Exploring how Instagram and TikTok influencers shape narratives in Israel's war on Gaza.

Anna Lapwood has also introduced her 690,000 TikTok followers to organ music.

The sounds came out of my mouth with an unexpected urgency. The cadence was deliberate—more befitting of an incantation than an order: one large strawberry-lemon-mint Charged Lemonade. The words hung in the air for a moment, giving way to a stillness punctuated only by the soft whir of distant fluorescent lights and the gentle hum of a Muzak cover of Bruce Hornsby’s “Mandolin Rain.”

The time was 9:03 a.m.; the sun had been up for only one hour. I watched the kind woman behind the counter stifle an eye roll, a small mercy for which I will be eternally grateful. Her look indicated that she’d been through this before, enough times to see through my bravado. I was just another man standing in front of a Panera Bread employee, asking her to hand me 30 fluid ounces of allegedly deadly lemonade. (I would have procured it myself, but it was kept behind the counter, like a controlled substance.)

I came to Panera to touch the face of God or, at the very least, experience the low-grade anxiety and body sweats one can expect from consuming 237 milligrams of caffeine in 15 minutes. Really, the internet sent me. Since its release last year, Panera’s highly caffeinated Charged Lemonade has become a popular meme—most notably on TikTok, where people vlog from the front seat of their car about how hopped up they are after chugging the neon beverage. Last December, a tongue-in-cheek Slate headline asked, “Is Panera Bread Trying to Kill Us?”

In the following months, two wrongful-death lawsuits were indeed filed against the restaurant chain, arguing that Panera was responsible for not adequately advertising the caffeine content of the drink. The suits allege that Charged Lemonade contributed to the fatal cardiac arrests of a 21-year-old college student and a 46-year-old man. Panera did not respond to my request for comment but has argued that both lawsuits are without merit and that it “stands firmly by the safety of our products.” In October, Panera changed the labeling of its Charged Lemonade to warn people who may be “sensitive to caffeine.”

The allegations seem to have done the impossible: They’ve made a suburban chain best known for its bread bowls feel exciting, even dangerous. The memes have escalated. Search death lemonade on any platform, and you’ll see a cascade of grimly ironic posts about everything from lemonade-assisted suicide to being able to peer into alternate dimensions after sipping the juice. Much like its late-aughts boozy predecessor Four Loko, Charged Lemonade is riding a wave of popularity because of the implication that consuming it is possibly unsafe. One viral post from October put it best: “Panera has apparently discovered the fifth loko.”

Like many internet-poisoned men and women before me, I possess both a classic Freudian death drive and an embarrassing desire to experience memes in the physical world—an effort, perhaps, to situate my human form among the algorithms and timelines that dominate my life. But there is another reason I was in a strip mall on the shortest day of the year, allowing the recommended daily allowance of caffeine to Evil Knievel its way across my blood-brain barrier. I came to make sense of a year that was defined by existential threats—and by a strange, pervasive celebration of them.

In 2023, I spent a lot of time listening to smart people talk about the end of the world. This was the year that AI supposedly “ate the internet”: The arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022 shifted something in the public consciousness. After decades of promise, the contours of an AI-powered world felt to some as if they were taking shape. Will these tools come for our jobs, our culture, even our humanity? Are they truly revolutionary or just showy—like spicier versions of autocorrect?

Some of the biggest players in tech—along with a flood of start-ups—are racing to develop their own generative-AI products. The technology has developed swiftly, lending a frenzied, disorienting feeling to the past several months. “I don’t think we’re ready for what we’re creating,” one AI entrepreneur told me ominously and unbidden when we spoke earlier this year. Civilizational extinction has moved from pure science fiction to immediate concern. Geoffrey Hinton, a well-known AI researcher who quit Google this year to warn against the dangers of the technology, suggested that there was as high as a 10 percent chance of extinction in the next 30 years. “I think that whether the chance of existential calamity is 0.5 percent or 50 percent, we should still take it seriously,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, told my colleague Ross Andersen this past spring.

In May, hundreds of AI executives, researchers, and tech luminaries including Bill Gates signed a one-sentence statement written by the Center for AI Safety. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” it read. Debates once contained to a small subculture of technologists and rationalists on niche online forums such as LessWrong became fodder for the press. Normal people trying to keep up with the news had to hack through a jungle of new terminology: x-risk, e/acc, alignment, p(doom). By mid-year, the AI-doomerism conversation was fully mainstreamed; existential calamity was in the air (and, we joked, in our fast-casual lemonades).

[Read: AI doomerism is a decoy]

Then, as if by cosmic coincidence, this strain of apocalyptic thought fused perfectly with pop culture in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. As the atomic-bomb creator’s biopic took over the box office, AI researchers toted around the Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, suggesting that they too were pushing humanity into an uncertain, possibly apocalyptic future. The parallels between Los Alamos and Silicon Valley, however facile, needled at a question that had been bothering me all year: What would compel a person to build something if they had any reasonable belief that it might end life on Earth?

Richard Rhodes, the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, offered me one explanation, using a concept from the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. At the core of quantum physics is the idea of complementarity, which describes how objects have conflicting properties that cannot be observed at the same time. Complementarity, he argued, was also the same principle that governed innovation: A weapon of mass destruction could also be a tool to avert war.

[Read: Oppenheimer’s cry of despair in The Atlantic]

Rhodes, an 86-year-old who’s spent most of his adult life thinking about our most destructive innovations and speaking with the men who built the bomb, told me that he believes this duality to be at the core of human progress. Pursuing our greatest ambitions may give way to an unthinkable nightmare, or it may allow our dreams to come true. The answer to my question, he offered, was somewhere on that thin line between the excitement and terror of true discovery.

Roughly 10 minutes and 15 ounces into my strawberry-lemon-mint Charged Lemonade, I felt a gentle twinge of euphoria—a barely perceptible effervescence taking place at a cellular level. I was alone in the restaurant, ensconced in a booth and checking my Instagram messages. I’d shared a picture of the giant cup sweating modestly on my table, a cheap bid for some online engagement that had paid off. “I hope you live,” one friend had written in response. I glanced down at my smartwatch, where my heart rate measured a pleasant 20 beats per minute higher than usual. The inside of my mouth felt wrong. I ran my tongue over my teeth, noticing a fine dusting of sugar blanketing the enamel.

I did not feel the warm creep of death’s sweet embrace, only a sensation that the lights were very bright. This was accompanied by an edgy feeling that I would characterize as the antithesis of focus. I stood up to ask a Panera employee if they’d been getting a lot of Charged Lemonade tourism around these parts. “I think there’s been a lot, but honestly most of them order it through the drive-through or online order,” they said. “Not many come up here like you did.” I retreated to my booth to let my brain vibrate in my skull.

It is absurd to imagine that lemonade could kill you—no less lemonade from a soda fountain within steps of a Jo-Ann Fabrics store. That absurdity is a large part of what makes Panera lemonade a good meme. But there’s something deeper too, a truth lodged in the banality of a strip-mall drink: Death is everywhere. Today, you might worry about getting shot at school or in a movie theater, or killed by police at a traffic stop; you also understand that you could contract a deadly virus at the grocery store or in the office. Meanwhile, most everyone carries on like everything’s fine. We tolerate what feels like it should be intolerable. This is the mood baked into the meme: Death by lemonade is ridiculous, but in 2023, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched, either.

The same goes for computers and large language models. Our lives already feel influenced beyond our control by the computations of algorithms we don’t understand and cannot see. Maybe it’s ludicrous to imagine a chatbot as the seed of a sentient intelligence that eradicates human life. Then again, it would have been hard in 2006 to imagine Facebook playing a role in the Rohingya genocide, in Myanmar.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat for the next hour next to my now-empty vessel, anticipating some kind of side effect like the recipient of a novel vaccination. Around the time I could sense myself peaking, I grew quite cold. But that was it. No interdimensional vision, no heart palpitations. The room never melted into a Dalí painting. From behind my laptop, I watched a group of three teenagers, all dressed exactly like Kurt Cobain, grab their neon caffeine receptacles from the online-pickup stand and walk away. Each wore an indelible look of boredom incompatible with the respect one ought to have for death lemonade. I began to feel sheepish about my juice expedition and packed up my belongings.

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t feel slightly ripped off; it’s an odd sensation, wanting a glass of lemonade to walk you right up to the edge of oblivion. But a hint of impending danger has always been an excellent marketing tool—one that can obscure reality. A quick glance at the Starbucks website revealed that my go-to order—a barely defensible Venti Pike Place roast with an added espresso shot—contains approximately 560 milligrams of caffeine, which is more than double that of a large Charged Lemonade. But I wanted to believe that the food engineers at Panera had pushed the bounds of the possible.

Some of us are drawn to (allegedly) killer lemonade for the same reason others fixate on potential Skynet scenarios. The world feels like it is becoming more chaotic and unknowable, hostile and exciting. AI and a ridiculous fast-casual death beverage may not be the same thing, but they both tap into this energy. We will always find ways to create new, glorious, terrifying things—some that may ultimately kill us. We may not want to die, but in 2023, it was hard to forget that we will.

One day in late November, I cradled a red Samsung flip phone in my hands as if it was a ruby gemstone. To me, it was just as precious. Deep inside an overstuffed dresser in my childhood bedroom, I had spotted the glint of my first-ever cellphone, a Samsung SGH-A707 purchased in the waning days of the George W. Bush presidency. The device, no bigger than a credit card, had long ago succumbed to the spider web of cracks on its screen. For a moment, I was brought back to life before the smartphone, clicking the phone’s plastic keys for the first time in more than a decade.

This device, and every other phone like it, of course, was made obsolete by the touchscreen slabs now in all of our pockets. Perhaps you have heard that we are now on the cusp of another iPhone moment—the rise of a new technology that changes the world. No, not that one. Despite the post-ChatGPT frenzy, artificial intelligence has so far been defined more by speculative hype than actual substance. Does anyone really want “AI-powered” smoothies, sports commentary, or roller skates? Assuming the bots don’t wipe out humanity, maybe AI will take the jobs of high-school teachers, coders, lawyers, fast-food workers, customer-service agents, writers, and graphic designers—but right now, ChatGPT is telling me that Cybertruck has 11 letters. There’s a long way to go.

Meanwhile, electric cars are already upending America. In 2023, our battery-powered future became so much more real—a boom in sales and new models is finally starting to push us into the post-gas age. Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million of them in 2023, according to a forecast by BloombergNEF, about the same number sold from 2016 to 2021 total. “This was the year that EVs went from experiments, or technological demonstrations, and became mature vehicles,” Gil Tal, the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, told me. They are beginning to transform not just the automotive industry, but also the very meaning of a car itself.

If the story of American EVs has long hinged on one company—Tesla—then this was the year that these cars became untethered from Elon Musk’s brand. “We’re at a point where EVs aren’t necessarily exclusively for the upper, upper, upper class,” Robby DeGraff, an analyst at the market-research firm AutoPacific, told me. If you wanted an electric car five years ago, you could choose from among various Tesla models, the Chevy Bolt, the Nissan Leaf—and that was really it. Now EVs come in more makes and models than Baskin-Robbins ice-cream flavors. We have more luxury sedans to vie with Tesla, but also cheaper five-seaters, SUVs, Hummers, pickup trucks, and … however you might categorize the Cybertruck. Nearly 40 new EVs have debuted since the start of 2022, and they are far more advanced than their ancestors. For $40,000, the Hyundai Ioniq 6, released this year, can get you 360 miles on a single charge; in 2018, for only a slightly lower cost, a Nissan Leaf couldn’t go half that distance.

[Read: Admit it, the Cybertruck is awesome]

All of these EVs are genuinely great for the planet, spewing zero carbon from their tailpipes, but that’s only a small part of what makes them different. In the EV age, cars are no longer just cars. They are computers. Stripping out a gas engine, transmission, and 100-plus moving parts turns a vehicle into something more digital than analog—sort of like how typing on an iPhone keyboard is different than on my clackety old Samsung flip phone. “It’s the software that is really the heart of an EV,” DeGraff said—it runs the motors, calculates how many miles are left on a charge, optimizes the brakes, and much more.

Just like with other gadgets that bug you about software updates, all of this firmware can be updated over Wi-Fi while a car charges overnight. Rivian has updated its software to add a “Sand Mode” that can enhance its cars’ driving ability on dusty terrain. Many new cars are getting stuffed with technology—a new gas-powered Mercedes-Benz E-Class comes with TikTok integration and a selfie stick—but EVs are capable of more significant updates. A gas car is never going to meaningfully get more miles per gallon, but one such update from Tesla in 2020 increased the range on its Model X car from 328 to 351 miles after the company found ways to wring more efficiency out of its internal parts. And because EVs all drive basically the same, tech is a bigger part of the sell. Instead of idly passing the time while an EV recharges, you can now use a car’s infotainment system to Zoom into a meeting, play Grand Theft Auto, and stream Amazon Prime.

The million-plus new EVs on the road are ushering in a fundamental, maybe existential, change in how to even think about cars—no longer as machines, but as gadgets that plug in and charge like all the others in our life. The wonderful things about computers are coming to cars, and so are the terrible ones: apps that crash. Subscription hell. Cyberattacks. There are new problems to contend with too: In Tesla’s case, its “Autopilot” software has been implicated in fatal crashes. (It was the subject of a massive recall earlier this month that required an over-the-air update.) You now might scroll on your phone in bed, commute in your EV, and log into your work laptop, all of which are powered by processors that are constantly bugging you to update them.

[Read: The end of manual transmission]

If cars are gadgets now, then carmakers are also now tech companies. An industry that has spent a century perfecting the internal combustion engine must now manufacture lithium-ion batteries and write the code to govern them. Imagine if a dentist had to pivot from filling cavities to performing open-heart surgery, and that’s roughly what’s going on here. “The transition to EVs is completely changing everything,” Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. “It’s changing the people that automotive companies have to hire and their skills. It’s changing their suppliers, their factories, how they assemble and build them. And lots of automakers are struggling with that.”

Take the batteries. To manufacture battery cells powerful enough for a car is so phenomenally expensive and arduous that Toyota is pumping nearly $14 billion into a single battery plant in North Carolina. To create software-enabled cars, you need software engineers, and car companies cannot get enough of them. (Perhaps no other industry has benefited the most from Silicon Valley’s year of layoffs.) At the very low end, estimates Sam Abuelsamid, a transportation analyst at Guidehouse Insights, upwards of 10,000 “software engineers, interface designers, networking engineers, data center experts and silicon engineers have been hired by automakers and suppliers in recent years.” The tech wars can sometimes verge on farce: One former Apple executive runs Ford’s customer-software team, while another runs GM’s.

At every level, the auto industry is facing the type of headache-inducing questions about job losses and employment that still feels many years away with AI. “There’s a new skill set we’re going to need, and I don’t think I can teach everyone—it will take too much time,” Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, said in May. “So there is going to be disruption in this transition.” Job cuts are already happening, and more may come—even after the massive autoworker strike this year that largely hinged on electrification. Such a big financial investment is needed to electrify the car industry that from July to September, Ford lost $60,000 for every EV it sold. Or peel back one more onion layer to car dealerships: Tesla, Rivian, and other EV companies are selling directly to consumers, cutting them out. EVs also require little service compared with gas vehicles, a reality that has upset many dealers, who could lose their biggest source of profit. None of this is the future. It is happening right now.

But if EVs are having an “iPhone moment,” we are still in the days when a few early adopters had the clunky, OG version. Most cars you see are a decade old; for all these EV sales, just 1 percent of cars on the road are all-electric. Even if we hit President Joe Biden’s EV target of 50 percent of sales by 2030, the sheer life span of cars will mean that gas vehicles will still greatly outnumber electric ones by then. Gas stations are not closing. Parking garages are not buckling under the weight of EVs and their hefty batteries. Electric cars remain too expensive, and they are limited by janky public chargers that are too slow, assuming they work at all. If you don’t have a house where you can install your own plug, EVs are still mostly just unrealistic. Most alarming might be the politics that surround them: Donald Trump and lots of other Republicans are vowing to stymie their growth. Carmakers are not even hiding that next year’s election might lead them to reconsider their EV plans.

Even so, the transition is not slowing down. Next year, America should hit 1.9 million EV sales, Corey Cantor, an EV analyst at BloombergNEF, told me. Another burst of models is coming: A retro-futuristic Volkswagen van! A Cadillac Escalade with a 55-inch touchscreen! A tiny Fiat 500e for just $30,000! And yes, they are succumbing a bit to hype themselves. In June, Mercedes’s infotainment screen got an optional update. Now you can talk to it through a chatbot.

This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In the smartphone era, libraries might seem less central. But it turns out that young people actually use them.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

How to be happy growing older America should be more like Operation Warp Speed. The Middle East conflict that the U.S. can’t stay out of

A Third Place

Spending time at my local library branch in elementary school, I felt like a little grown-up. I’d march up to the desk and tell the librarian all about the chapter books I would be reading that summer. (“Absolutely Normal Chows,” I told her once, holding up a copy of the Sharon Creech novel Absolutely Normal Chaos.) I value public libraries for the resources they offer but also because of how these spaces have always felt to me: like a community of people who care about learning new things, and who simply want to spend time in public.

Libraries, and the people who keep them running, have had a rough time in recent years. Across America, politicians and advocates have pushed to ban from schools a variety of books, including those that deal with topics of race and gender; this movement has now extended to public libraries. As my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in the March Atlantic article “The Librarians Are Not Okay”: “Although books don’t have feelings, the librarians forced to remove them from the shelves definitely do.” On top of the harassment and stress brought on by book bans, “as public-facing professionals, [librarians] are on the front lines of the masking wars, the homelessness crisis, the opioid epidemic, and the general rise in public rage,” Gonzalez notes. Libraries also continue to face financial strain. Some of the problems are bureaucratic: In New York, for example, the city just announced that because of budget cuts, it will close most libraries on Sundays. And some are ideological: This past spring, Missouri’s Republican-led House aimed to strip all funding from the state’s libraries.

This slew of attacks on libraries is concerning not only because these are attacks on education and literacy; they also threaten spaces that many Americans, including young people, actually use. New research released by the American Library Association found that more than half of Gen Zers and Millennials surveyed in 2022 had visited a physical library location in the previous year. And of the Gen Zers and Millennials who said that they did not identify as readers, more than half still reported going to the library, suggesting that they may be visiting for other reasons, including events, classes, or simply to find community. As the authors of the study, both Portland State University professors, wrote, “The youth that researchers met during visits to two public library branches talked about coming to the library just to ‘vibe’ and hang out.”

Conventional wisdom says that teens are on their phones all the time. There is some truth to that, and many read their library books on apps as well. But according to the ALA research, young people do read print books. In fact, the report found that younger members of Gen Z were reading more print books than older readers in their age cohort were, and print was the preferred format for the Gen Z respondents. Seeing a display of books can be an opportunity for discovery, and print books can provide a welcome break from screens. Books can also feature in people’s online lives: A physical object adds richer texture to a TikTok, for example, than a shot of a Kindle might, Emily Drabinski, the president of the ALA, told me earlier this month. “We might finally come out of that binary thinking where there’s the digital and the print world,” she said. “We all inhabit all of [these worlds] all the time.”

Libraries are about books and reading, of course. But they are also about providing people with a “third place” for programming, services, and socializing; they are one of America’s only truly cross-class spaces, Drabinski noted. And they function as a public resource in all meanings of the term. As Drabinski said, “We want people to come in and use the bathroom; if that’s the only thing they need from the public library: Welcome.”

Related:

The librarians are not okay. How to show kids the joy of reading

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: In 1949, despondent at the failure of UN arms-control talks, J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote an essay for The Atlantic. It’s a fascinating historical artifact and act of public grief, Ross Andersen writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Alanah Sarginson

The New Old Age

By David Brooks

People are living longer lives. If you are 60 right now, you have a roughly 50 percent chance of reaching 90. In other words, if you retire in your early or mid-60s, you can expect to have another 20 years before your mind and body begin their steepest decline.

We don’t yet have a good name for this life stage. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a notable scholar in this area, calls it the “Third Chapter.” Some call it “Adulthood II” or, the name I prefer, the “Encore Years.” For many, it’s a delightful and rewarding phase, but the transition into it can be rocky …

Over the past few months, I’ve had conversations with people who are approaching this transition or are in the middle of it. These conversations can be intense. One senior executive told me that he fears two things in life: retirement and death—and that he fears retirement more.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Dusty Deen for The Atlantic

Read. These six books about other people’s kin may help you feel better about yours during a stressful family holiday.

Watch. The 15 best television shows of 2023 pushed the boundaries of episodic storytelling.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last summer, I started tracking my reading in a spreadsheet, which I’ve been enjoying revisiting as the year winds down. I used to track my reading haphazardly on Goodreads, but whereas for some people the social dimension of sites such as Goodreads and the StoryGraph is the point, for me, it was a drawback. I realized that I could re-create their utility—which for me was having all of my books in one place—in a Google Sheet. The sheet is very simple: I record the name of the book, the date finished, the length, the format (Kindle, print, or audio), and the gender of the author.

This was driven not by an effort to quantify my reading or optimize my path toward any particular goals—just by a curiosity about what I was reading and any patterns I could find. Next year, I’m planning to add tabs for plays I see and movies I watch. I recommend giving it a try if you’d like to track the culture you’re consuming, just for yourself.

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Girl dinner was one of the biggest hashtags on the video-sharing app in the last 12 months.

After a year of tough government scrutiny, the stars seem to have aligned in favour of TikTok as it enters the new year.

Every time I see a high schooler on TikTok flying through a tutorial of how she gets perfect beach waves with her Dyson Airwrap hair wand, I think of the time my mother straightened my ringlet-curly hair with an iron. Like, on the ironing board, in the kitchen, before a middle-school dance in the 1990s. Or my first Conair flat iron, purchased with money saved up from my summer job, which only got hot enough to make me look like the lead singer of a hair-metal band. Or the time I spent in my freshman college dorm, trying and mostly failing to harness the dexterity and fine motor skills necessary to manipulate the clamp on a Hot Tools curling iron. The Dyson Airwrap is my version of In my day, we used to walk to school uphill, both ways, in the snow. It is my proof, as someone rapidly progressing toward 40, that kids these days are soft.

TikTok is crowded with these tutorials, which feature the $600 hair tool or one of its many dupes. And hairstyling is just the beginning of TikTok’s love affair with gizmos and doodads. After you Airwrap your hair, you can prep your face for makeup with red-light currents, remove some hairs with your at-home follicle zapper, and throw together a salad with your veggie chopper. The chatty, short-form recommendation videos that proliferate on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, all algorithmically targeting various interests and demographics, have helped usher shoppers toward a new crop of tools designed to aid in domestic or personal-care tasks—domains traditionally thought of as women’s work. Some of these devices, such as Dyson’s hair tools and Dr. Dennis Gross’s at-home LED masks, cost hundreds of dollars. Others, such as personal milk-frothing wands and motorized scrubbing brushes, are pretty cheap.

These products count as something of a reversal in fate for gadgets as a concept. Tech-industry watchers and pundits have spent years wondering if the end of the gadget era might be nigh. Our phones, after all, obviate most people’s need for so many of the consumer-tech products that crowded the shelves of electronics stores in the recent past: GPS systems, digital cameras, CD and DVD players, iPods. After a brief resurgence during the pandemic, when Americans stocked up on ring lights and gaming rigs and tablets to entertain the kids, traditional consumer-electronics companies have seen demand slump. But not in every part of the market. Au contraire: We’re in a golden age of gadgets for girlies.

Dyson, which debuted its absurdly popular and very expensive vacuums in the United States in 2002, likely deserves much of the recent credit for convincing other brands that women might have a real interest in high-tech gadgetry, or that engineering advancements could be a selling point in stereotypically feminine realms. After winning over the vacuum market, Dyson released a series of fans and motion-sensing hand dryers—products with useful applications, but not the type of stuff that captures the public’s imagination. Then, in 2016, came a product that seemed a little out of left field at the time: Dyson’s Supersonic hair dryer, the first of a triad of launches that reimagined the basic physical reality of commonplace hairstyling tools. The Airwrap followed in 2018, and in 2020, the brand launched a cordless flat iron. All three have been smash hits, especially among the cohort of wealthy young women who are particularly influential in setting beauty trends online. Hair tools now account for almost a third of Dyson’s business in the U.S.

[Read: Shoppers are stuck in a dupe loop]

In tech-industry terms, a gadget is a piece of hardware—your smartphone is plausibly a gadget, but none of the apps within it is. In more traditional terms, a gadget is a device with a narrow set of uses, usually designed to perform or simplify a particular task. Not all gadgets are tech products, but a lot of them are the result of certain kinds of technology becoming less expensive to produce and more widely available to the average person. The idea that women will buy tech products that take their needs seriously is so obvious that I feel sort of stupid even bothering to explicate it, but it’s nonetheless something that tech companies seem to talk themselves out of—or just forget—over and over again. The industry is dominated by men, and that colors which new ideas attract support and which products get passed over for improvement. Certainly some past gadgets have been designed with women and girls in mind—most obviously tools used in the kitchen—but the domains of domesticity and personal care remained off the radar in the gadget boom that arose alongside personal computing. The curling iron that I struggled to learn to use in college was called a Marcel iron—so named because its complex hinged-clamp mechanism was largely unchanged from the one patented by the hairdresser Marcel Grateau in 1905.

That Dyson tapped into such demand for improved vacuums and hair tools is perhaps less of a reflection of the company’s capacity for technical innovation than of its capacity to identify stale markets and willing consumers. Or, I should say, once-stale markets. At the end of 2022, Dyson announced that it would invest roughly $600 million to develop 20 new beauty gadgets over the following four years. It will have far more competition for those gadgets than it did just a few years ago. Dyson’s existing hair tools alone have spawned enough knockoffs and dupes to fuel a cottage industry of tutorials and recommendations. In the case of the Airwrap, the cycle has been perpetuating itself for more than a year: New but very similar tools show up on TikTok Shop or Amazon or Temu, maybe at a newly low price or with some novel attachments. Influencers try them out, often because they’ve received the product for free (sometimes with an additional cash payment on top of it); make demonstration videos promising that this is actually the best dupe out there; and provide commission-generating shopping links. Smaller creators and regular users buy whatever new thing is surging in popularity and post their own reviews, many of them hoping that their accounts rise to greater prominence as everyone else tries to figure out what’s up with this new thing they’re suddenly seeing everywhere.

In other corners of the internet, much the same thing happens. CleanTok, where creators swap housecleaning tips and hacks, has links to a seemingly limitless number of battery-powered scrub brushes in every size and length, all from companies with inscrutable Amazon-brand names, that promise to make maintaining a pristine kitchen and bathroom a cinch. The skincare-curious have found a genre of device that costs less than $10 and shoots red light into your face to give you a “snatched” jawline. Fitness influencers extoll the virtues of compact steppers and walking pads that you can tuck under a standing desk. I have seen so many close-ups of hairless underarms thanks to Ulike at-home hair-removal devices.

What gadgets of all kinds promise, above and beyond whatever specific task they’re intended to execute, is ease. On some level, most of these new gadgets marketed to women do make something—usually the fulfillment of a particular aesthetic or domestic standard—easier. Less time and skill needed to perfect your hair and less elbow grease spent making your bathroom fixtures shine offer potential buyers the possibility of, finally, getting it all done. Perhaps most important, those gadgets provide the possibility of relief—if not from the standards themselves, maybe from the sense that fulfilling them all would be impossible.

[Read: The real reason eye cream is so expensive]

But when adherence to cultural standards is at stake, convenience never holds for long. When current expectations become too easy to achieve, those expectations change. Consumer history is littered with examples of exactly how this happens. In her book Never Done: A History of American Housework, the historian Susan Strasser traces the path of domestic gadgetry over the course of industrialization and finds consequences both intended and not. Electric washing machines, for instance, genuinely did make the task of household laundry less physically demanding and more productive. They also changed where and how laundry fit into women’s lives: It became less communal and more isolated inside homes, and the ease of electric washers changed hygiene norms, requiring clothes to be washed more frequently. Over time, a hated once-a-week chore transformed into a ceaseless burden. Strasser found little evidence that the amount of time women spent doing laundry had been reduced at all.

Innovations in domestic and personal-care technologies tend not to clear the way for more leisure or personal time for women, even if they do reduce the physical strength or skill involved in some of their labor. Instead, they clear the way for even more onerous expectations of how we’ll perform, domestically and aesthetically. The results that many of these gadgets promise are the kinds of things that were, until recently, available only to the wealthy, and therefore not the default expectation of most of us: Your hair will look like you just got a fresh blowout, your skin will look like you see a cosmetic dermatologist, and your house will look like you have a maid. You can watch the bar of expectation get higher in real time on social media, as young women sort out how they should groom themselves and organize their living spaces. Ideas about how flawless their skin should look or how undisturbed their homes should be grow more uncanny, and things that gadgets can’t yet replicate—Botox, buccal-fat removal, expensive home renovations, adherence to rapidly changing furniture trends—become the new baseline among the affluent and influential. No matter how hard we run, the finish line is always getting a little farther away.

Recently reading through the cookbook Jerusalem, I was struck by an observation made by its co-authors, an Israeli chef and a Palestinian chef, in their introduction. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi write that food “seems to be the only unifying force” in Jerusalem, a city claimed as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. Despite their cuisine’s fraught history, the chefs consider preparing meals to be a uniquely human act—an unspoken language shared between two people who might otherwise be enemies.

I was flipping through Jerusalem rather than scrolling through news updates about the Middle East. I found comfort in the co-authors’ attitude of community, especially when many conversations on social media, in mainstream U.S. coverage, and in real life threaten to turn the lost lives of the Israel-Hamas war into abstractions. I quietly leave the room whenever the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is casually discussed at work or among friends, because I do not want to treat death as a watercooler topic of conversation. I am the son of Palestinian immigrants, and I have family in Gaza. I do not want to be a spokesperson for Palestinian suffering.

Although reading about violence in Palestine does little more than cause me pain and frustration, poetry allows me to access the place’s wonder and complexity. And, judging from the surge in people who are sharing Palestinian poetry, the same is true for readers across the globe. The poems of Mahmoud Darwish, Mosab Abu Toha, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, and other Palestinian writers have gone viral on TikTok, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). The hashtag #palestinianpoetry has more than 206,500 views on TikTok, and the hashtag #mahmouddarwishpoetry has 17.8 million views. Both the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets have been sharing works by Palestinian writers, not to mention the countless posts I see among my own family and within my various literary circles.

[Poem: ‘Younger Than War,’ by Mosab Abu Toha]

As a poet myself, I suspect that there are many reasons for the form’s increased popularity. Poetry can communicate confusion and suffering because it isn’t a medium for resolving problems. It is better suited for affirming humanness, piercing through politicized news narratives, and—during tense historical moments—producing memorable, shareable lines. Of course, a line offers only a glimpse of a poem’s whole. It cannot, and does not, aim to make the argument of the entire poem—if a poem makes an argument at all. But in a few carefully considered words, poems can create enough electricity to spark surprising feelings in a reader: curiosity, pain, empathy. How important, especially now, to connect audiences to poems that generate such emotions.

Consider just the title of the widely shared poem by Noor Hindi, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying.” Hindi’s title, which acts as its first line, bluntly concretizes the Palestinian cause and turns it into an issue of human rights—her people’s rights. The poem’s urgency is apparent in its language, starting with a verb, that verb, and ending with an image of death. The title is a desperate, angry cry for help.

The speaker positions herself against the “colonizers” who have the freedom to “write about flowers.” She, however, aims to “tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks / seconds before becoming daisies.” The broken line and its comparison of sturdy, unliving tanks with fragile daisies point to the same conclusion: The speaker’s people are precious nothings compared with the forces around them. The speaker can’t talk about children without talking about flowers, a strangely beautiful dehumanization. She is, in ways she can’t quite articulate, like the colonizers her poem stands against.

Many of Hindi’s lines carry their emotional weight in language and images immediately accessible to the reader. When Hindi writes, “Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons,” it stings with the same venom as “I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.” I’ve seen each of these lines shared individually, retweeted, and highlighted as a synecdoche for the poem.

No wonder some fear poetry’s viral power. Fadwa Tuqan, a Palestinian feminist and poet, famously used her poetry as an act of political resistance from the 1940s until just before she died, in 2003. The Guardian published an obituary featuring an exaggerated claim that the former Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan once likened reading a single Tuqan poem to facing 20 enemy fighters. A more accurate telling of the event comes from Samar Attar’s Debunking the Myths of Colonization: The Arabs and Europe, which notes that Dayan wanted a group in Israel to rescind its offer inviting Tuqan to recite poetry in the West Bank. The defense minister’s justification, according to Attar: “One of her poems is capable of creating ten resistance fighters.” Regardless of the number of combatants poetry can allegedly spur into battle, the point stands: Words have influence, and poetry’s words, dense with meaning and softened by emotion, can generate real change.

The October 7 attacks and the current war in Gaza are harrowing examples of the consequences of undervaluing human life. “Imagine extending … equal humanity to everyone, every time,” Fady Joudah, a prolific Palestinian poet and essayist, wrote in a recent LitHub article. The politician-poet and activist Hanan Ashrawi shows what it means to extend humanity to some of war’s most vulnerable victims in her poem “From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year-Old.” Though her poem borders on sentimentality, Ashrawi achingly describes how the world looks to a toddler whom a soldier unremorsefully shoots in the eye. The poem’s power comes from its final lines, in which the child dispassionately recounts hearing about a nine-month-old who has also lost an eye and wonders if the same soldier was responsible. The speaker empathizes with the younger victim, expressing herself with a precociousness that might be sweet if it weren’t devastating:

I’m old enough, almost four,
I’ve seen enough of life,
but she’s just a baby
who didn’t know any better.

The 3-year-old’s matter-of-factness and innocence produce a painful irony. Palestinian toddlers, Ashrawi suggests, are so accustomed to violence that they’ve become experts in it. Having “seen enough of life,” they are emotionally prepared for their own death—in some ways, more so than adults.

[Read: The nameless children of Gaza]

Indeed, much of Palestinian poetry emphasizes the voices of the injured and silenced. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s “Running Orders,” an enormously popular poem, describes an unconcerned assault on life, and in doing so, insists that all life is valuable—the message of many Palestinian anti-war poems. Tuffaha’s poem is told from the perspective of a parent preparing to flee her house after receiving a warning call. I find the poem especially heartbreaking amid the current conflict, during which the Israel Defense Forces have seemingly chosen to forgo the knock-on-the-roof policy, a warning to allow noncombatants to escape (to where? some poets and human-rights groups ask) before soldiers drop a bomb in a civilian-dense area.

For Tuffaha’s narrator, though, the experience of receiving a warning is new: “They call us now, / before they drop the bombs.” The break at the end of the opening line separates the politeness of a phone call from the community-shattering violence that follows. The attacks isolate the speaker from her neighbors even as she is surrounded by them, and her city becomes a “prison by the sea / and the alleyways are narrow / and there are more human lives / packed one against the other / more than any other place on earth.” These short, claustrophobic lines pile injustices on top of one another, offering no way out of this war-imposed jail cell.

The speaker, swept up in her family’s mistreatment, starts minimizing her own suffering. She begins speaking in the voice of the caller and the other combatants: “It doesn’t matter that / you can’t call us back to tell us / the people we claim to want aren’t in your house / that there’s no one here / except you and your children / who were cheering for Argentina / sharing the last loaf of bread for this week / counting candles left in case the power goes out.” Tuffaha affirms the family’s dignity by emphasizing the ordinariness of their lives. And in showing the casual destruction of their home, Tuffaha’s closing lines strike with the force of a missile. They empty the sensitive reader in the same way the speaker’s house has been gutted:

It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

The only solution her family has is to run, but 58 seconds isn’t enough time to grab the myriad objects that, together, make up their life. Ironically, to prove they are human, they have to run, shoeless, like animals. And because “the borders are closed / and your papers are worthless,” the best the family can hope for is some sort of foreign pity as refugees, lost and permanently away from home. Najwan Darwish, one of Palestine’s most prominent poets, ends his poem “I Write the Land” with the notion that he, and many other Palestinians, eventually will be erased: “My words are everywhere / and silence is my story.” To him, erasure is the inevitable outcome of Palestinian struggles for sovereignty, and his story alone is insufficient to bring effective change.

Poetry at its best can stun readers into silence, but also give the silenced a voice and a way to share that voice. Reading Gazan poets, many of whom have recently been killed, I’m struck by the words they leave behind, and their unignorable humanness. News reports and interviews of course have the potential to share the perspective of the disenfranchised. But poetry conveys the humanity and personality of an interview without its opportunism; it offers the heart of a news article without burdening itself with data. Better still, it doesn’t have anything to prove. It sits like a monument to injustice—unflinching, chipped, told in broken pieces that together are something like art.

As more food enthusiasts turn to Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube for quick and visually appealing recipe videos, here are some top-tier accounts you should be following for mouth-watering tips.