It’s Wednesday, October 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: World Trade Center bombing survivors recoil at Zohran Mamdani’s photo op with a terror-linked imam. How political violence became commonplace. And is it possible to actually “break the internet”?
But first: Inside Palantir’s enigma machine.
Few companies raise as many questions as Palantir does. Did it help kill Osama bin Laden? Is its software being used to watch all of us? Why does it help the feds identify illegal immigrants?
The company has become a lightning rod for people across the political spectrum, partly because Palantir is secretive and complex. That only fuels the sense that it must be up to something nefarious. So, in an effort to shed a little light on the secretive firm, I asked Palantir employees a simple question during a visit to their office in Washington, D.C., recently: What do you do for a living?
The answers were almost all metaphors. One engineer told me to think of Palantir as capable of finding a moving needle in a haystack the size of a small country. Another began his answer by asking me to imagine a tangle of hoses in the backyard.
It’s true that the company’s software is hard to understand, but Palantir’s leaders say their mission is simple. “We’re pro-West,” CEO Alex Karp told me. “For us, the West is led by America, but also includes allies, including Israel.”
I spoke to dozens of people inside and outside Palantir to understand the criticisms of the company. Which are fair? Which aren’t? And, to return to the question at the heart of it all: What does Palantir actually do?
—Maya Sulkin
America’s Growing Political Violence Problem |
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Death threats against public figures aren’t just escalating—they’re becoming all too normal. In the past two days, a pardoned January 6 rioter was charged with threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and another man was arrested for threatening conservative commentators, including Free Press contributors Seth Dillon and Josh Hammer. In our latest editorial, we argue that every act of political violence is an attack on all of us. | | |
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‘All of That Changed When I Saw That Photo’ |
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After a photo surfaced of New York mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani smiling beside a Brooklyn imam once named in a terrorism probe, survivors of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing are demanding answers, Olivia Reingold reports. For people like Michael Macko—who lost his father in the attack—the image didn’t sit well: “If I were going to vote,” he said, “he would’ve just lost my vote.” | | |
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Where Humanity Still Outruns the Machine |
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When we don’t know something, we google it—or ask AI. But what do we lose in the process? More than we realize, argues Ben Schott. After years studying the secret codes shared among diamond dealers, cabbies, and baristas, Ben explains what the machine can never replace: “No algorithm can collect the shouted slang of a crowded kitchen, or the subtle signs of a soigné dining room. Such terms turn work into kinship and create systems of trust that transform colleagues into co-conspirators. They are proof that shared experience always outruns scraped data—and that belonging depends not on computational heuristics but on intimacy.” Read his fantastic piece below. | | |
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Is the Internet Too Fragile? |
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What would you do if the internet stopped working? Millions had to answer that for themselves on Monday morning when the largest cloud database provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), experienced an outage, effectively shutting down most of the internet. Everything from United Airlines to T-Mobile to Snapchat to Fortnite was down. Tanner Nau talked to Mehdi Daoudi, an expert in internet security and resiliency, about the alarming vulnerabilities of the digital world—and the damage they can do to the real one. | | |
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