How Online Shopping Lost Touch With Reality

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The idea of the “informed consumer” may have always been a myth, but online shopping has made distinguishing between reality and manipulation even harder.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• America’s lowest standard
• Why Pope Francis isn’t with the West on Ukraine
• Every emergency needs to end, even COVID-19.
• AI is about to make social media (much) more toxic.

An Illusion of Control

Booking a hotel room used to be fairly easy. But as my colleague earlier this week, the process has recently become a “uniquely excruciating experience.” You might see a few good deals on booking websites, only to click through and find that they’ve become unavailable. In the event that a room genuinely up for grabs, it can turn out to be much more expensive than the price you were first shown, because of additional fees and taxes. The ordeal, Jacob writes, “will leave you questioning what is true and what is false. It will beat you down until, at a certain point, you won’t even care.”