Ali Breland

3 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Ali Breland |Matteo Wong

Yesterday, a user on X saw a viral post of Timothée Chalamet celebrating courtside at a Knicks game and had a simple question: Who was sitting next to him? The user tapped in Grok, X’s proprietary chatbot, as people often do when they want help answering questions on the platform—the software functions like ChatGPT, except it can be summoned via reply to a post. And for the most part, Grok has performed reasonably well at providing responses. But not yesterday.

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Ali Breland

On the long list of reasons the United States could have lost World War II—the terribly effective surprise Japanese attack, an awful lack of military readiness, the relatively untrained troops—there is perhaps no area in which Americans were more initially outmatched than armament. Americans had the M4 Sherman, a tank mass-produced by Detroit automakers. Germans had the formidable panzer, a line of tanks with nicknames such as Panther and Royal Tiger that repeatedly outgunned the Americans.

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Ali Breland

The president was quick to condemn political violence. It’s hard to take him at his word. Josh Shapiro is very lucky to be alive. The Pennsylvania governor and his family escaped an arson attack in the early hours of this morning. Parts of the governor’s mansion were badly charred, including an opulent room with a piano and a chandelier where Shapiro had hosted a Passover Seder just hours earlier. Things could have been much worse.

2 months ago | theatlantic.com | Ali Breland

White House staffers, it seems, had better hope that they stay in Laura Loomer’s good graces. This week, Loomer—a far-right provocateur who has described herself as “pro–white nationalism” and Islam as a “cancer on humanity”—met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. After she reportedly railed against National Security Council officials she believed were disloyal to the president, the White House fired six NSC staff members the next day.

2 months ago | theatlantic.com | Ali Breland

Steve Bannon seems resigned to sharing power with the “tech bros,” as he calls them. Last week, when I spoke with President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and continued ally, he was clear about his disagreements with Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley elites on the so-called tech right. “Nationalist populists,” Bannon’s self-identified political clan, “don’t trust these oligarchs,” he told me.