The fad began with a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York City on a beautiful day last month. Thousands of people came and caused a ruckus. At least one of the Timothées was among the four people arrested by New York City police. Eventually, the real Timothée Chalamet showed up to take pictures with fans. The event, which was organized by a popular YouTuber who had recently received some attention for eating a tub of cheeseballs in a public park, captured lightning in a bottle. It didn’t even matter that the winner didn’t look much like the actor, or that the prize was only $50.

In the weeks since, similar look-alike contests have sprung up all over the country, organized by different people for their own strange reasons. There was a Zayn Malik look-alike contest in Brooklyn, a Dev Patel look-alike contest in San Francisco, and a particularly rowdy Jeremy Allen White look-alike contest in Chicago. Harry Styles look-alikes gathered in London, Paul Mescal look-alikes in Dublin. Zendaya look-alikes competed in Oakland, and a “Zendaya’s two co-stars from Challengers” lookalike contest will be held in Los Angeles on Sunday. As I write this, I have been alerted to plans for a Jack Schlossberg look-alike contest to be held in Washington, D.C., the same day. (Schlossberg is John F. Kennedy’s only grandson; he both works at Vogue and was also profiled by Vogue this year.)

These contests evidently provide some thrill that people are finding irresistible at this specific moment in time. What is it? The chance to win some viral fame or even just positive online attention is surely part of it, but those returns are diminishing. The more contests there are, the less novel each one is, and the less likely it is to be worth the hassle. That Chalamet showed up to his look-alike contest was magic—he’s also the only celebrity to attend one of these contests so far. Yet the contests continue.

Celebrities have a mystical quality that’s undeniable, and it is okay to want to be in touch with the sublime. Still, some observers sense something a bit sinister behind the playfulness of contest after contest, advertised with poster after poster on telephone pole after telephone pole. The playwright Jeremy O. Harris wrote on X that the contests are “Great Depression era coded,”  seeming to note desperation and a certain manic optimism in these events. The comparison is not quite right—although the people at these contests may not all have jobs, they don’t seem to be starving (one of the contests promised only two packs of cigarettes and a MetroCard as a prize)—but I understand what he’s getting at. Clearly, the look-alike competitions do not exist in a vacuum.

The startling multiplication of the contests reminds me of the summer of 2020, when otherwise rational-seeming people suggested that the FBI was planting caches of fireworks in various American cities as part of a convoluted psyop. There were just too many fireworks going off for anything else to make sense! So people said. With hindsight, it’s easy to recognize that theory as an expression of extreme anxiety brought on by the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. At the time, some were also feeling heightened distrust of law enforcement, which had in some places reacted to Black Lives Matter protests with violence.

Today’s internet-y stunts are just silly events, but people are looking for greater meaning in them. Over the past few weeks, although some have grown a bit weary of the contests, a consensus has also formed that they are net good because they are bringing people out of their house and into “third spaces” (public parks) and fraternity (“THE PEOPLE LONG FOR COMMUNITY”). This too carries a whiff of desperation, as though people are intentionally putting on a brave face and shoving forward symbols of our collective creativity and togetherness.

I think the reason is obvious. The look-alike contests, notably, started at the end of October. The first one took place on the same day as a Donald Trump campaign event at Madison Square Garden, which featured many gleefully racist speeches and was reasonably compared by many to a Nazi rally. The photos from the contests maybe serve as small reassurance that cities, many of which shifted dramatically rightward in the recent presidential election, are still the places that we want to believe they are—the closest approximation of America’s utopian experiment, where people of all different origins and experiences live together in relative peace and harmony and, importantly, good fun. At least most of the time.

An inquiry into Carpenter's video in a Brooklyn church led to a host of findings against the priest

For nearly two years, the world’s biggest tech companies have said that AI will transform the web, your life, and the world. But first, they are remaking the humble search engine.

Chatbots and search, in theory, are a perfect match. A standard Google search interprets a query and pulls up relevant results; tech companies have spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars engineering chatbots that interpret human inputs, synthesize information, and provide fluent, useful responses. No more keyword refining or scouring Wikipedia—ChatGPT will do it all. Search is an appealing target, too: Shaping how people navigate the internet is tantamount to shaping the internet itself.

Months of prophesying about generative AI have now culminated, almost all at once, in what may be the clearest glimpse yet into the internet’s future. After a series of limited releases and product demos, mired with various setbacks and embarrassing errors, tech companies are debuting AI-powered search engines as fully realized, all-inclusive products. Last Monday, Google announced that it would launch its AI Overviews in more than 100 new countries; that feature will now reach more than 1 billion users a month. Days later, OpenAI announced a new search function in ChatGPT, available to paid users for now and soon opening to the public. The same afternoon, the AI-search start-up Perplexity shared instructions for making its “answer engine” the default search tool in your web browser.

[Read: The AI search war has begun]

For the past week, I have been using these products in a variety of ways: to research articles, follow the election, and run everyday search queries. In turn I have scried, as best I can, into the future of how billions of people will access, relate to, and synthesize information. What I’ve learned is that these products are at once unexpectedly convenient, frustrating, and weird. These tools’ current iterations surprised and, at times, impressed me, yet even when they work perfectly, I’m not convinced that AI search is a wise endeavor.

For decades, the search bar has been a known entity. People around the world are accustomed to it; several generations implicitly regard Google as the first and best way to learn about basically anything. Enter a query, sift through a list of links, type a follow-up query, get more links, and so on until your question is answered or inquiry satisfied. That indirectness and wide aperture—all that clicking and scrolling—are in some ways the defining qualities of a traditional Google search, allowing (even forcing) you to traverse the depth and breadth of connections that justify the term world-wide web. The hyperlink, in this sense, is the building block of the modern internet.

That sprawl is lovely when you are going down a rabbit hole about Lucrezia de Medici, as I did when traveling in Florence last year, or when diving deep into a scientific dilemma. It is perfect for stumbling across delightful video clips and magazine features and social-media posts. And it is infuriating when you just need a simple biographical answer, or a brunch recommendation without the backstory of three different chefs, or a quick gloss of a complex research area without having to wade through obscure papers.

In recent years, more and more Google Search users have noted that the frustrations outweigh the delight—describing a growing number of paid advertisements, speciously relevant links engineered to top the search algorithm, and erroneous results. Generative AI promises to address those moments of frustration by providing a very different experience. Asking ChatGPT to search the web for the reasons Kamala Harris lost the presidential election yielded a short list with four factors: “economic concerns,” “demographic shifts,” “swing state dynamics,” and “campaign strategies.” It was an easy and digestible response, but not a particularly insightful one; in response to a follow-up question about voter demographics, ChatGPT provided a stream of statistics without context or analysis. A similar Google search, meanwhile, pulls up a wide range of news analyses that you have to read through. If you do follow Google’s links, you will develop a much deeper understanding of the American economy and politics.

Another example: Recently, I’ve been reading about a controversial proposed infrastructure project in Maryland. Google searches sent me through a labyrinth of public documents, corporate pitches, and hours-long recordings of city-council meetings, which took ages to review but sparked curiosity and left me deeply informed. ChatGPT, when asked, whipped up an accurate summary and timeline of events, and cited its sources—which was an extremely useful way to organize the reading I’d already done, but on its own might have been the end of my explorations.

I have long been a critic of AI-powered search. The technology has repeatedly fabricated information and struggled to accurately attribute its sources. Its creators have been accused of plagiarizing and violating the intellectual-property rights of major news organizations. None of these concerns has been fully allayed: The new ChatGPT search function, in my own use and other reports, has made some errors, mixing up dates, misreporting sports scores, and telling me that Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is bigger than Manhattan’s (much larger) Central Park. The links offered by traditional search engines are filled with errors too—but searchbots implicitly ask for your trust without verification. The citations don’t particularly invite you to click on them. And while OpenAI and Perplexity have entered into partnerships with any number of media organizations, including The Atlantic—perhaps competing for the high-quality, human-made content that their searchbots depend on—exactly how websites that once relied on ad revenue and subscriptions will fare on an AI-filtered web eludes me. (The editorial division of The Atlantic operates independently from the business division, which announced its corporate partnership with OpenAI in May.)

[Read: AI search is turning into the problem everyone worried about]

Although ChatGPT and Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite their sources with (small) footnotes or bars to click on, not clicking on those links is the entire point. OpenAI, in its announcement of its new search feature, wrote that “getting useful answers on the web can take a lot of effort. It often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you. Now, chat can get you to a better answer.” Google’s pitch is that its AI “will do the Googling for you.” Perplexity’s chief business officer told me this summer that “people don’t come to Perplexity to consume journalism,” and that the AI tool will provide less traffic than traditional search. For curious users, Perplexity suggests follow-up questions so that, instead of opening a footnote, you keep reading in Perplexity.

The change will be the equivalent of going from navigating a library with the Dewey decimal system, and thus encountering related books on adjacent shelves, to requesting books for pickup through a digital catalog. It could completely reorient our relationship to knowledge, prioritizing rapid, detailed, abridged answers over a deep understanding and the consideration of varied sources and viewpoints. Much of what’s beautiful about searching the internet is jumping into ridiculous Reddit debates and developing unforeseen obsessions on the way to mastering a topic you’d first heard of six hours ago, via a different search; falling into clutter and treasure, all the time, without ever intending to. AI search may close off these avenues to not only discovery but its impetus, curiosity.

The issues with factuality and attribution may well be resolved—but even if they aren’t, tech companies show no signs of relenting. Controlling search means controlling how most people access every other digital thing—it’s an incredible platform to gain trust and visibility, advertise, or influence public opinion.

The internet is changing, and nobody outside these corporations has any say in it. And the biggest, most useful, and most frightening change may come from AI search engines working flawlessly. With AI, the goal is to keep you in one tech company’s ecosystem—to keep you using the AI interface, and getting the information that the AI deems relevant and necessary. The best searches are goal-oriented; the best responses are brief. Which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising coming from Silicon Valley behemoths that care, above all, about optimizing their businesses, products, and users’ lives.

A little, or even a lot, of inefficiency in search has long been the norm; AI will snuff it out. Our lives will be more convenient and streamlined, but perhaps a bit less wonderful and wonder-filled, a bit less illuminated. A process once geared toward exploration will shift to extraction. Less meandering, more hunting. No more unknown unknowns. If these companies really have their way, no more hyperlinks—and thus, no actual web.

In 2022, pollsters and political analysts predicted a red wave in the midterms that didn’t materialize. Last night, polls anticipated a whisker-thin election, and instead we got a red wave that carried Donald Trump to victory.

The breadth of Trump’s improvement over 2020 is astonishing. In the previous two elections, we saw narrow demographic shifts—for example, non-college-educated white people moved toward Trump in 2016, and high-income suburban voters raced toward Biden in 2020. But last night’s election apparently featured a more uniform shift toward Trump, according to a county-by-county analysis shared with me by Thomas Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University. The “really simple story,” he said, “is that secular dissatisfaction with Biden’s economic stewardship affected most demographic groups in a fairly homogeneous way.”

Trump improved his margins not only in swing states but also in once comfortable Democratic strongholds. In 2020, Biden won New Jersey by 16 points. In 2024, Harris seems poised to win by just five points. Harris ran behind Biden in rural Texas border towns, where many Hispanic people live, and in rural Kentucky, where very few Hispanic people live. She ran behind Biden in high-income suburbs, such as Loudoun County, Virginia, and in counties with college towns, including Dane County (home to the University of Wisconsin) and Centre County (home to Penn State).

Perhaps most surprising, Trump improved his margins in some of America’s largest metro areas. In the past two cycles, Democrats could comfort themselves by counting on urban counties to continue moving left even as rural areas shifted right. That comfort was dashed last night, at least among counties with more than 90 percent of their results reported. In the New York City metro area, New York County (Manhattan) shifted nine points right, Kings County (Brooklyn) shifted 12 points right, Queens County shifted 21 points right, and Bronx County shifted 22 points right. In Florida, Orange County (Orlando) shifted 10 points right and Miami-Dade shifted 19 points right. In Texas, Harris County (Houston) and Bexar County (San Antonio) both shifted eight points right and Dallas County shifted 10 points right. In and around the “Blue Wall” states, Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia County shifted five points right, Michigan’s Wayne County (Detroit) shifted nine points right, and Illinois’ Cook County (Chicago) shifted 11 points right.

[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]

Other than Atlanta, which moved left, many of the largest U.S. metros moved right even more than many rural areas. You cannot explain this shift by criticizing specific campaign decisions (If only she had named Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro her vice president…). You can’t pin this shift exclusively on, say, Arab Americans in Michigan who voted for Jill Stein, or Russian trolls who called in bomb threats to Georgia.

A better, more comprehensive way to explain the outcome is to conceptualize 2024 as the second pandemic election. Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020. In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.

The pandemic was a health emergency, followed by an economic emergency. Both trends were global. But only the former was widely seen as international and directly caused by the pandemic. Although Americans understood that millions of people were dying in Europe and Asia and South America, they did not have an equally clear sense that supply-chain disruptions, combined with an increase in spending, sent prices surging around the world. As I reported earlier this year, inflation at its peak exceeded 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Canada, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in the United Kingdom, 10 percent in Italy, and 20 percent in Argentina, Turkey, and Ethiopia.

Inflation proved as contagious as a coronavirus. Many voters didn’t directly blame their leaders for a biological nemesis that seemed like an act of god, but they did blame their leaders for an economic nemesis that seemed all too human in its origin. And the global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world. The ruling parties of several major countries, including the U.K., Germany, and South Africa, suffered historic defeats this year. Even strongmen, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lost ground in an election that many experts assumed would be a rousing coronation.

This has been a year of global anti-incumbency within a century of American anti-incumbency. Since 2000, every midterm and presidential election has seen a change in control of the House, Senate, or White House except for 2004 (when George W. Bush eked out a win) and 2012 (when Barack Obama won reelection while Republicans held the House). The U.S. appears to be in an age of unusually close elections that swing back and forth, in which every sitting president spends the majority of his term with an underwater approval rating.

There will be a rush to blame Kamala Harris—the candidate, her campaign, and her messaging. But there is no escaping the circumstances that Harris herself could never outrun. She is the vice president of a profoundly unpopular president, whose approval was laid low by the same factors—such as inflation and anti-incumbency bias—that have waylaid ruling parties everywhere. An analysis by the political scientist John Sides predicted that a sitting president with Biden’s approval rating should be expected to win no more than 48 percent of the two-party vote. As of Wednesday afternoon, Kamala Harris is currently projected to win about 47.5 percent of the popular vote. Her result does not scream underperformance. In context, it seems more like a normal performance.

[Annie Lowrey: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

A national wave of this magnitude should, and likely will, inspire some soul searching among Democrats. Preliminary CNN exit polls show that Trump is poised to be the first GOP candidate to win Hispanic men in at least 50 years; other recent surveys have pointed to a dramatic shift right among young and nonwhite men. One interpretation of this shift is that progressives need to find a cultural message that connects with young men. Perhaps. Another possibility is that Democrats need a fresh way to talk about economic issues that make all Americans, including young men, believe that they are more concerned about a growth agenda that increases prosperity for all.

If there is cold comfort for Democrats, it is this: We are in an age of politics when every victory is Pyrrhic, because to gain office is to become the very thing—the establishment, the incumbent—that a part of your citizenry will inevitably want to replace. Democrats have been temporarily banished to the wilderness by a counterrevolution, but if the trends of the 21st century hold, then the very anti-incumbent mechanisms that brought them defeat this year will eventually bring them back to power.