This article was originally published in bioGraphic.

One dusky June evening, two days before the 2022 Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, the biologist Sarah Lower sat on a back porch, watching the sky for a specific gradation of twilight. A group of Lower’s students from Bucknell University hung around her, armed with butterfly nets and stopwatches for counting the time between firefly flashes—a way to differentiate between the multiple lightning-bug species that live here at the edge of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest. This postindustrial expanse of second-growth trees and hills pimpled with oil wells also happens to rank among the world’s best places to see fireflies.

Once the cloudy sky blushed red from its last glimpse of the setting sun, I set out with Lower and her students toward the forest edge. Moving from habitat to habitat as the evening deepened, Lower narrated which species we saw and their different behaviors. Her students, meanwhile, netted their way down a wish list of research samples.

First up was Photinus macdermotti, a firefly species that emits two quick flashes. Just a few feet away, near a pond ringed by cattails where a beaver lazed face up, the students caught Photinus marginellus, a quick single flasher. Males buzzed around one patch of goldenrod, blinking quick winks at the sitting females who deigned to flash back. Like other species of fireflies, males of P. marginellus typically flash in flight, while females wait below on blades of grass, shooting answering flashes at only the most compelling suitors.

At first, these early-evening species looked almost like pixels of static. But the darker it got, the more they came to resemble dust motes twinkling in invisible sunbeams.

Half an hour later, we moved on. Heading across Pennsylvania Route 666 and past a modest farmhouse, we reached a small path leading down to Tionesta Creek, which parallels the road. By now the air had chilled. Twilight drained away the last notes of color, a dullness almost immediately punctuated by a yet-undescribed firefly species from the genus Photuris, nicknamed “Chinese lanterns” by Lower and her team. Each flash set the fireflies aglow for long beats of unearthly green so bright they illuminated surrounding vegetation. A student snagged one in a net, marveling at its size—several times larger than the species they’d already collected. Irritated or alarmed, the captured firefly switched to a faster pulse, reminiscent of a car alarm.

“These are the ‘I’m angry’ lights,” Lower explained.

Clumsy in the dark but reluctant to spoil our night vision with flashlights, we meandered along the creek to where a bridge spanned the water, overlooking an island spiked with conifers. From the base of the island to the tree canopy, a galaxy of fireflies shone in drifts or brief flashes, complemented by a starry sky overhead. Their flashes merged with the stars into a doubly scintillating reflection in the water below. It was a dazzling scene, and one that hundreds of people would soon flock here to see as the Firefly Festival got under way.

Around the world, firefly tourism is surging in popularity. The interest gives scientists like Lower hope that funding and conservation will follow, because fireflies—like other dark-dependent invertebrates—are succumbing to our society’s penchant for sterile lawns and careless nighttime lighting. But the choice to open any of the world’s most spectacular firefly sites to the public focuses these same pressures to a sharp point. When the founders of the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival chose to share their backyard’s magic with the world a decade ago, did they further imperil the local firefly population? Or, by giving people like me the chance to stand on a bridge, balanced between galaxies, did they play a small role in protecting one of our most beloved summer spectacles?

On another June night, in 2012, a group of visitors arrived at Ken and Peggy Butler’s bed-and-breakfast, out past reliable cell service in Forest County, Pennsylvania. Peggy was a school therapist, Ken a money manager, and they had moved out into the northwest corner of the state for the quiet and the fly-fishing.

These visitors were not the Butlers’ typical bed-and-breakfast guests. The roving band of firefly scientists lugged microscopes and butterfly nets into the Butlers’ garage, then spent the next six weeks venturing out in tick-proof gear each evening, surveying fireflies where the Butler’s grassy backyard melted into the half-a-million-acre national forest. What they found was nothing short of astonishing—a wonderland of evolutionary biology amid the quiet, unimposing hills of rural Pennsylvania.

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One theory holds that bioluminescence emerged on Earth half a billion to 2 billion years ago in organisms to which oxygen was toxic. This theory holds that some life forms evolved a chemical process that could consume and detoxify any offending molecules while popping out a little bit of light as a harmless by-product.

Whatever its primordial purpose, bioluminescence has since emerged or reemerged at least 94 times across the tree of life, according to recent counts. The specifics of how different single-celled organisms and larger creatures accomplish their own glow-up tricks vary, but a general pattern holds across many examples. Bioluminescent organisms like fireflies have enzymes called luciferases (from the Latin lucifer, meaning “light-bringer”), which they apply inside specialized lantern organs, alongside a pinch of oxygen and a little bit of energy, to another class of compounds called luciferins. Et voilà: A photon of light comes out.

Most creatures who adapt this ancient chemistry to their own ends reside in the ocean: electric-blue crustaceans, fish that use dim lights to cloak themselves from predators, and deep-sea squid that scintillate like alien spacecraft. A few, like New Zealand’s glowworms, live in caves. Fireflies, conversely, are easy to see, flickering at the edge of backyards, captured in jars, shining in the childhood memories of millions as a stand-in for nostalgia or wonder. Perhaps because they’re the type of bioluminescent creature people are most likely to encounter, fireflies hold a special allure—often they’re a gateway to an underappreciated, imperiled cosmos of nocturnal biodiversity.

To date, scientists have described more than 2,000 species of fireflies. Some are active during the day, communicating via pheromones. But the most well known come out during the evening or night to inscribe bursts of light into the air like species-specific autographs. The researchers who first came to survey the species in the Butlers’ backyard included Lower, who was then a graduate student, and Lynn Faust, an independent naturalist and firefly expert. The team reported at least 15 species in all, the insects living practically on top of one another.

Two species in particular stood out. The researchers spotted clouds of one famous and rare firefly, Photinus carolinus, which flashes in synchronous bursts, causing larger groups of them to light up in near unison in a wave that moves across the forest. Then they discovered what appeared to be a new species, the one they nicknamed “Chinese lanterns,” flying like lazy sparks above a campfire for long beats of electric lime green. Both these and the synchronizers, wrote Faust in the survey report, “easily reached the ‘WOW!’ level.”

For the Butlers, the choice now was whether the scientists should be vague or precise about the location of the firefly wonderland. “If you decide you don’t want to pursue anything with this, we will keep it quiet,” Faust told the Butlers. “You can just go about your lives as normal as possible.”

The Butlers evaluated their options. Make the report as specific as you like, they said. How many people could possibly come?

Faust knew the answer to that question. She had begun her own path to the forefront of firefly science not as a credentialed academic but as a young mother in 1992, when she invited scientists to her family’s cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee to study a spectacle her family had long referred to as “the light show.” As those scientists soon published, Faust’s family’s private light show was a proven example of synchronous fireflies.

Before long, people wanted to see for themselves. Many people. The synchronizers in Great Smoky Mountains National Park became an annual event on par with Fourth of July fireworks, drawing more than 26,000 tourists a year. Visitors clomped through the forest, often crushing female fireflies underfoot or disorienting the insects with their flashlight beams. “I have crouched in the dark woods, illuminated by the rhythmic flashes, and wept over the unintended consequences,” Faust wrote in her 2017 book, Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs, one of the few authoritative field guides to North American fireflies.

She also felt, however, that many of these clompers would otherwise never go out in the dark with eyes and hearts open to nature. Was sharing the Smoky Mountain fireflies with the world the right call? “It depends on which night you get me,” she told me recently.

Humans’ fascination with fireflies has long been smothering. In the early 20th century, hunters in the Japanese countryside stuffed fireflies into cages and shipped them to major cities such as Tokyo to glimmer out the rest of their lives as doomed mood lighting. Another wave of lighting-bug lust occurred in mid-century America, when a chemical company eager to harvest bioluminescent enzymes dispatched community groups and Boy Scouts as firefly collectors. And in China, 17 million fireflies were sold in 2016 alone, many over the eBay-like website Taobao, to customers who used them as living gifts, decorations, and Valentine’s Day–esque love tokens. (The chemical company stopped soliciting fireflies in the 1990s, and Taobao banned the sale of fireflies in 2017.)

Just going to see fireflies poses less obvious risk to them. But scientists have amassed some alarming reports. In Thailand, for example, where boats ferry tourists past mangrove-swamp forests pulsing with synchronous fireflies, scientists have documented shorelines eroding, gas leaking into the water, and camera flashes disturbing firefly courtship. At one popular Thai site, scientists have estimated that the population of one synchronizing-firefly species is down 80 percent since tourism began.

In a rural town in Mexico’s Tlaxcala state, where a new synchronizing-firefly species was formally recognized in 2012, tourism has since ballooned to some 120,000 visitors a year. And in North America, too, firefly tourism is on the rise. In Faust’s beloved Great Smokies, even after years of trying to throttle crowds—the National Park Service has instituted an online lottery to limit the number of visitors—some guests still head off into the forests and lie on the ground.

Tourism is far from the only threat to fireflies. As with many insects, data on lightning-bug populations are spotty, outside of a general, anecdotal sense that they’re blinking out. But insects overall are in crisis. Numerous studies suggest that within many insect groups, abundance is dwindling by 1 to 2 percent each year. An International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) group found in 2020 that fireflies face three primary threats.

The first is habitat loss, which eradicates all but the hardiest lightning bugs from developed areas, leaving species like the big-dipper firefly—the pigeon of the firefly world. Second, like other insect populations, fireflies also seem to be suffering collateral damage from pesticides used in agriculture. And, finally, on top of that is light pollution: the glare of each streetlight, LED-outfitted billboard, front-porch lamp, and every other fixture left on in the night. A recent global study estimated that the collective glow of all this wasted light is making the night sky about 10 percent brighter each year, bathing ever more of the planet’s nighttime surface in light. Such artificial lights threaten to drown firefly bioluminescent courtship signals in much the same way loudspeakers blaring out static would disrupt birdsong. The entomologist Avalon Owens, who studied fireflies for her Ph.D. dissertation at Tufts University, has found that even ambient light pollution can cause some firefly species to blink less often, transforming what should be call-and-response dialogues into a series of missed connections.

Our effort to understand how quickly fireflies are disappearing is also hampered by our relative ignorance of them. North American fireflies spend much of their lives as larvae wriggling through soil, where they hunt down worms and snails, inject their prey with enzymes, and slurp up the resultant puddle of goo. Once they emerge as short-lived adults, some species are known only by a specific flash that a naturalist described seeing in a dark jungle decades ago. When the IUCN published its first firefly-conservation-status survey in 2021, focusing on 132 species in North America, it classified 18 as threatened. But it categorized 70 more only as data deficient, meaning we don’t know enough about them to say how imperiled they might be.

“Compared to what the monarch people can do, it’s so sad,” says Owens. Unlike butterfly hobbyists, who go out in clubs during the daytime and have collected decades of data on population abundances, firefly surveying has historically been a solitary activity. “Each couple of decades, you get, like, one eccentric person who spends every night in the middle of the woods,” she adds.

“Five years ago we basically knew nothing,” says Sara Lewis, a biologist at Tufts. For years, Lewis designed careful lab experiments to understand firefly reproductive structures and behaviors. Then “a switch went off in my head, and I was like, wait, what difference does it make to know [these specific details about] a group of animals that could be extinct in 50 or 100 years?” Today, Lewis co-leads the IUCN’s efforts to keep firefly populations alive.

As some firefly populations fade to black, though, general and scientific interest is swelling. More people want to see fireflies for themselves, driving firefly tourism, and more scientists want to better understand firefly biology both for its own sake and for future conservation work. Perhaps the Butlers didn’t have to make the same stark choice Lynn Faust made in the Great Smoky Mountains. Perhaps tourism and science could complement each other. Maybe people could love fireflies neither too little nor too much but just the right amount.

The Butlers’ path to sustainable firefly tourism was rocky. The summer after Lynn Faust’s report on the Allegheny National Forest fireflies was published, the Butlers hosted the first Pennsylvania Firefly Festival—a free, two-night event in the grassy field behind their house. They had food trucks, face painting, and music. Some 400 people came. The next year was similar. Then, in 2015, David Attenborough and his crew came to the property to film a documentary called Life That Glows, hiring Lower and Faust as on-site firefly wranglers. “Then we knew: This is serious,” Peggy says.

After Attenborough’s film, things got out of hand. A thousand people showed up in 2016. Cars filled the field, and as they pulled out, every pair of headlights beamed into the woods, grinding the synchronous display to a halt. “It was like, this is gonna break us,” Peggy says. “This is going to kill us because it’s going to kill the fireflies.”

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Since then, the Butlers have taken steps to rein in the enthusiasm. First they started charging admission, which they funneled to a nonprofit called the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, which supports research and sponsors graduate students. With advice from Lewis, they installed bleachers and red-rope lighting to keep visitors from trampling female fireflies and their habitat. After the pandemic forced a pause, they went even smaller: They sold just 100 tickets in 2022, divided into two nights.

At the same time, the Butlers built up closer ties with the scientific community, converting their bed-and-breakfast into something more like a hostel for visiting researchers. Among the scientists who kept coming back was Lower, who is studying the many firefly species that restrict their activities to the day and communicate with pheromones. Lower and her collaborators recently isolated the first known firefly pheromone, and she was at the Butlers’ in 2022 to determine what scents fireflies are using to attract one another, and whether light- and smell-based flirting are mutually exclusive.

The Butlers have also hosted research on how artificial light stifles fireflies. In recent years, ecologists have demonstrated that many species are more sensitive to blue colors of light. When Owens came here to test the least harmful colors of artificial light for fireflies in 2019, though, she found that amber-colored lights—darlings of the dark-sky environmental movement because most species, humans included, seem less bothered by them—are especially disruptive to fireflies. Red lights are still a good choice, Owens says, but the best strategy remains the most obvious: Just use light sparingly overall.

The research happening at the Butlers’ is just one part of a worldwide firefly renaissance. Setting aside habitat loss, light pollution, and pesticides, the known ranges of many firefly species seem to be expanding, Faust says, because more people are out looking. Starting from the “discovery” of synchronizing P. carolinus fireflies in the Smoky Mountains in the 1990s based on Faust’s reports, naturalists and scientists have recognized other P. carolinus outposts up and down the Appalachian Mountains. (The Xerces Society maintains a map of places that accept visitors to view these and other species.)

The same scientists whom Faust had summoned to Tennessee later documented synchrony in another American species, Photuris frontalis, which soon drew its own research scientists and crowds, which in turn helped spark the passion of new enthusiasts. After surviving a life-threatening car accident, for example, the North Carolina State University entomologist Clyde Sorenson told me he pursued research on fireflies for the pure joy of it. In 2019, Sorenson documented firefly synchrony on North Carolina’s Grandfather Mountain, and he has since been tracking down an undescribed “ghost” firefly species that emits faint green signals.

With firefly tourism on the rise as well, a team convened by Lewis published a set of recommendations in 2021 for how to manage the upswing of interest. Although tourism is unlikely to lead to global extinctions, it can certainly extirpate local populations, she says. The final report recommends robust habitat protection and education programs, including etiquette guides. For guests, that means carrying no artificial light sources and staying on marked trails; for hosts, it means limiting total visitor numbers, fencing off paths, and minimizing lighting. These are all steps that the Butlers have taken as part of their journey from wide-eyed enthusiasts to conservation advocates.

A few weeks before the 2022 Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, Ken and Peggy Butler visited their first international scientific conference, in Portugal. From the time their plane touched back down in the U.S. to the start of the festival, their days were packed with answering emails, wrangling volunteers, and accommodating an in-home guest list that had ballooned to festival presenters, interns, the troop of Bucknell researchers, and the latest visiting journalist.

Finally, a few hours before the 2022 festival’s first night, Ken and Peggy slowed down long enough to chat with me on their porch about their own learning experience. Sarah Lower listened in, pausing at one point to snatch another day-active, presumably pheromone-emitting firefly buzzing around us and slot it into a vial.

I asked whether the Butlers regretted the answer they had given to Faust a decade ago, when the choice to publish their location propelled the rest of their summers—and a sizable part of their lives—into firefly-land. “I’m a firm no,” Ken said, and Peggy agreed.

Once the festival began, local musician Matt Miskie played a set of songs, including one written for the event: “We’re out tonight,” the chorus goes, “beneath the Allegheny skies.” (He’s “the Jimmy Buffett of Western Pennsylvania,” Ken explained.) There was a merch table and exhibits: The astronomer Diane Turnshek, who had recently helped the city of Pittsburgh change its street lighting to limit light pollution, set up a booth promoting dark-sky environmentalism. Don Salvatore, a firefly naturalist and educator from New England, gave a Boston-accented presentation on firefly courtship. And then groups set out to see fireflies, guided by volunteers and the Bucknell students.

Even with the Butlers’ dedication to protecting fireflies and encouraging responsible tourism, nothing is perfect. That first evening got too cold, causing the synchronous fireflies to slow down and eventually stop flashing. One little girl, scared of the dark, had chosen to wear sneakers that burst out purple flashes with every step. An elderly woman sat in reverence and reminiscence at the edge of the woods, listening as Peggy explained firefly life history, but the car that fetched her back pierced the forest with its headlights.

And though the Butlers can control what happens on their own property, some of the most enticing firefly-viewing locations—like the magical bridge over Tionesta Creek—are public spaces subject to the choices of the entire community.

The nominal marquee show started at about 10 p.m. that evening, behind the house in the darker shadows of the woods. I stood in shivering silence, shoulder to shoulder with Miskie and a few other festival volunteers as a forest clearing’s worth of synchronous Photinus carolinus fireflies alternated between paparazzi bursts of quick white flashes and long, coordinated beats of collective quiet. A few straggling Chinese lanterns floated through their midst on their own tempo, unperturbed. Afterward, it was very, very hard to fall asleep.

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Earlier today, three witnesses came before Congress to testify about their experiences with unidentified flying objects. A former Navy pilot spoke of the mysterious objects that he has seen with his own eyes and through radar, and how frequently pilots encounter them in the air. A retired Navy commander described the time he pulled his jet up to an object shaped like a Tic Tac hovering over the ocean, then watched it suddenly speed up and vanish.

The most anticipated remarks, however, came from a former military-intelligence officer named David Grusch, who went public with his account just last month. Grusch told the House oversight subcommittee on national security that the American government has spent decades secretly recovering mysterious vehicles that have crashed on the ground, and has determined the material to be of “non-human” origin. The government also attempted to reverse engineer some of the technology. And it’s doing all of this clandestinely, without proper supervision by Congress.

In the hearing, Grusch expanded on his previous claims in response to lawmakers’ questions. If elected officials had never heard about this effort before, how did it get any funding? The military pilfered money that had been allocated for its other programs. A defense official recently testified before Congress that the U.S. military hasn’t found any evidence of extraterrestrial activity on Earth; is that statement correct? It’s not accurate. Has any of the activity been aggressive or hostile? My colleagues have gotten physically injured. By UFOs, or people within the government? Both.

After not holding a hearing on UFOs for more than half a century, Congress has recently held two in as many years. In that sense, we can count today’s events as historic. But as in the other hearings, this one had no big reveal, no grand answer to humankind’s most existential questions about our place in the universe. The hype surrounding the hearing—and there has been considerable hype—says more about the people who tuned in than about Grusch’s claims. Just as it did in the late 1940s, when stories of flying saucers over Washington state and crash-landings in New Mexico captivated the nation, UFO fever today indicates that Americans feel that their government knows more than it’s letting on.

That sentiment is not new, nor is Americans’ belief in conspiracy theories. Though research suggests that conspiracy thinking is not getting worse in the modern-day United States, we are in a moment of acute public curiosity about—and acceptance of—conspiracism. Compared with QAnon, vaccine microchips, and stolen elections, a big UFO cover-up might seem almost reasonable. Even if that cover-up involves, as Grusch previously claimed in an interview, the military discovering the “dead pilots” of alien craft. (In Congress today, Grusch declined to give specifics about this and many other claims, saying that there was only so much he could disclose to the public and that he could elaborate in a closed setting.)  

The past several years have coincided with an unprecedented mainstreaming of UFO culture. In 2017, when an interstellar object showed up in our solar system, most scientists agreed that it was an asteroid or a comet, but some said it could have been an alien spaceship. (The Harvard professor leading the latter camp, Avi Loeb, recently led an expedition to recover material from the seafloor that he believes could be from alien spacecraft.) Later that year, The New York Times and other news outlets revealed that the Pentagon had a covert program dedicated to cataloging UFOs. Then NASA decided to weigh in on the topic after years of steering clear, and convened a team to consider UFOs in a “scientific perspective.” And who can forget the spy balloons that the military shot out of the sky this year?

These events have unfolded against a shift in public knowledge about the universe beyond Earth, which might help explain why people are interested. In the 1940s, the only planets we knew of were the ones around our sun, and scientists had only recently determined that there were galaxies other than our own. Today, astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets, and telescopes can see nearly all the way back to the Big Bang. Faced with so many wonders, the question of whether we’re sharing them with anyone else becomes more urgent, and might even seem more answerable. “I think people are just ready, or at least excited about the possibilities of alien contact, maybe more than ever,” Jacob Haqq Misra, an astrobiologist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, told me.

Congress has contributed to this mainstreaming too. Under the instruction of lawmakers, the Pentagon last year established a special office dedicated to investigating reports of unexplainable phenomena in the sky, at sea, and on land. The effort has been unusually bipartisan, with both far-right Republicans and progressive Democrats calling on the military to be more transparent. This month, Senator Chuck Schumer introduced legislation that would create a commission with the authority to declassify government documents about UFOs. “The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena,” Schumer said in a statement.

Yes, we do. But some undisclosed documents about UFOs is not synonymous with incontrovertible evidence that aliens have visited Earth. UFOs are just that—objects that are flying, and that we cannot yet identify. If the military is misusing taxpayer money to investigate mysterious debris it doesn’t recognize, that’s bad, whether it’s the remnants of drones from another nation or a non-human craft. “If that’s the case, and auditors have not been allowed into these programs and there’s illegal layers of secrecy,” Haqq Misra said, “then that’s really important to disclose, independent of any connection to anything else”—anything otherworldly. But even as lawmakers assert that UFOs are primarily a national-security concern, by invoking aliens in their discussions, they lend credence to the idea that a connection between the two exists.

Grusch was careful to tell lawmakers that he was only “speaking to the facts as I have been told them”—that is, he has not seen any evidence of alien wreckage or its inhabitants himself. And in general, though his claims are steeped in the language of authority, he simply has not been able to offer any concrete proof. The news website that first published Grusch’s claims reported that the Pentagon had cleared him to speak publicly, but that means only that his remarks don’t contain classified information, not that they’re true. Testifying under oath before Congress is not a measure of truth, either. Outside the hearing, some lawmakers seemed like they didn’t know what to make of the claims.

The prospect of extraterrestrial interlopers may be a national-security question, but it’s also a scientific one. Science requires data, and secondhand accounts just aren’t data. “When NASA brings back rocks on the moon, those rocks are shared with qualified people,” David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton who chaired NASA’s committee on UFOs, told me. “Imagine we had some samples of some craft [and] we really want to understand what it was. You would make materials from those small samples available for labs anywhere in the world.” In other words, meaningful testimony would show evidence of alien ships and pilots, not just tell the public about them. “That would be pretty awesome,” he said, but it’s not what we’ve got. Today, we heard some extraordinary claims, and, to quote Carl Sagan, they require extraordinary evidence.

In May, Elon Musk presided over an uncharacteristically subtle tweak to Twitter’s home page. For years, the prompt in the text box at the top of the page read, “What’s happening?,” a friendly invitation for users to share their thoughts. Eight months after the billionaire’s takeover, Twitter changed the prompt ever so slightly to match the puzzling, chaotic nature of the platform under the new regime: “What’s happening?” became “What is happening?!”

This question, with its exclamatory urgency, has never been more relevant to Twitter than in the past 48 hours, when Musk decided to nuke 17 years’ worth of brand awareness and rename the thing. The artist formerly known as Twitter is now X. What is happening?! indeed.

I have three answers to that question, beyond the simple “Nothing much.” (Even with its new name, the site is pretty much the same as ever; the blue bird logo in the left-hand corner of the website is now a black X, and … that’s about it.) This X boondoggle may simply be the flailing of a man who doesn’t want to own his social network and was pressured via lawsuit to buy it, but Musk and the Twitter (X?) CEO, Linda Yaccarino, would like you to believe that much bigger things are coming.

1. Musk wants to build the “Internet of Elon.”

The first theory requires taking Musk’s ambitions somewhat seriously. In a tweet last October, he declared that “buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” Versions of these “super apps” already exist and are popular in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, so we know what this means: X would function as a holistic platform that includes payment processing and banking, ride-sharing, news, communication with friends, and loads and loads of commerce. Think of it as the internet, but without leaving Musk’s walled garden. In a leaked recording of a Twitter town hall back in June 2022, Musk hinted that China’s WeChat was a model of sorts for X. “There’s no WeChat movement outside of China,” he said. “And I think that there’s a real opportunity to create that. You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so useful and so helpful to your daily life. And I think if we could achieve that, or even close to that with Twitter, it would be an immense success.”

If you squint, you can see the logic. Plenty of people across Twitter—influencers, freelancers, small-business owners—use the platform to sell things. Many of these people use various “link in bio” pages to direct people to their work and receive payment. X, the theoretical everything app, could streamline and consolidate these exchanges, and, like WeChat, generate revenue from them. Musk has already launched a program to share ad revenue with some of Twitter’s larger “creator” accounts, the early beneficiaries of which included many prominent right-wing shock jocks. And if he could manage to get hundreds of millions of people to live and shop and bank on his app, instead of, say, shitpost memes and argue politics with white nationalists, that would be an immense success.

To do that, X would need to build out an advanced, secure payment platform; apply the appropriate regulatory licenses to legally process payments and store money; and, of course, recruit businesses and financial institutions to use the platform. According to the Financial Times, the company began filing applications for those licenses early this year and has been at work building parts of a payment infrastructure. The bad news is that the person Musk tasked with spearheading the project was laid off—along with about 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce.

[Read: I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside]

Musk does have experience in the payments business. He founded an online bank—also called X.com—in 1999, and it shortly thereafter merged with Confinity to become PayPal. Perhaps this would give his super-app idea some credibility, if not for Musk having spent the past 15 months blundering through his latest business venture in full view of the public. He has alienated advertisers with his reactionary and conspiratorial political opinions, sent the company deep into debt, and, at times, rendered the platform unusable by limiting how many tweets users can see. The platform appears to be shrinking under Musk’s leadership, according to third-party traffic data. Spam is rampant, and the most satisfied users seem to be previously banned racists and anti-Semites who have regained access to their megaphone.

It’s already a hard sell for Musk to convince people that his sputtering platform is the best place for posting Barbenheimer memes, let alone the right home for … everything, including our money. But the cognitive dissonance between Musk’s reputational hemorrhaging and his grand ambitions is easier to bridge when you consider the second way to explain X, which is that it’s a desperate shot in the dark.

2. X is pseudoware—just buzzwords and a logo.

Unlike Facebook’s pivot to Meta, which was oriented around a real (though flawed and unappealing) virtual-reality product, X is a rebrand built on little more than a vague collection of buzzwords cobbled together to form a complete sentence. On Sunday, Yaccarino described the forthcoming app as “the future state of unlimited interactivity” that is “centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.” She also noted that, “powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.” (Yaccarino did not respond to a request for comment.)

Her tweet is a near-perfect example of business-dude lorem ipsum—corporate gibberish that sounds superficially intelligent but is actually obfuscating. What is “unlimited interactivity?” How will X be “powered by AI”? Does she mean generative AI like ChatGPT or standard algorithms of the sort that have powered Twitter’s “For you” feed for years? The particulars are irrelevant: The words just need to sound like something when strung together.

Musk, too, is guilty of such blabber. He has argued that his hypothetical project, if built correctly, could “become half of the global financial system.” This is the empty language of a dilettante, the equivalent of me telling you that this article, if written correctly, is on pace to win the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, or that I am the executive wordsmith for The Atlantic’s Words About Computers section.

Musk’s and Yaccarino’s descriptions of X don’t just suggest vaporware, an industry term for a hyped-up product that never materializes. They feel like something else, too: I’d call it pseudoware. Like a pseudo-event, pseudoware masquerades as something newsworthy, even though it is not. Yaccarino’s Mad Libs–ian tweetstorm is the press release for this pseudo-event: big talk for a pivot that has so far manifested in ornamental changes. Musk’s first orders of business have been to adopt a new logo and to project it in conference rooms at headquarters. When Yaccarino tweeted that “X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” I take her at her word: No one seems to have spent much time thinking about any of this.

It’s natural to wonder why the world’s richest man would spend his time dismantling one of the world’s most recognizable social-media brands in favor of an inscrutable super app nobody asked for. He could, at any moment, jet off to a private island and drink bottomless piña coladas while giggling about Dogecoin instead! Herein lies the third and most important explanation for X, which is that it is a reputational line of credit for Musk.

3. Musk needs to save face.

Musk’s reputation is dependent on people believing that he can gin up new categories of industry and see around corners to build futuristic stuff. His $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was marketed with a visionary framework: Musk would realize Twitter’s dreams of being a truly global town square and solve the intractable problems of free speech at scale. Having failed at that, Musk is, in essence, going back to basics with X—it’s an opportunity to remake the internet in his own image.

[Read: Elon Musk really broke Twitter this time]

As Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin pointed out, Musk’s original X.com brand was a total failure. He was obsessed with the name and the web address, but consumers, not illogically, associated the brand with adult-entertainment sites. Musk was ousted by X.com’s board after the merger in 2000, a year before the service was renamed PayPal, but the payment company remains an important part of his legacy. X, then, is a callback to a younger version of the entrepreneur—one who is associated with success, products that work, and generous investor returns. It also represents unfinished business and a chance to rewrite an earlier phase of his career.

In this sense, X is less a brilliant vision than it is an act of desperation. Musk is behaving much like a start-up with an unsustainable burn rate—he needs a cash injection. And in order to raise some reputational capital, he needs a good idea, one that seems plausible and scalable. X checks all the boxes for such an idea. Its ambitions are so vague as to be boundless, which signals perpetual growth and moneymaking—it is, quite literally, the everything app. In this way, X is an inkblot test for anyone who still wants to believe in Musk: Squint the right way and X takes on the form of whatever hopes and dreams that person has for the future of the internet. This is the fleeting genius of pseudoware: The best feature of marketing an app for everything is that you can get away with saying mostly nothing.

But just how many people still have unwavering faith in Musk is an open question. How many people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the man who can’t pay his rents and server bills on time? Who is going to help build this technological behemoth for the man who fired the majority of his company and allegedly owes $500 million in severance payments? And, perhaps most important, who is excited about what Musk is focusing his time, energy, and money on?

Even though X wants to be big, a WeChat clone is conceptually small in comparison with the projects that have allowed Musk to market himself as a savant: space exploration, rewiring the human brain, revolutionizing transportation to save the Earth. The most cynical view of X is that the people who still respect Musk are reactionaries who delight only when their enemies have been gleefully trolled. Perhaps, then, Musk’s dismantling of the social network is a success, so long as it makes the right people miserable. Left with few options, Musk has decided to mortgage the Twitter brand to save his own. Even by his standards, it’s a risky bet.

In February of 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of Los Alamos Laboratory under the Manhattan Project, took to the pages of this magazine to write about a terrible defeat. Nearly four years had passed since the Manhattan Project had detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The explosion had flashed purple light onto the surrounding mountains and raised a 40,000-foot pillar of flame, smoke, and debris from the desert floor. But for Oppenheimer, the afterglow had quickly dimmed and been replaced by an existential hangover of the first order.

[From February 1949: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ‘The Open Mind’]

The most gutting stretch of Christopher Nolan’s new Oppenheimer biopic occurs when the great scientist, played by Cillian Murphy, begins to experience the disenchantment that would haunt him for the rest of his life. As he watches two bombs rumble away on trucks from his desert lab toward Japan, any illusion that their terrible power is under his control is punctured. Hiroshima was bombed three weeks after the Trinity test. In the film, a sickened Oppenheimer averts his gaze from photos of its disfigured victims. Like Nolan’s camera, he cannot bear to look.

Oppenheimer would later say that through the bomb, physicists had come to know sin. Having plucked a dangerous fruit from the tree of knowledge, they consigned themselves—and all of humanity—to a fallen world, tormented by the constant possibility of self-extinction. In the war’s immediate aftermath, Oppenheimer consoled, or perhaps deceived, himself that his invention’s apocalyptic potential could and would be contained, in part through his efforts.

Oppenheimer had reason to believe in his influence. The public had embraced his personal legend: Inflamed by a fear of a nuclear-armed Hitler, he had ventured into the invisible realm of atoms and returned with a tremendous power, capable of stopping a war cold and returning sons to their mothers. Honors were heaped upon him. In Nolan’s film, we watch as Oppenheimer is courted for a plush role: director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the academic home of Albert Einstein. Oppenheimer also chaired the committee tasked with advising the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. During the latter half of the 1940s, his pronouncements on matters of science had a singular gravitas. “Certainly he knows as much about the potential of atomic energy as any living American,” reads an editor’s note atop his essay for The Atlantic.

What did he do with this outsize voice? He opposed the development of a much more powerful, second-generation atom weapon—the hydrogen bomb, which Edward Teller called the “super”—in part because he was concerned it would accelerate an arms race with the Soviet Union. He also lent his prestige and credibility to ongoing efforts to avoid that arms race altogether. He helped draft the proposals that evolved into the Baruch Plan, an arms-control regime that the United States put before the United Nations. Under the latter’s direction, all countries would forfeit their atomic-weapons programs, and atomic energy would be a global collective good, administered by a centralized regulatory body at the UN, over which no country would enjoy a veto.

[Read: We have no nuclear strategy]

After the final failure of these proposals at the UN, in 1948, Oppenheimer turned, as one does, to The Atlantic. His essay is a fascinating historical artifact and act of public grief. Titled “The Open Mind,” it lays out Oppenheimer’s account of the back-and-forth over arms-control proposals. Soviet leaders had voted against them, but their response had not been wholly negative. They agreed that all countries should dismantle their atomic-weapons programs and that atomic energy should fall under international oversight. But they objected, perhaps understandably, to America’s insistence on keeping its weapons program running until the new system was functional. They wanted President Harry Truman to disarm first, a condition that he could not abide.

During the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer’s powers of foresight had failed him. However accurate his calculations concerning the innards of the atom, he’d misjudged what would happen geopolitically after he and his colleagues wrenched it apart. Out of naivete, or the expedient blindness of ambition, or some combination of the two, he may have believed that he could stop its further use after the Nazis had been defeated, or that the terrifying spectacle of the bomb would eventually lead to a renunciation of ever larger weapons and wars.

In 1949, he understood that no such renunciation was in store. “We see no clear course before us that would persuade the governments of the world to join with us” in atomic disarmament, he wrote. This time, the implications were obvious, and they implicated America, which, as Oppenheimer laments, “responded by adopting some of the very measures that we had hoped might be universally renounced.” The mass manufacture of the atomic bomb was under way and American scientists had clear orders to put the new physics in service of even more destructive weapons.

Oppenheimer saw a cosmically bleak arms race taking shape, and this time his  foresight proved accurate. Within months, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb, and only three years later, in 1952, the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb roughly 500 times as powerful as the one that had largely destroyed Nagasaki. The Soviets followed suit a few years later, and by the time of Oppenheimer’s death, in 1967, the two countries had nearly 40,000 nuclear weapons between them, many of them set on a hair trigger.

[Read: Never give artificial intelligence the nuclear codes]

Oppenheimer knew that he’d helped to conjure this world into existence. He sought to prepare our readers for its horrors. In the main, his advice was to not lose hope, and to remember that our imagination of the future is limited. Oppenheimer was perhaps heartened by the quantum world, shot through as it is with uncertainty, that had captivated him in his youth. He seemed to draw strength from a belief that the macro world of human affairs is likewise contingent, such that nothing about our fate is ever settled.

Oppenheimer quotes from a speech that Abraham Lincoln gave in Baltimore three years into the Civil War. At the beginning of that conflict, few expected that “domestic slavery would be much affected,” Lincoln said, and yet it had been. Reality is unpredictable; it will surprise you. Lincoln reminded Oppenheimer that surprises swing both ways. A world that appears to be fallen can sometimes veer toward moral progress.

We have seen such swerves before, even in the nuclear realm. By the 1980s, enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons appeared to be a fact of life on planet Earth. In 1986, the Soviet Union’s stockpile reached an all-time high of about 40,000 warheads, and the United States had more than 20,000. Very few people imagined that the end of the Cold War was imminent. Nor could many have guessed that in 1991, George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev would sign the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the first in an extraordinary sequence of agreements that shrank the two countries’ arsenals to less than a quarter of their previous size.

Bush and Gorbachev were wise to seize the day, because that era’s peace—and its clean two-party strategic symmetry—proved ephemeral. The specter of nuclear annihilation has since returned with force to the global collective psyche. Vladimir Putin has invoked it in speeches about his invasion of Ukraine. China has built up an arsenal that may be large enough to destroy every major American city.

[Read: What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine?]

As Oppenheimer well understood, there is no technological reason that world-threatening stockpiles of nuclear weapons will not be with us for hundreds of thousands of years. To keep large numbers of them in place for that long, in a strategic setting where any small exchange could very easily become a large one, is to play a fool’s game. No one should feel safe because seven decades have passed without another incident of nuclear warfare; that sample size is too small.

Beyond advising hope, Oppenheimer didn’t offer much guidance as to how we might dismantle the sword of Damocles that he helped to string up above human civilization. A notorious dandy and eloquent impromptu speaker, he was always drawn to style; in his Atlantic essay, he invokes it in a higher form. “It is style,” he wrote, “which, in the domain of foreign policy, enables us to find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and the regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light.”

The problem Oppenheimer had in mind was arms control. He asked that those who negotiate on America’s behalf carry out their work in a spirit of openness. He asked that they appeal to the reasoning minds of those who sit across the table. He appears to have believed—or to have wanted to believe—that a widespread adoption of this style might be enough to set into motion a new evolutionary step in geopolitics, through which the world’s major powers might come to a shared understanding that peace is the highest wisdom. To this end, he counseled patience. Time and nature must be allowed to do their work, he noted. Seven decades on, it looks to be slow work indeed.

Monday's papers chronicle the plight of holidaymakers fleeing fires in Rhodes, and the Tory debate on green policies.

The new media technology was going to make us stupid, to reduce all human interaction to a sales pitch. It was going to corrode our minds, degrade communication, and waste our time. Its sudden rise and rapid spread through business, government, and education augured nothing less than “the end of reason,” as one famous artist put it, for better or for worse. In the end, it would even get blamed for the live-broadcast deaths of seven Americans on national television. The year was 2003, and Americans were freaking out about the world-altering risks of … Microsoft PowerPoint.

Socrates once warned that the written word would atrophy our memory; the Renaissance polymath Conrad Gessner cautioned that the printing press would drown us in a “confusing and harmful abundance of books.” Generations since have worried that other new technologies—radio, TV, video games—would rot our children’s brains. In just the past 15 years alone, this magazine has sounded the alarm on Google, smartphones, and social media. Some of these critiques seem to have aged quite well; others, not so well. But tucked among them was a techno-scare of the highest order that has now been almost entirely forgotten: the belief that PowerPoint—that most enervating member of the Office software suite, that universal metonym for soporific meetings—might be evil.

Twenty years later, the Great PowerPoint Panic reads as both a farce and a tragedy. At the time, the age of social media was dawning: MySpace and LinkedIn were newly founded, and Facebook’s launch was just months away. But even as the polarization machine hummed to life, we were fixated on the existential threat of bullet points. Did we simply miss the mark? Or, ridiculous as it may seem today, were we onto something?

Sixteen minutes before touchdown on the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. As the broken shuttle hurtled toward Earth in pieces, it looked to its live TV viewers like a swarm of shooting stars.

The immediate cause of the disaster, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board determined that August, was a piece of insulating foam that had broken loose and damaged the shuttle’s left wing soon after liftoff. But the report also singled out a less direct, more surprising culprit. Engineers had known about—and inappropriately discounted—the wing damage long before Columbia’s attempted reentry, but the flaws in their analysis were buried in a series of arcane and overstuffed computer-presentation slides that were shown to NASA officials. “It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,” the report stated, later continuing: “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

PowerPoint was not then a new technology, but it was newly ubiquitous. In 1987, when the program was first released, it sold 40,000 copies. Ten years later, it sold 4 million. By the early 2000s, PowerPoint had captured 95 percent of the presentation-software market, and its growing influence on how Americans would talk and think was already giving rise to a critique. A 2001 feature in The New Yorker by Ian Parker argued that the software “helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world.” Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the internet,” took to quipping that “power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

By the start of 2003, the phrase death by PowerPoint had well and truly entered the popular lexicon. A Yale statistician named Edward Tufte was the first to take it literally: That spring, Tufte published a rip-roaring broadside titled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, including his analysis of the software’s role in the recent Columbia disaster. Its cover page, a political cartoon that Tufte designed himself, shows a photo of army battalions, standing in perfect columns, before a giant statue of Joseph Stalin in the center of Budapest. A speech bubble comes from one soldier’s mouth: “There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list!” Another calls out: “But why read aloud every slide?” Even Stalin speaks: “следующий слайд,” he says—“Next slide, please.”

The pamphlet’s core argument, channeling Marshall McLuhan, was that the media of communication influence the substance of communication, and PowerPoint as a medium had an obfuscatory, dumbing-down effect. It did not necessarily create vague, lazy presentations, but it certainly accommodated and sometimes even disguised them—with potentially fatal consequences. This is exactly what Tufte saw in the Columbia engineers’ slides. “The cognitive style of PP compromised the analysis,” he declared months before the NASA investigation report reached a very similar conclusion.

[Read: The Gettysburg Address as a Powerpoint]

Radical as Tufte’s position was, people took him seriously. He was already famous at the time as a public intellectual: His traveling one-day class on information design was more rock tour than lecture circuit. Hundreds of people packed into hotel ballrooms for each session. “They come to hear Edward R. Tufte,” one writer remarked at the time, “in the way the ancient Greeks must have gone to hear Socrates or would-be transcendentalists cut a path to 19th century Concord.” So when “the da Vinci of data” decided to weigh in on what would soon be called “the PowerPoint debate,” people listened.

Wired ran an excerpt from his pamphlet in September 2003, beneath the headline “PowerPoint Is Evil.” A few months later, The New York Times Magazine included Tufte’s assessment—summarized as “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb”—in its recap of the year’s most intriguing and important ideas. “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation,” the entry read, noting that Colin Powell had just used the software to present evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to the United Nations.

A few pages on was another notable entry in the magazine’s list of exciting new ideas: the social network. Even as PowerPoint was being linked with reality distortion and the rise of what Americans would soon be calling “truthiness,” the jury was still out on Friendster, LinkedIn, and other such networks. Maybe by supercharging social connection, they could alleviate our “profound national loneliness,” the write-up said. Maybe they would only “further fracture life into disparate spheres—the online and the offline.” Or maybe they wouldn’t be all that transformative—at least not compared with a technology as pervasive and influential as PowerPoint.

Tufte is now 81 years old and has long since retired. The “E.T. Tour,” which garnered, by his final count, 328,001 attendees, is over. These days, he mainly sculpts. But he is still himself: He still loathes PowerPoint. He still derives a kindergartner’s delight from calling it “PP.” And if you visit edwardtufte.com, you can still purchase his Stalin cartoon in poster form for $14.

In May, I emailed Tufte to ask how he thought his critique of PowerPoint had aged. True to form, he answered with a 16-page PDF, compiled specially for me, consisting of excerpts from his books and some blurbs about them too. He eventually agreed to speak by phone, but my first call to him went to voicemail. “In a land where time disappeared, E.T. is not available,” he incants in his outgoing message, with movie-trailer dramatics. “Your key to communication is voicemail. Or text message. Do it!” Beep.

When I finally reached E.T., I asked him whether, after 20 years of steady use, PowerPoint had really made us stupid. “I have no idea,” he said. “I’ve been on another planet. I’m an artist now.” In some sense, he went on, he’s the worst person to ask, because no one has dared show him a PowerPoint presentation since 2003. He also claimed that he hasn’t been “keeping score,” but he was aware—and appreciative—of the semi-recent revelation that his work helped inspire Jeff Bezos to ban the use of PowerPoint by senior Amazon executives.

Bezos was not the only one to see things Tufte’s way. Steve Jobs also banned PowerPoint from certain company meetings. At a 2010 military conference in North Carolina, former National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, then an Army general, described PowerPoint as an internal threat; he had prohibited its use during the assault on the Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005. “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” General James Mattis said at the same conference. And in 2011, a former software engineer in Switzerland formed the Anti PowerPoint Party, a (sort of) real political party devoted to fighting slide-deck tyranny.

[Read: Is Google making us stupid?]

Tufte’s essay has faced its share of criticism too. Some accused him of having engineered a controversy in order to juice his course attendance. Others said he’d erred by mixing up the software with the habits of its users. “Any general opposition to PowerPoint is just dumb,” the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker told The Wall Street Journal in 2009. “It’s like denouncing lectures—before there were awful PowerPoint presentations, there were awful scripted lectures, unscripted lectures, slide shows, chalk talks, and so on.” Gene Zelazny, the longtime director of business visual presentations at McKinsey, summed up Tufte’s argument as “blaming cars for the accidents that drivers cause.”

The problem with this comparison is that our transportation system does bear some responsibility for the 30,000 to 40,000 car-crash deaths that occur in the U.S. every year, because it puts drivers in the position to cause accidents. PowerPoint, Tufte told me, has an analogous effect by actively facilitating bad presentations. “It’s convenient for the presenter,” he said, “and it’s inconvenient and harmful to the audience and to the content.”

But if all of those bad presentations really led to broad societal ills, the proof is hard to find. Some scientists have tried to take a formal measure of the alleged PowerPoint Effect, asking whether the software really influences our ability to process information. Sebastian Kernbach, a professor of creativity and design at the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, has co-authored multiple reviews synthesizing this literature. On the whole, he told me, the research suggests that Tufte was partly right, partly wrong. PowerPoint doesn’t seem to make us stupid—there is no evidence of lower information retention or generalized cognitive decline, for example, among those who use it—but it does impose a set of assumptions about how information ought to be conveyed: loosely, in bullet points, and delivered by presenters to an audience of passive listeners. These assumptions have even reshaped the physical environment for the slide-deck age, Kernbach said: Seminar tables, once configured in a circle, have been bent, post-PowerPoint, into a U-shape to accommodate presenters.

The Atlantic

When I spoke with Kernbach, he was preparing for a talk on different methods of visual thinking to a group of employees at a large governmental organization. He said he planned to use a flip chart, draw on blank slides like a white board, and perhaps even have audience members do some drawing of their own. But he was also gearing up to use regular old PowerPoint slides. Doing so, he told me, would “signal preparation and professionalism” for his audience. The organization was NASA.

The fact that the American space agency still uses PowerPoint should not be surprising. Despite the backlash it inspired in the press, and the bile that it raised in billionaires, and the red alert it caused within the military, the corporate-presentation juggernaut rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, according to Shawn Villaron, Microsoft’s vice president of product for PowerPoint—well into the hundreds of millions. If anything, its use cases have proliferated. During lockdown, people threw PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy or quit soccer or attend a Niall Horan meet and greet. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil rules the world.

On its face at least, the idea that PowerPoint makes us stupid looks like a textbook case of misguided technological doomsaying. When I asked Tufte to revisit his critique, he demurred, but later in our conversation I pressed him on the matter more directly: Was it possible that his own critique of a new technology had missed the target, just as so many others had in the past? Were the worries over PowerPoint any different from those about the printing press or word processors or—

He cut in before I could finish the thought. The question, he said with evident exasperation, was impossible to answer. “I don’t do big think, big bullshit,” he told me. “I'm down there in the trenches, right in the act of communication.” By which he meant, I think, that he doesn’t engage in any kind of remotely abstract historical thinking.

I tried narrowing the question. Today’s concerns about social media bear a certain resemblance to the PowerPoint critique, I said. Both boil down to a worry that new media technologies value form over substance, that they are designed to hold our attention rather than to convey truth, and that they make us stupid. Could it be—was there any chance at all—that Tufte had made the right critique, but of the wrong technology? He wasn’t having it. The comparison between PowerPoint and social media, he said, is “hand-waving and bullshit and opportunism.”

[Read: Yes, social media really is undermining democracy]

This dismissal notwithstanding, it’s tempting to entertain counterfactuals and wonder how things might have played out if Tufte and the rest of us had worried about social media back in 2003 instead of presentation software. Perhaps a timely pamphlet on The Cognitive Style of Friendster or a Wired headline asserting that “LinkedIn Is Evil” would have changed the course of history. If the social-media backlash of the past few years had been present from the start, maybe Facebook would never have grown into the behemoth it is now, and the country would never have become so hopelessly divided.

Or it could be that nothing whatsoever would have changed. No matter what their timing, and regardless of their aptness, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. Objections get steamrolled. The new technology takes over. And years later, when we look back and think, How strange that we were so perturbed, the effects of that technology may well be invisible.

Did the written word decimate our memory? Did radio shrink our attention span? Did PowerPoint turn us into corporate bureaucrats? If these innovations really did change the way we think, then we’re measuring their effects with an altered mind. Either the critiques were wrong, or they were so right that we can no longer tell the difference.

A series of records on temperature, ocean heat, and Antarctic sea ice are "unprecedented", some scientists say.

Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s, they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, in England. Its impacts, however, are accelerating—sometimes far faster than expected.

For a while, the consequences weren’t easily seen. They certainly are today. The Southwest is sweltering under a heat dome. Vermont saw a deluge of rain, its second 100-year storm in roughly than a decade. Early July brought the hottest day globally since records began—a milestone surpassed again the following day. “For a long time, we were within the range of normal. And now we’re really not,” Allegra LeGrande, a physical-research scientist at Columbia University, told me. “And it has happened fast enough that people have a memory of it happening.”

In fact, a growing number of climate scientists now believe we may be careening toward so-called tipping points, where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change—leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted. “The Earth may have left a ‘safe’ climate state beyond 1°C global warming,” Armstrong McKay and his co-authors concluded in Science last fall. If these thresholds are passed, some of global warming’s effects—like the thaw of permafrost or the loss of the world’s coral reefs—are likely to happen more quickly than expected. On the whole, however, the implications of blowing past these tipping points remain among climate change’s most consequential unknowns: We don’t really know when or how fast things will fall apart.

Some natural systems, if upended, could herald a restructuring of the world. Take the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica: It’s about the size of Florida, with a protruding ice shelf that impedes the glacier’s flow into the ocean. Although the ice shelf's overall melt is slower than originally predicted, warm water is now eating away at it from below, causing deep cracks. At a certain point, that melt may progress enough to become self-sustaining, which would guarantee the glacier’s eventual collapse. How that plays out will help determine how much sea levels will rise—and thus the future of millions of people.

The fate of the Thwaites Glacier could be independent of other tipping points, such as those affecting mountain-glacier loss in South America, or the West African monsoon. But some tipping points will interact, worsening one another’s effects. When melt from Greenland’s glaciers enters the ocean, for example, it alters an important system of currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The AMOC is like a conveyor belt, drawing warm water from the tropics north. The water’s salinity increases as it evaporates, which, among other factors, makes it sink and return south along the ocean floor. As more glacial fresh water enters the system, that conveyor belt will weaken. Right now it’s the feeblest it’s been in more than 1,000 years.

[Read: I’ve hit my climate tipping point]

A shutdown of that ocean current could dramatically alter phenomena as varied as global weather patterns and crop yields. Messing with complex systems is chilling precisely because there are so many levers: If the temperature of the sea surface changes, precipitation over the Amazon might too, contributing to its deforestation, which in turn has been linked to snowfall on the Tibetan plateau. We may not even realize when we start passing points of no return—or if we already have. “It’s kind of like stepping into a minefield,” Armstrong McKay said. “We don’t want to find out where these things are by triggering them.”

One grim paper that came out last year, titled “Climate End Game,” mapped out some of the potential catastrophes that could follow a “tipping cascade,” and considered the possibility that “a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.” Chris Field, the director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and a contributor to several IPCC reports, warned that “at some point, the impacts of the climate crisis may become so severe that we lose the ability to work together to deliver solutions.”

James Hansen, one of the early voices on climate, says that measures to mitigate the crisis may now, ironically, be contributing to it. He published a working paper this spring suggesting that a reduction in sulfate aerosol particles—or the air pollution associated with burning coal and the global shipping industry—has contributed to warmer temperatures. That’s because these particles cause water droplets to multiply, which brightens clouds and reflects solar heat away from the planet’s surface. Though the paper has not been peer-reviewed, Hansen predicts that environmentally minded policies to reduce these pollutants will likely cause temperatures to rise by 2 degrees Celsius by 2050.

[Read: ‘Things don’t always change in a nice, gradual way’]

Even before the climate gets to that point, we may face a dramatic uptick in climate-related disasters, says William Ripple, a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University and the lead author of a recent commentary on the “risky feedback loops” connecting climate-driven systems. There’s a sense of awe—in the original meaning of inspiring terror or dread—at witnessing such sweeping changes play out across the landscape. “Many scientists knew these things would happen, but we’re taken aback by the severity of the major changes we’re seeing,” Ripple said. Armstrong McKay likened the challenge of being a climate scientist in 2023 to that faced by medical professionals: “You put a certain emotional distance between you and the work in order to do the work effectively,” he said, “that can be difficult to maintain.”

Although it may be too late to avert some changes, others could still be staved off by limiting emissions. LeGrande said she worries that talking about tipping points may encourage people to think that any further action now is futile. In fact, the opposite is true, Ripple said. “Scientifically, everything we do to avoid even a tenth of a degree of temperature increase makes a huge difference.”

Pull up a sticky green lawn chair, everyone. It’s time for another round of Mounting Democratic Jitters, cherished summer pastime from Wilmington to the West Wing. Today’s installment: Cornel West, unlikely MAGA accessory.

West, the famed academic and civil-rights activist, is a Green Party candidate for president. He probably will not win. Not a single state or, in all likelihood, a single electoral vote. But he remains a persistent object of concern around the president these days.

I’ve talked with many of these White House worrywarts, along with their counterparts on Joe Biden’s reelection team and the usual kettles of Democratic anxiety who start bubbling up whenever the next existential-threat election is upon us. Even with the nuisance primary challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr. polling in the double digits, West inhabits a particular category of Democratic angst, the likes of which only the words Green Party presidential candidate can elicit.

You can understand the sensitivities, given the history. Democrats still recoil at the name Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee in 2016, whose vote total in key battlegrounds—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—wound up exceeding the margins by which Hillary Clinton lost in those states. What’s Dr. Stein doing these days, anyway?

“She is my interim campaign manager,” Cornel West told me this week in a phone interview. Not a joke, as Biden would say. Or an acid flashback. Apparently Ralph Nader was not available. Not Dennis Kucinich, either (already snapped up to run RFK Jr.’s campaign). It might be kind of funny if the stakes didn’t involve a return Trump ordeal in the White House.

“The fact that Jill Stein is running his campaign is a little on the nose,” one senior Democratic campaign strategist told me.

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West has repeatedly denied that he might play a spoiler role. “I would say that most of the people who vote for me would not have voted for Biden,” he told me. “They would have probably stayed home.” In a recent CNN appearance, West dismissed the two parties as a “corporate duopoly” and professed “great respect for my dear brother Ralph Nader and great respect for sister Jill Stein.” This did nothing to assuage Democratic jitters.

I asked West whether he would campaign all the way to Election Day 2024, or if he might reconsider his venture at some point. “My goal is to go all the way to November,” he said, but allowed that circumstances could change and so could his plans. “I’m trying to be a jazzlike man,” he said. “Trying to be improvisational.”

In his campaign-launch video, West promised that his candidacy would focus on core progressive issues such as health care, housing, reproductive rights, and “de-escalating the destruction” done to the Earth and our democracy. “Neither political party wants to tell the truth,” West said, by way of explaining why he is running as a third-party candidate.

Notably, West has asserted that NATO was as much to blame for Russia’s war in Ukraine as the Kremlin. He has railed against the coalition as an “expanding instrument” of Western aggression, which he says is what provoked Russia’s onslaught. “This proxy war between the American Empire and the Russian Federation could lead to World War III,” he wrote in a social-media post calling for diplomatic talks. West also dismissed as a “sham” a House resolution—passed Tuesday—that affirmed U.S. support for Israel. “The painful truth is that the Israeli state—like the USA—has been racist in practice since its inception,” West wrote on Twitter.

Several Democrats were eager to tell their own truths about West’s endeavor, expressing uniform exasperation.

“This is not the time in order to experiment. This is not the time to play around on the margins,” warned Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison during a recent appearance on MSNBC. “What we see is a lot of folks who want to be relevant and try to be relevant in these elections and not looking at the big picture.”

“Too little attention is being paid to this,” David Axelrod, the former top Barack Obama strategist, told me. Axelrod recently gave voice to the gathering Democratic freak-out when he tweeted out some basic historical parallels. “In 2016, the Green Party played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump,” he wrote. “Now, with Cornel West as their likely nominee, they could easily do it again.”

In our interview, Axelrod noted that the 2020 race between Biden and Trump, in which neither Stein nor West was on the ballot, underscores how slim the Democrats’ margin of error remains. “When you have three states that you won by 41,000 votes combined, you just cannot afford to bleed votes, even a few of them,” Axelrod told me.

Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party chair of one of these states—Wisconsin—said he expects Trump allies to help prop up any third-party effort as a way to undermine Biden. “Regardless of the motivations of third-party candidates themselves, they can have the effect of delivering net votes to Trump next year,” Wikler said, “especially if a Trump-aligned super PAC pours money into targeted messages,” he added. “And those are exactly the kind of cynical games you have to expect.”

Cedric Richmond, a former Democratic congressman and White House adviser who recently signed on as co-chair of the Biden campaign, called West a “substantive person.” But Richmond argued that Biden has earned the support of the left through his record on the environment, health care, gun reform, and other progressive causes. “They also know that [Biden] could have done a hell of a lot more if not for this hostile Supreme Court,” Richmond told me. “And they know they got this hostile Supreme Court because ‘Hillary wasn’t good enough,’ because ‘we weren’t happy and we wanted to support Jill Stein’ or whatever the reason was at the time.” Now that voters have experienced a Trump presidency, he said, the cost of casting a protest vote with a third-party candidate should be much more apparent. “I think people have seen this movie, and they know the ending,” Richmond said.

In recent days, the putative-centrist outfit No Labels—which many Democrats have been quick to label as a pro-Trump collaborator—has been the main source of third-party hand-wringing.  The group is trying to recruit a so-called unity ticket that would appear on ballots across the country, possibly led by Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat.

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“The idea that a third-party candidate won’t hurt the Democratic nominee is preposterous on its face,” Matt Bennett, executive vice president of Third Way, a center-left policy think tank that lately has been focused on stopping No Labels, told me. Recent polls show that in a head-to-head race between Trump and Biden, Trump is more likely to benefit when a third-party candidate is added to the mix. Likewise, an NBC survey from last month revealed that 44 percent of registered voters would be open to a third-party candidate—and there were considerably more Democrats saying this (45 percent) than Republicans (34 percent).

But Bennett explained that if No Labels does not recruit a serious candidate to actually run, the group will remain a largely hypothetical menace. West, meanwhile, is definitely running. The Green Party has an organizational structure in place in many states that will ensure the nominee’s position on general-election ballots. West has deep roots on the left, and is better known than Stein was in 2016. Like Clinton, Biden has faced uncertainty about how much enthusiasm he can expect from his own party, especially young progressives.

“Dr. West has a huge following among college-age voters and a lot of folks who are more interested in social movements than they are in supporting Democratic or Republican candidates,” Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist who was the executive director of the State Democratic Party of New York from 2015 to 2018, told me.

West was a vocal supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in the 2020 Democratic primary. He has said that he wound up voting for Biden in the general election because “a fascist catastrophe is worse than a neoliberal disaster.” He also dubbed Biden “mediocre” and “milquetoast” (a tepid endorsement, let’s say).

Supporters of Biden are hopeful that the blessing of progressive allies such as Sanders, who endorsed his reelection in April, will insulate the president from the threat of West-inspired defections to the Green Party. “What Bernie can do is say, ‘Look man, we thought the existential threat of Trump had waned, but it’s still here,’” Smikle said. “We need you to show up again.”  

Another prominent Bernie booster from 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, endorsed Biden during a recent appearance on the podcast Pod Save America. The host Jon Favreau asked a follow-up about what she thought of West. Ocasio-Cortez appeared to tread carefully but sounded deferential. “I think Dr. West has an incredible history in this country,” she said. “What he gives voice to is incredibly important.” She went on to slam No Labels as a source of great concern, given “the sheer amount of money and bad-faith actors involved with it.”

“Not all third-party candidacies are created equal,” Ocasio-Cortez summarized. But she landed on a pragmatic point. “The United States has a winner-take-all system, whether we like that or not,” she said, adding that the cost of messing around could be fascism. “We have to live with that reality,” she said. Live with Joe Biden, in other words. Because the alternative is far worse—not a joke.