New Yorker

Elon Musk's Shadow Rule

Elon Musk, became involved in the war in Ukraine soon after Russia invaded, in February 2022. Along with conventional assaults, the Kremlin was conducting cyberattacks against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure. Ukrainian officials and a loose coalition of expatriates in the tech sector, brainstorming in group chats on WhatsApp and Signal, found a potential solution: SpaceX, which manufactures a line of mobile Internet terminals called Starlink. The tripod-mounted dishes, each about the size of a computer display connect with a network of satellites.

The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees

The campaign against Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to serve on the Supreme Court was spearheaded by a new conservative dark-money group that was created in 2020: the American Accountability Foundation (AAF). An explicit purpose of the AAF—a politically active, tax-exempt nonprofit charity that doesn’t disclose its backers—is to prevent the approval of all Biden Administration nominees. The AAF’s approach represents a new escalation in partisan warfare, and underscores the growing role that secret spending has played in deepening the polarization in Washington.

How the Biden Administration Can Expand Rural Broadband

Population density has favored the building of Internet infrastructure in urban areas, but there has been little economic incentive to do so in many rural parts of the country. As a candidate, Joe Biden seemed to understand that appealing to rural voters was a political necessity.

The Students Left Behind By Remote Learning

Shemar, a 12-year-old from East Baltimore, is good at math, and Karen Ngosso, his fourth grade math teacher at Abbottston Elementary School, is one reason why.  Remote learning started in earnest on April 6. For Shemar, that meant just four hours per week of live online instruction — an hour for each of the four main subjects once a week, with nothing on Fridays.

Connecting rural America to broadband is a popular talking point on the campaign trail. In one Kentucky community, it’s already a way of life.

McKee, an Appalachian town of about twelve hundred tucked into the Pigeon Roost Creek valley, is the seat of Jackson County, one of the poorest counties in the country. Subscribers to Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative (PRTC), which covers all of Jackson County and the adjacent Owsley County, can get speeds of up to one gigabit per second, and the coöperative is planning to upgrade the system to ten gigabits. Keith Gabbard, the CEO of PRTC, had the audacious idea of wiring every home and business in Jackson and Owsley Counties with high-speed fibre-optic cable. For nearly fifteen million A