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An attempt to simplify federal financial-aid forms led to a bureaucratic mess. That may shape where students go to college—and whether they enroll at all.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The unreality of Columbia University’s “liberated zone” The new quarter-life crisis Why a dog’s death hits so hard

A Botched Rollout

Even under the best conditions, applying to college is rarely easy. But this year, the process became an extraordinary source of stress for many American families when the planned rollout of a simplified Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form devolved into a series of delays and website glitches that left students in limbo.

The plan to simplify the FAFSA process has been a few years in the making: In 2020, as part of a massive spending bill, Congress ordered the Department of Education to create a shorter version of the FAFSA form; the new application reduces the maximum number of questions from 108 to 36. The goal was to make things easier for applicants and increase the number of students who could receive federal aid—“a rare win for bipartisan, commonsense governance,” my colleague Rose Horowitch wrote. But in recent months, the new FAFSA rollout has met roadblocks and delays at almost every turn. The form was supposed to launch in October, but it didn’t open up until the very end of December. Even after the soft launch, many families encountered various lockouts and issues, and students whose parents don’t have Social Security numbers struggled to submit the form.

By late last month, around the time when many students were receiving admissions decisions, some 2 million FAFSA forms were in purgatory, Rose reported. The FAFSA fiasco, my colleague Adam Harris told me, is “a result of the administration overestimating the resources it would have at its disposal—time, people, money—in order to complete an inherited overhaul.” That lack of resources, he explained, combined with missed contractor deadlines and miscommunication, led to a bungled process.

The botched rollout has posed problems for students who want to compare financial-aid offers before they commit to a university, Sandy Baum, an expert on higher-education financing and a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told me. But the stakes are even higher for students who are on the fence about enrolling: This fiasco may “transform the life of somebody who just says, Well, I guess I’m not going to be able to go to college at all.”

As of April 12, only 29 percent of high-school seniors had completed their FAFSA forms, down from more than 46 percent last year at the same time, according to data from the National College Attainment Network (NCAN). Baum suggested that some of the dropoff was because people ran into so many roadblocks that they gave up. But others were also likely scared away from even trying. “Everybody has heard about this problem,” she said. The decline has been especially stark at schools where many students of color and low-income students are enrolled, according to NCAN.

None of this is likely to help the perception among some students that college is out of reach. Recent news stories reported that certain colleges are on the brink of costing six figures a year, including tuition, housing, and personal expenses. Many students at public and private institutions don’t actually pay the sticker price after factoring in grants, loans, and other aid, and most colleges don’t charge nearly that much—but not everybody knows that, Baum said.

The FAFSA debacle collides with a number of other higher-education issues, Laura Perna, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. In 2022, the number of young students enrolled in college dropped by roughly 1.2 million from its 2011 peak, and polling shows that many people are questioning the value of higher education. Perna worries that this year’s financial-aid fiasco might diminish trust in the FAFSA system, which requires families to submit a huge amount of personal information.

As May 1, the traditional college-commitment deadline, approaches, many people are scrambling to figure out what financial assistance they might get. Some colleges have already extended their deadlines, though many are leaving the situation in students’ hands. Baum is optimistic that in the long run, the simplified FAFSA process will mean more people are eligible for federal aid. Still, this year’s senior class is bearing the brunt of many bureaucratic failures and missteps. “If students don’t go to college this year, will they go next year or will they just never go?” she wonders. “That’s something we don’t know yet.”

Related:

Colleges are facing an enrollment nightmare. How the Biden administration messed up FAFSA

Today’s News

During Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial in New York, the former publisher of The National Enquirer tabloid testified that he and Trump had a “highly confidential” arrangement that included buying and burying negative stories about the former president. The Federal Trade Commission voted to ban noncompete clauses, which prevent workers from joining rival companies or starting their own competing business. The Justice Department reached a $138.7 million settlement with more than 100 victims of Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics physician currently serving an effective life sentence for sexual-abuse and child-pornography convictions.

Evening Read

Courtesy of Kidipadeli75

A Dentist Found a Jawbone in a Floor Tile

By Sarah Zhang

Recently, a man visiting his parents’ newly renovated home recognized an eerily familiar white curve in their tile floor. To the man, a dentist, it looked just like a jawbone. He could even count the teeth—one, two, three, four, five, at least. They seemed much like the ones he stares at all day at work.

The jawbone appeared at once very humanlike and very old, and the dentist took his suspicions to Reddit. Could it be that his parents’ floor tile contains a rare human fossil? Quite possibly. It’s “clearly hominin,” John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who also blogged about the discovery, told me in an email. (Hominin refers to a group including modern humans, archaic humans such as Neanderthals, and all of their ancestors.) It is too soon to say exactly how old the jawbone is or exactly which hominin it belonged to, but signs point to something—or someone—far older than modern humans.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic

Play. Crossword lovers, pay attention. This year’s speed-solving crossword champion, Paolo Pasco, has some tips and tricks for your next game.

Watch. These are 15 under-the-radar television shows that deserve a moment in the spotlight.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Valerie Trapp, an assistant editor who has written about the adult stuffed-animal revival, a fun way to pick up a new language, and the long tradition of villain comedy.

Valerie is a “self-appointed emissary” for Crazy, Stupid, Love, which she calls “the perfect rom-com.” She loves listening to Bad Bunny’s “unfailing bangers,” will watch anything Issa Rae does, and was left in a brief stupor after reading The Order of Time by the physicist Carlo Rovelli.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Gavin Newsom can’t help himself. Welcome to pricing hell. “Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had”

The Culture Survey: Valerie Trapp

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I’m still riding a wave of postconcert bliss from the Bad Bunny tour, which left me wanting little. But if I could, I’d love to see the Shakira, Maggie Rogers, and Jazmine Sullivan tours, and Steve Carell and William Jackson Harper in the Uncle Vanya production on Broadway.

Something I recently revisited: I’ve been rereading the civil-rights lawyer Valarie Kaur’s memoir See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. It’s an absolutely gorgeous and lucid guide on how to stretch our heart a little past what we think is possible. Kaur defines the act of wonder as looking at the world—trees, stars, people you do and don’t like—and thinking, “You are a part of me I do not yet know.” I return to such phrases when I need a way forward.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: The novel The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez, entranced me with a voice I’d follow down any train of thought. And the physicist Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time left me walking around in a mild stupor for about 20 minutes, seeing buildings as events instead of as objects. Did I quickly forget all the physics Rovelli tried to teach me? I’d barely grasped it in the first place. But his poetic musings on how humans experience time and mortality have stayed with me. [Related: A new way to think about thinking]

Authors I will read anything by: Jia Tolentino, Maggie Nelson, Andrew Sean Greer, Joy Harjo, Michael Pollan.

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: Maybe not a blockbuster, but I’ll mention it anyway, because I am its self-appointed emissary: Crazy, Stupid, Love is the perfect rom-com. It’s a Shakespearean comedy of errors with jokes about the Gap and many perfect uses of the word cuckold. Could we ask for more? As for an art film, I love Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers—Penélope Cruz is brilliant in it (and in pretty much everything she does).

An actor I would watch in anything: In college, I was fascinated by Margot Robbie’s “animal work” method-acting process, which involves studying and embodying different animals to shape the physicality of her roles. She prepared for I, Tonya by observing bulldogs and wild horses; for Babylon, she studied octopi and honey badgers! I had a philosophy professor in college who once made us do a similar exercise as homework. I ended up embodying a crow, and by this I mean I made a gigantic fool of myself by squawking in front of passersby. So props to Margot—I’m happy to sit that exercise out and watch her do it instead.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: A quiet song: “Rodeo Clown,” by Dijon. I’ll play the entirety of Dijon’s discography when I feel even a bit moody, and this song is the pinnacle of moodiness. It’s perfect and a little deranged, all soul and catharsis. “You’re missin’ out on some good, good lovin’!” Dijon wails, screeching and theatrical, shortly before an interlude of quiet sobs.

A loud song: “Safaera,” by Bad Bunny, Jowell & Randy, and Ñengo Flow. Bad Bunny makes unfailing bangers that switch up and crescendo, taking you on a complete and adequately tiring perreo journey. “Todo Tiene Su Hora,” by Juan Luis Guerra, also can get me both dancing and crying happy tears of wonder at the magic of the world. [Related: Bad Bunny overthrows the Grammys.]

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Beyoncé. She’s ecstatic and lavish in her artistry. I think sometimes about a moment in her documentary Life Is but a Dream in which she emphatically tells a crowd, “I’m gonna give you everything I have. I promise!” I find that kind of exuberant generosity very moving.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Recently, Sarah Zhang’s article about the life-changing effects of a cystic-fibrosis breakthrough and Ross Andersen’s story about our hypothetical contact with whale civilizations left me in absolute awe.

The last entertainment thing that made me cry: I might not be the best gauge for this question, because I cry easily and for most movies—including once during a viewing of Justin Bieber’s 2013 concert film. But recently: the song “2012,” by Saba. It feels like time travel and sounds like nostalgia. It was the sweeping post-chorus, which speaks to simpler days, that got me: “I had everything I needed, everything / ’Cause I had everyone I needed.”

An online creator that I’m a fan of: I’m a devoted reader of Heather Havrilesky’s Ask Polly Substack, which is consistently hilarious, comforting, and sharp.

A good recommendation I recently received: Young Miko’s new album, Att.—it’s a 46-minute-long party. I saved pretty much every track and especially loved “ID” and “Fuck TMZ.”

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: I started rewatching Insecure this year while doing my taxes. Dare I say, I almost had a nice time on TurboTax. The show’s pilot remains brilliant. The “Broken Pussy” rap remains hilarious. I will watch anything Issa Rae does. [Related: How Issa Rae built the world of Insecure]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I mutter lines from “The Story Wheel,” by Joy Harjo, like affirmations. Whenever I feel myself slipping into self-deprecation or pride, I recall: “None of us is above the other / In this story of forever. / Though we follow that red road home, / one behind another.”

The Week Ahead

Challengers, a film directed by Luca Guadagnino about a former tennis star turned coach, played by Zendaya, who is enmeshed in a love triangle with two pro players (in theaters Friday) The Jinx: Part Two, the second installment of the infamous true-crime docuseries, in which the real-estate heir Robert Durst seemingly confessed to murder (premieres today on HBO and Max) Funny Story, a book by Emily Henry about a woman whose life is upended when her fiancé leaves her for his childhood best friend (out Tuesday)

Essay

Getty

The Most Hated Sound on Television

By Jacob Stern

Viewers scorned the laugh track—prerecorded and live chortles alike—first for its deceptiveness and then for its condescension. They came to see it as artificial, cheesy, even insulting: You think we need you to tell us when to laugh? Larry Gelbart said he “always thought it cheapened” M*A*S*H. Larry David reportedly didn’t want it on Seinfeld but lost out to studio execs who did. The actor David Niven once called it “the single greatest affront to public intelligence I know of.” In 1999, Time judged the laugh track to be “one of the hundred worst ideas of the twentieth century.” And yet, it persisted. Until the early 2000s, nearly every TV comedy relied on one. Friends, Two and a Half Men, Everybody Loves Raymond, Drake & Josh—they all had laugh tracks.

Now the laugh track is as close to death as it’s ever been.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues. Eight cookbooks worth reading cover to cover The uncomfortable truth about child abuse in Hollywood The illogical relationship Americans have with animals Something weird is happening with Caesar salads. Short story: “The Vale of Cashmere” Is this the end for Bluey? Prestige TV’s new wave of difficult men Ken will never die.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The Trump trial’s extraordinary opening Finding justice in Palestine Why did U.S. planes defend Israel but not Ukraine?

Photo Album

Theo Dagnaud, a member of a fire crew, scans the horizon during Canada’s recent summer of gigantic forest fires. (Charles-Frederick Ouellet)

Check out the winning entries of this year’s World Press Photo Contest, including images of the aftermath of an earthquake in Turkey, Canada’s scorching wildfire summer, and war in Gaza.

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

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

Computers may have seemed magical to you once, portals to an unpredictable expanse of knowledge and entertainment. Then they became ubiquitous, perhaps a little boring, and occasionally horrifying. Artificial intelligence, though laced with plenty of its own troubles, has managed to rekindle some of the excitement that has been absent from digital technology in recent years—and not just in its highest-profile applications.

Take dictation, for example. As my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote in a recent article, AI has recently enabled drastic improvements in voice recognition, advancing a technology that researchers have historically struggled with. “For a long time, we were making gradual, incremental progress, and then suddenly things started to get better much faster,” Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told her.

Try activating your phone’s dictation feature and speaking your next message instead of typing it. You might just pick up a helpful new habit—and you’d have AI to thank.

— Damon Beres, senior editor

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

You Don’t Have to Type Anymore

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

As a little girl, I often found myself in my family’s basement, doing battle with a dragon. I wasn’t gaming or playing pretend: My dragon was a piece of enterprise voice-dictation software called Dragon Naturally Speaking, launched in 1997 (and purchased by my dad, an early adopter).

As a kid, I was enchanted by the idea of a computer that could type for you. The premise was simple: Wear a headset, pull up the software, and speak. Your words would fill a document on-screen without your hands having to bear the indignity of actually typing. But no matter how much I tried to enunciate, no matter how slowly I spoke, the program simply did not register my tiny, high-pitched voice. The page would stay mostly blank, occasionally transcribing the wrong words. Eventually, I’d get frustrated, give up, and go play with something else.

Much has changed in the intervening decades. Voice recognition—the computer-science term for the ability of a machine to accurately transcribe what is being said—is improving rapidly thanks in part to recent advances in AI. Today, I’m a voice-texting wizard, often dictating obnoxiously long paragraphs on my iPhone to friends and family while walking my dog or driving. I find myself speaking into my phone’s text box all the time now, simply because I feel like it. Apple updated its dictation software last year, and it’s great. So are many other programs. The dream of accurate speech-to-text—long held not just in my parents’ basement but by people all over the world—is coming together. The dragon has nearly been slain.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

Why a cognitive scientist put a head cam on his baby: The perspective of a child could help AI learn language—and tell us more about how humans manage the same feat, Sarah Zhang writes. A tool to supercharge your imagination: “New technologies for making pictures can be prosthetics for your mind,” Ian Bogost writes. Don’t talk to people like they’re chatbots: “AI could make our human interactions blander, more biased, or ruder,” Albert Fox Cahn and Bruce Schneier write.

P.S.

Earlier this week, The Atlantic published an article by the writer S. I. Rosenbaum exploring implants that allow the human brain to interface with computers. AI plays a substantial role, translating neural signals into commands that allow a mouse cursor to move, for instance. Another encouraging use of the technology, perhaps—though as Rosenbaum reports, there are still major challenges to overcome.

— Damon

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

I’ve long fought the battle in defense of milk chocolate. My colleague Yasmin Tayag understands this position—her favorite chocolate treat is the Cadbury Creme Egg—but in a recent article, she acknowledges that genuinely “good chocolate …. should taste richly of cocoa.”

Many of the milky, sugary versions of chocolate are light on actual cocoa, she explains: “M&M’s, Snickers bars, and Hershey’s Kisses aren’t staples of American diets because they are the best—rather, they satisfy our desire for chocolate while costing a fraction of a jet-black bar made from single-origin cocoa.”

Now the ongoing cocoa shortage is driving prices way up, in ways that will affect even low-in-cocoa chocolate varieties. Commercial chocolate makers may start to tweak their recipes to use less cocoa; as Yasmin puts it, “Chocolate as we know it may never be the same.” I don’t tell you this to ruin your weekend. Instead, let the news encourage you to savor your favorites while you can (for me, it’s those extra-milky Dove milk-chocolate pieces).

On Chocolate

Chocolate Might Never Be the Same

By Yasmin Tayag

The cocoa shortage is making chocolate more expensive—maybe forever.

Read the article.

Silicon Valley Is Coming for Your Chocolate

By Larissa Zimberoff

One day, cocoa might come from a petri dish.

Read the article.

Milk Chocolate Is Better Than Dark, the End

By Megan Garber

Do you enjoy being reminded that the treat (“treat”) you are eating has been extruded from a crushed-up plant?

Read the article.

Still Curious?

How to make hot chocolate: In March 1994, Corby Kummer explained how to make hot chocolate an opulent, adult drink. Americans don’t really like to chew: For texturally exciting gummies, you have to look outside the United States, Sarah Zhang wrote last year.

Other Diversions

Jung’s five pillars of a good life Tupperware is in trouble. Six cult classics you have to read

P.S.

In 1943, the self-proclaimed chocolate addict WIlliam Henry Chamberlin came up with an ill-advised plan for handling the chocolate shortage of the time. “Life without sun or air might be made endurable by some miracle of science,” he wrote. “But not life without chocolate. Should this be denied, I cherish wild dreams of emigrating to Ecuador or Guatemala. There (although I have never raised anything more productive than ideas) I would layout, a personal Victory Garden in which the sole crop would be cocoa beans, which I would chew raw if necessary.”

— Isabel