the end. Stowers and his guests, many of whom work in the AI industry, were gathered to watch a newly released YouTube video in which two OpenAI researchers divulged new details about an alarming cybersecurity breach.
Welcome to the Scrolling Backlash
Listen1.0x 0:001:05:51 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube A lot of people are getting tired of their phone—they’re sick of the algorithms and overwhelmed by what can feel like a loss of control. The Atlantic staff writer Julie Beck dug into why and how people are trying to renegotiate their relationships with technology.
The Home Slopping Network
It is 12:04 p.m., and I’ve been watching AI slop for the past three hours. Before me on the screen, a man is playing trumpet in fog. He’s been fired (bad market for trumpet players) but then, at last, he lands an interview. Trumpet Man sits at a large desk across from an obese fellow who asks how good he is with a mop. (Smash cut.) Trumpet Man is now in a janitor uniform with a name tag reading V. Helsing. Oh, he’s a musician-janitor turned vampire slayer.
How Social Media Makes Our Lives Smaller
Listen1.0x 0:0048:21 Most people spend more time than you think agonizing over their social-media posts. Kathryn Jezer-Morton wanted to understand their thinking—and when she dug deeper, she learned that redemption and optimization narratives are what the algorithm rewards, and therefore what drive the stories we tell. What does that mean for how we all think about ourselves?
Galaxy Brain : Behind the Curtain at Google
Listen1.0x 0:0049:36 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts Silicon Valley has long been a place of tech innovation and optimism. When Claire Stapleton moved there to work in communications at Google in 2007, she was bright eyed and optimistic about the company’s mission. In those days, she describes the executives as acting like “benevolent kings.” But over the course of the next decade, Google grew and changed.
Even Trump Can’t Spin This One
If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive.
Even Trump Can’t Spin This One
11 hours ago The president is happy to receive money and gifts, but don’t expect favors in return. Faithless, chaotic, and corrupt: Donald Trump's character also shapes his foreign policy. The latest victim is Saudi Arabia—not a sympathetic victim, maybe, but a victim all the same. On July 22, United States …
Is AI the End of Cheap Tech?
Listen1.0x 0:0038:34 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts Electronics are getting more expensive—and the culprit has a lot to do with generative AI. Amid all the talk of AI taking over people’s jobs, automating people’s workflows, and doing people’s homework, we’re learning that actually scaling this technology is a lot harder, and more expensive, than it seems.
Is AI the End of Cheap Tech?
5 reasons I'd buy the Galaxy Z Fold 8 instead of the Fold 8 Ultra (after using both phones) The cheaper Galaxy Z Fold 8 is the one I'd actually buy. Follow us on Google DiscoverAdd us as preferred source The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 series is here. And just as everyone expected, Samsung has split its book-style foldable lineup into two models: the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and the Galaxy Z Fold 8 …
How the World Cup Finally Won Over America Original
Listen1.0x 0:0030:17 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Why does the World Cup endure in an age of fractured attention? Is FreddyLA7 a real person? Charlie Warzel speaks with Men in Blazers founder Roger Bennett to chart how the World Cup has become far more than a sporting event and how this year’s tournament marks a turning point for soccer in the United States.
The Hidden Cost of Optimizing Everything
Listen1.0x 0:0042:00 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Modern life is built to make things easier, faster, and more efficient. But what if, in smoothing away life’s everyday frictions, we’ve also lost something essential?
The Hidden Cost of Optimizing Everything
Robert Reich reveals the real 'source of Trump’s power' — and it isn’t MAGA When Donald Trump launched his 2016 campaign, many of his critics predicted that it would go the way of his short-lived 2000 presidential run with …
20 Hours Inside America’s World Cup Fever Dream Original
Two hundred fifty years and two days into the American experiment, a 55-year-old bespectacled bald man from Liverpool enters a sterile hotel conference room in Atlanta, shaking his head. “It’s all gone to hell, hasn’t it?” he mutters. In 14 hours, the United States men’s soccer team is scheduled to play Belgium in the World Cup Round of 16, a match that ought to be a celebration of the U.S.’s triumphant, and somewhat unexpected, run in the world’s biggest sporting event.
How Elon Musk Became More Powerful Than Ever Original
Listen1.0x 0:0046:43 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Elon Musk isn’t just the world’s richest man—he’s one of the most influential people alive. His companies have transformed industries, his wealth has shattered records, and his politics now shape governments and public debate. But how did he become this powerful? And is his dominance really inevitable?
A Tough Day for NPR Original
It was all a “misunderstanding.” That’s the word that NPR Editor in Chief Thomas Evans used to describe why, today, the outlet erroneously published a report by the veteran Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg that Justice Samuel Alito had retired. According to an archived copy, available on the Wayback Machine, the 1,186-word story was published at 10:51 a.m. eastern time. In the story, Totenberg attributed her reporting to the Court itself, not to an anonymous source.
Trump’s Peeling Green Gift to America
If you wanted to make an argument that we are all living in some cruel simulation, a key piece of evidence might be that the news keeps providing us with absurd, occasionally quite alarming metaphors for what it’s like to exist in 2026. To wit: The London School of Economics recently canceled an event on extreme heat because of an extreme-heat warning issued by the United Kingdom’s Met Office.
The 13 Steps of a Trump Fiasco
Now The Architect of the Capitol has long toiled to keep the Mall’s other body of water from falling into disrepair. Still blue waters, abundant waterfowl, promenading tourists and barely a whiff of mildew — that is the vision President Donald Trump has struggled to turn into reality this month at the …
Trump’s Peeling Green Gift to America
Snipers at Nats Park – Wait, What?! Why? - PoPville “Dear PoPville, Snipers on the roof at Nats Park? What the actual f*** is this country coming to? It’s really too bad that each day it feels a little …
A Writer Learns How to Read Again
Listen1.0x 0:0043:27 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Do you wish you could read more books? You’re not alone. These days, fewer people are reading for pleasure, and even those who do tend to struggle with distractions. Is this a literacy crisis, or has our attention just been warped? And what can we do? In this episode of Galaxy Brain, John Paul Brammer joins Charlie Warzel to talk about how he managed to ditch the allure of his screens and social media and rewild his attention.
The Myth of SpaceX
SpaceX had its initial public offering. Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. But what is SpaceX? On one level, of course, SpaceX is a company that builds rockets and spacecraft and launches them into space. (Occasionally the rockets explode.) It is also the company that birthed Starlink, a satellite-internet business that generated more than $11 billion in revenue last year. But the company can be defined in many ways. SpaceX is a financial instrument for Musk.
The Seven-Headed Hydra at the End of Finance
SpaceX had its initial public offering last week. Now Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. But what is SpaceX? On one level, of course, SpaceX is a company that builds rockets and spacecraft and launches them into space. (Occasionally the rockets explode.) It is also the company that birthed Starlink, a satellite-internet business that generated more than $11 billion in revenue last year. But the company can be defined in many ways. SpaceX is a financial instrument for Musk.
How to Think About AI Before It’s Too Late Original
Listen1.0x 0:0045:32 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Cory Doctorow has a refrain: “The most important thing about a gadget isn’t what it does; it’s who it does it for and what it does it to.” In this episode of Galaxy Brain, he sits down with Charlie Warzel to talk about the AI boom, making the case that the hype, vision, and dreams of endless growth are unsustainable.
Jomboy on Robot Umpires and the Future of Baseball Original
Listen1.0x 0:0035:00 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Baseball has never been synonymous with change. But in recent years, Major League Baseball has transformed radically, and this season it has embraced technology via the ABS pitch-tracking system (also known as “robot umpires”). Has the experiment worked? Can baseball evolve in the 21st century without losing a piece of itself? Does the tech make the game less human?
The Second Act of the DOGE Bro
Shooters shoot. Builders build. And DOGE alumni make splashy announcements about entering complex industries with scant qualifications while promising to “root out waste.” This, at least, is the premise of Special, a newly announced start-up co-founded by Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, two former Department of Government Efficiency staffers who left the federal government “motivated to extend the ethos of our work at DOGE back into the private sector,” as they wrote on Special’s website.
The Old Campaign Playbook Is Dead
Listen1.0x 0:0040:42 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube How do you build a winning campaign for the era of AI? In the aftermath of the 2024 race, Democrats have been struggling to adapt to the new logic of the attention economy. On this episode of Galaxy Brain, Rob Flaherty, the deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris’s campaign, joins Charlie Warzel to talk about what went wrong and how Democrats need to embrace a new theory of attention.
A Crisis of Agency
Back in the web-traffic-obsessed days of 2018, at a time of dawning awareness of how easily audiences online could be manipulated and spoofed by bots, the writer Max Read argued that the internet had crossed a threshold known as “the Inversion.” Not only had bots proliferated across the internet; they had come to constitute it. In outnumbering humans, bots were also loosening everyone’s grasp on the very reality of online experience.
Why Everyone Hates AI Data Centers
Listen1.0x 0:0039:35 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Data centers are quickly becoming the most polarizing buildings in America. On this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with the reporter Jael Holzman about the backlash to the buildings powering the AI boom. Why have data centers become controversial? What are the environmental, economic, and political impacts? How does the backlash track along left/right party lines? This episode demystifies the data-center fight.
How Dropout Cracked Internet Comedy
Listen1.0x 0:0039:12 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube How do you build a streaming service from scratch? On this week’s Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Sam Reich, the CEO of Dropout, a comedy streaming platform that’s found success eschewing the growth-at-all-costs model of the mega streamers. The two discuss the pre-YouTube days of online video and how Reich acquired Dropout, formerly known as the internet site CollegeHumor, for $0.
What’s the AI Endgame?
Listen1.0x 0:0044:09 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube How should you feel about the AI boom? In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Chris Hayes about how to emotionally calibrate our response to this dizzying AI moment. Hayes describes why AI gives him “The Bad Feeling,” and how it led him to report on AI like an anthropologist would.
What’s the AI Endgame?
Related storyboards More stories from Chris Hayes Chris Hayes on Wednesday said the $10 billion endeavor is so unique that he doesn't even know to "characterize it legally." MS NOW host Chris Hayes blared the alarm Wednesday on the latest scheme of Donald Trump, warning that the president could pull off the “greatest heist in American history” — … Reports Q1 revenue $23.4M vs $23.8M last year.
Too Much Is Happening Too Fast
You hear wild stuff all the time now. Like this story that Nat Friedman, a former CEO of GitHub, told recently at a conference. Friedman uses OpenClaw, an autonomous AI agent that runs on his computer, acting like a personal assistant. One day, his OpenClaw decided that he wasn’t drinking enough water, so Friedman instructed the agent to “do whatever it takes” to make sure he stays hydrated. According to Friedman, eventually the bot directed him to go to the kitchen and drink a bottle of water.
Too Much Is Happening Too Fast
3 hours ago A once promising partnership between Apple and OpenAI could be heading for a legal confrontation, according to a report published Thursday. OpenAI has been providing artificial intelligence services for iPhone and Mac users since 2024, but the deal is souring behind the scenes, with the software …
Flipping Off Phones
Listen1.0x 0:0048:50 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube On this week’s episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks with his Atlantic colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany about what our phones are doing to us. Tiffany recently wrote about swapping her iPhone for a flip phone as part of a movement called “Month Offline.” Kaitlyn talks through her personal experience: the joys and inconveniences of a dumbphone and the difficulty of unplugging completely.
Did a Human Write This?
Listen1.0x 0:0048:14 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube What happens when the majority of content on the internet tips over into AI slop? On this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks to Max Spero, a co-founder of Pangram, an AI-detection company. They discuss how AI-detection tools work and how effective they can be at identifying what’s made by humans and what comes from a chatbot.
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