My immigrant parents—my father especially—are ardent Christians. As such, my childhood seemed to differ dramatically from the glimpses of American life I witnessed at school or on television. My parents often spoke of their regimented, cloistered upbringings in Nigeria, and their belief that Americans are too lax. They devised a series of schemes to keep us on the straight and narrow: At home, we listened to an unending stream of gospel music and watched Christian programming on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. The centerpiece of their strategy, however, was daily visits to our small Nigerian church, in North Texas.

I quickly discerned a gap between the fist-pumping, patriotic Christianity that I saw on TV and the earnest, yearning faith that I experienced in church. On TV, it seemed that Christianity was not only a means of achieving spiritual salvation but also a tool for convincing the world of America’s preeminence. Africa was mentioned frequently on TBN, but almost exclusively as a destination for white American missionaries. On-screen, they would appear dour and sweaty as they distributed food, clothes, and Bibles to hordes of seemingly bewildered yet appreciative Black people. The ministers spoke of how God’s love—and, of course, the support of the audience—made such donations possible, but the subtext was much louder: God had blessed America, and now America was blessing everyone else.

In church, however, I encountered an entirely different type of Christianity. The biblical characters were the same, yet they were evoked for different purposes. God was on our side because we, as immigrants and their children, were the underdogs; our ancestors had suffered a series of losses at the hands of Americans and Europeans, just as the Israelites in the Bible had suffered in their own time. And like those chosen people, we would emerge victorious.

Over time, I learned that Christianity is a malleable faith; both the powerful and the powerless can use it to justify their beliefs and actions. This is, in part, the message of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Sister Deborah, which was published in France in 2022 and was recently released in the United States, in a translation by Mark Polizzotti. Set in Rwanda in the 1930s, the novel spotlights a group of recently arrived African American missionaries who preach a traditional Christian message about a forthcoming apocalypse, but with a twist: They prophesize that “when everything was again nice and dry, Jesus would appear on his cloud in the sky and everyone would discover that Jesus is black.” These missionaries are a destabilizing influence in a territory dominated by another version of Christianity, established and spread by the colonizing Belgians, that emphasizes the supremacy of a white Jesus.

[Read: A family story about colonialism and its aftereffects]

The most vital force in the novel is Sister Deborah herself. She is the prophetic, ungovernable luminary of the African American contingent, and possesses healing powers. Over the course of her time in Rwanda, she develops a theology that centers Black women; as a result, she is eventually castigated by her former mentor, Reverend Marcus, a gifted itinerant preacher who serves as the leader of the missionaries. Sister Deborah is a novel about the capaciousness of Christianity but also the limits of its inclusivity—particularly for the women in its ranks.

Those limits are evident throughout the novel. The first section is narrated by a woman, Ikirezi, who recalls her childhood in Rwanda. She’d been a “sickly girl” who required constant attention, yet her mother had avoided the local clinic: She had “no confidence in the pills that the orderlies dispensed, seemingly at whim.” Ikirezi’s mother eventually determines that her child’s chronic illness comes “from either people or spirits.” So, in a fit of desperation, she decides to take her to Sister Deborah. She doesn’t know much about this American missionary except that she is a “prophetess” who possesses the gift of “healing by laying on hands.” Upon learning of his wife’s plans, Ikirezi’s father explodes:

You are not going to that devil’s mission. I forbid it! Didn’t you hear what our real padri said about it? They’re sorcerers from a country called America, a country that might not even exist because it’s the land of the dead, the land of the damned. They have not been baptized with good holy water. And they are black—all the real padri are white. I forbid you to drag my daughter there and offer her to the demon hiding in the head and belly of that witch you call Deborah. You can go to the devil if you like, but spare my daughter!

Through Ikirezi’s father’s outburst, Mukasonga deftly sketches the two opposing Christian camps in the novel—one that depends on the Bible to protect its status, and the other that uses the Bible to attain status. The white padri (priests) seek to maintain their spiritual control of the local population by labeling the African American missionaries as evil interlopers. The missionaries, for their part, have positioned themselves as an alternative religious authority, and they begin to attract many followers, especially women, who are drawn to their energetic services and Sister Deborah’s supernatural abilities.

Ikirezi’s mother defies her husband and takes Ikirezi to see Sister Deborah. They arrive at the American dispensary, where Sister Deborah holds court “under the large tree with its dazzling red flowers, sitting atop the high termite mound that had been covered by a rug decorated with stars and red stripes.” She asks the children who are gathered before her, Ikirezi among them, “to touch her cane while she lay her hands on their heads.” Afterward, Ikirezi recalls “that under the palms of her hands, a great sense of ease and well-being spread through me.” Ikirezi’s depiction of Sister Deborah remains more or less at this pitch through the rest of this section: deferential and mystified, studied but also somewhat distant. As time passes, Ikirezi’s reverence for Sister Deborah only grows, forming a scrim that obscures the healer in a hazy glow.

The novel then pivots to Sister Deborah’s point of view; she expands on and revises Ikirezi’s portrait of her life. As a child in Mississippi, Sister Deborah discovered that she had healing powers. Her mother pulled her out of school, dreading “people’s vindictiveness as much as their gratitude” for her daughter’s gift. Shortly afterward, Sister Deborah is raped by a truck driver, which shifts the trajectory of her life dramatically. She has a profound religious experience when she visits a local church, and soon after falls in with Reverend Marcus.

Reverend Marcus initially sees Sister Deborah as a tool to advance his own ambitions. He is concerned about the suffering of Black people around the world: “the contempt, insults, and lynchings they endured in America; the enslavement, massacres, and colonial tyranny forced upon them in Africa.” His theology is focused not only on their salvation but on their ascendancy as well.

Sister Deborah begins to perform healings during Reverend Marcus’s revival services, and eventually, he brings her along on a missionary trip to Rwanda. There, the reverend and Sister Deborah initially work in harmony, attracting devoted new converts. But their partnership begins to fray when a divine spirit informs Sister Deborah that a Black woman, not a Black Jesus, will save them. Reverend Marcus’s response is both a warning and a prophecy: “If we follow you in your visions and dreams, we step outside of Christianity and venture into the unknown.”

Although the reverend initially accepts Sister Deborah’s “vision” of female power, he eventually uses it to undermine her, condemning her as a witch. Even within his progressive and radical theology, Reverend Marcus believes that women must serve men; in Mukasonga’s telling, he is a man whose shortsightedness and thirst for power eventually overwhelm his generally good intentions. His behavior reflects a reality that many Christian women have experienced, Black women in particular. In Rwanda, Sister Deborah is contending with a caste system that installed white men at the top and placed Black women at the bottom. Sister Deborah’s claim that the savior is a Black woman undermines that status quo. And the reverend’s response reveals a contradiction that many Black Christian women have faced: They are encouraged to seek spiritual freedom but are still expected to remain subservient.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

What Reverend Marcus doesn’t realize, however, is that his warning about “ventur[ing] into the unknown” has also given Sister Deborah a route for her own liberation. Like the women in Mukasonga’s prior work—a collection of accomplished memoirs, novels, and short fiction—Sister Deborah explores and then occupies unfamiliar realms. Unfamiliar, that is, to men, who create hierarchies in which they can flourish and then mark any territory beyond their reach as benighted. Yet it is in those benighted spaces, Sister Deborah comes to believe, that Black women can thrive. A group of women begins to follow her, and she changes her name to Mama Nganga. Little girls collect “healing plants” for her. She treats local sex workers, and invites homeless women to stay with her. She constructs an ecosystem of care and protection for women and proudly claims the label that Ikirezi’s father placed on her at the beginning of the novel: “I’m what they call a witch doctor, a healer, though some might say a sorceress,” she declares. “I treat women and children.” For Sister Deborah, Reverend Marcus’s Christianity is inadequate because it prioritizes dominance over service. She abandons that approach in favor of pursuing the true mission of Jesus: to uplift and care for the most vulnerable.

Mukasonga’s slim novel is laden with ideas, but perhaps the most potent and urgent is her assertion that sometimes, Black women cannot achieve true freedom within the confines of Christianity. By exposing how even progressive interpretations of the faith can uphold patriarchal norms, Mukasonga invites her reader to question the limitations imposed on marginalized believers. In Sister Deborah, real liberation lies in eschewing conformity to any dogma, even the Bible. But the novel is more than a critique of religious institutions: It is a call to redefine faith, perhaps even radically, on one’s own terms.

File this under something that should have been self-evident: When it came time for the artist known as Cher to finish her memoir, she discovered she had too much material. Where to even begin? Decades before Madonna had reinventions and Taylor Swift had eras, Cher had comebacks—triumphs over decline in which she’d reemerge stronger, shinier, and more resolute than ever. “It’s a thousand times harder to come back than to become,” she writes in the first volume of her autobiography, titled—naturally—Cher. And yet something in her soul seems to always relish the challenge. A walking, singing eye roll, Cher has never met an obstacle without theatrically raising a middle finger. Consider the gown she wore to present at the Academy Awards in 1986 after having been snubbed for her performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask: the cobwebbed, midsection-baring, black sequined supervillainess outfit that became known as her fuck the Oscars dress. Radiantly moody, she glowered her way right into awards-show history.

But much of that later timeline is for the second volume, supposedly arriving next year. Cher, which documents the four decades between her birth, in 1946, and the start of her serious acting career, in 1980, is concerned with the essentials: where she came from, who she is, all the incidents that helped her become one of music’s most indelible mononyms. I guarantee that, as you read, you’ll be able to conjure the sound of her voice in your mind, velvety and sonorous. (“You couldn't tell who was singing the baritone parts,” The New York Times noted in 1988 about “I Got You, Babe,” her duet with Sonny Bono, “but you had the disturbing feeling that it probably wasn't Sonny.”) And likely her face, too: her doll-like features, sphinxlike smile, and black, black hair. More than anything, though, Cher has come to stand for a brassy, strutting kind of survival over the years, and on this front, her memoir is awash in insight and rich in details.

Cher is a bracing read, peppered with caustic quips and self-effacing anecdotes, but fundamentally frank. This, you might agree, is no moment for nostalgia. (She does not—forgive the cheap gag—actually want to turn back time.) “Ours was a sad, strange story of Southern folk coming from nothing and carving out a life after the Great Depression,” Cher writes. “It wasn’t pretty and it was never easy … Resilience is in my DNA.” Her grandmother was 12 years old when she became pregnant with Cher’s mother, Jackie Jean; her grandfather Roy was a baker’s assistant turned bootlegger who beat his new wife, made his daughter sing for pennies on top of the bars he’d drink at, and once tried to murder both his children by leaving the gas stove on. For much of Cher’s infancy—she was born Cheryl Sarkisian but changed her name in 1978—she was raised by nuns, after her father abandoned her 20-year-old mother. Later, her mother, who had a muted acting career, cycled through seven or eight husbands and two illegal abortions that almost killed her. Although Jackie was a talented performer and luminously beautiful, “my mom missed out on several major acting roles because she refused to sleep with men who promised her a break,” Cher notes. The stepfather who was kindest to young Cher was also a nasty drunk, to the point where, even now, “I still can’t stand the sound of a belt coming out of pant loops.”

From early childhood, Cher was a dynamo—singing perpetually into a hairbrush, dancing around the house, and peeing her pants during a screening of Dumbo rather than miss any of the movie. She dreamed of being a star, and, less conventionally, of discovering a cure for polio. (“When Jonas Salk invented a vaccine, I was so pissed off,” she writes.) Because of her mother’s erratic relationships, she moved constantly, all over the country. By 15, she was living in Los Angeles, where she recounts being leered at by Telly Savalas in a photographer’s studio and spending a wild night or two with Warren Beatty. At 16, she met the man who’d become her partner in all senses of the word: a divorced, charming, slightly squirelly 27-year-old named Sonny Bono. “He liked that I was quirky and nonjudgmental,” Cher writes. “I liked that he was funny and different. He was a grown-up without being too grown up, and I was a sixteen-year-old lying about my age.” Their relationship was platonic at first—when she found herself homeless, she moved in with him, the pair sleeping in twin beds next to each other like characters in a 1950s sitcom. One day, he kissed her, and that was that.

If Cher’s early life is a Steinbeckian saga of grim endurance, her life with Bono is a volatile scrapbook of life in 20th-century entertainment. Thanks to Bono’s connections with Phil Spector, she became a singer, performing backing vocals on the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” When Cher and Bono formed a duo and became wildly famous in 1965 with “I Got You, Babe,” the American musical establishment initially deemed her too outré in her bell bottoms and furs, and then—as the sexual revolution and rock music caught fire—too square. In her first flush of fame, the recently widowed Jackie Kennedy requested that Sonny & Cher perform for a private dinner party in New York. The fashion editor Diana Vreeland had Cher photographed for Vogue. At a party in his hotel suite, Salvador Dalí explained to her that an ornamental fish she was admiring was actually a vibrator. (“I couldn’t drop that fish fast enough.”) Having entrusted all the financial details of their partnership to Bono, she was stunned when he revealed that they owed hundreds of thousands in back taxes, right as their musical success was stalling.

[Read: What Madonna knows]

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,” Marcel Proust declared in In Search of Lost Time. Show-business memoirs can be gritty—Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy recounts a similarly bleak childhood—but I’m hard pressed to think of another celebrity author so insistent on dispensing with rose-tinted reminiscences. Cher wants you to know that for most people—and absolutely for most women—the 20th century was no cakewalk. She loved Bono, and is the first to admit how enchanting their dynamic could be. But the partner she describes was controlling, vengeful (he reportedly burned her tennis clothes after he saw her talking to another man), and shockingly callous. When she left him, she discovered that her contract was one of “involuntary servitude”—he owned 95 percent of a company called Cher Enterprises, of which she was an employee who never received a paycheck. (His lawyer owned the other 5 percent.) Their divorce was finalized in 1975, a year or so after women were granted the right to apply for credit cards in their own names.

Promoting her book, Cher told CBS Sunday Morning, “I didn’t want to give information, ’cause you could go to Wikipedia [for that]. I just wanted to tell stories.” And she does, but in a form that can’t help doubling as a broader history—an account of all the things women have suffered through (casting couches, financial ruin, humiliating public scrutiny) and fought for (authority over their own bodies). Unlike her mother, Cher was, via carefully coded language, offered a legal abortion in her doctor’s office in 1975, during a period when her life was in flux. (Her second husband, the musician Gregory Allman, was addicted to heroin and had deserted her; she was about to return to work on her CBS variety show, also titled Cher.) “I needed to be at work on Monday,” she remembers. “I needed to be singing and dancing. I had a child, mother, and sister to take care of. I knew I had to make a choice, and I knew what it was. It made it harder that I didn’t have Gregory to talk to about it, but I made my decision and I was so grateful to my doctor’s compassion for giving me one.” (Cher and Bono's son, Chaz Bono, had been born in 1969. By 1976, Cher and Allman had reconciled, and Cher gave birth to Elijah Blue Allman.)

Gratitude. Compassion. Choice. What is resilience reliant on if not all three? We have to wait for book two for Cher’s account of her ups and downs in the ’80s and ’90s—her new acting career, her Best Actress Oscar for Moonstruck, her turn to infomercials for income after a severe bout of chronic fatigue syndrome, her auto-tuned path with “Believe” to one of the best-selling pop singles of all time. But in Cher, she offers a persuasive, wry, rousing account of what made her, and what she was able to make in turn. “I’ve always thought that whether you get a break or not is purely down to luck,” she writes, adding, “These were the key moments that changed my luck.” But that read of things understates her sheer force of will—her outright refusal, as with the Oscars dress, to ever be counted out.

Edinburgh University wants the two women's descendants to help decide what happens to their remains.

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One of the most wonderful, and frustrating, things about Google Search is its inefficiency. The tool, at its most fundamental level, doesn’t provide knowledge. Instead, it points you to where it may, or may not, lie. That list of blue links can lead you down rabbit holes about your favorite sports team and toward deep understandings of debates you never knew existed. This tendency can also make it impossible to get a simple, straightforward fact.

But the experience of seeking information online is rapidly changing. Tech giants have for almost two years been promising AI-powered search tools that do provide knowledge and answers. And last week, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google made announcements about their AI-powered search products that provide the clearest glimpse yet into what that future will look like. I’ve spent the past week using these tools for research and everyday queries, and reported on my findings in an article published today. “These tools’ current iterations surprised and, at times, impressed me,” I wrote, “yet even when they work perfectly, I’m not convinced that AI search is a wise endeavor.”

The promise of AI-powered search is quite different from Google’s—not to organize information so you can find it yourself, but to readily provide that information in a digestible, concise format. That made my searches faster and more convenient at times. But something deeply human was lost as a result. The rabbit holes and the unexpected obsessions are what’s beautiful about searching the internet; but AI, like the tech companies developing it, is obsessed with efficiency and optimization. What I loved about traditional Google searches, I wrote, is “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.”

Illustration by The Atlantic

The Death of Search

By Matteo Wong

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.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

The AI search war has begun: “Nearly two years after the arrival of ChatGPT, and with users growing aware that many generative-AI products have effectively been built on stolen information, tech companies are trying to play nice with the media outlets that supply the content these machines need,” I reported this past summer. Google is playing a dangerous game with AI search: “When more serious health questions get the AI treatment, Google is playing a risky game,” my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote in May.

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.

More than 200 people are dead and dozens more still missing after torrential rain earlier this week.