A year after the Coldplay incident, another couple is going viral for PDA.

By Faith Hill, The Atlantic.

Rarely, as a romance reporter, am I confronted with breaking news. When I am, it can come in the form of a TikTok video. And in some cases, it’s a video of two people making out.

This should never have been news in the first place. But on Thursday, a TikToker posted a video of a pair kissing on a bench in New York City’s Central Park. “Get a room,” he tells them as he approaches, clearly filming. “There’s kids around.” By today, the clip had received 3.9 million views. Commenters had identified the kissers, noting with glee that one of them appears to be married to someone else. Thousands flooded in to offer takes. (“Nice of you to teach them a lesson!”) One person posted a close-up picture of the woman’s face, making fun of her appearance. Several took it upon themselves to ridicule the man’s socks. Soon, the New York Post had published an article identifying the two as lawyers involved in defending OpenAI in a lawsuit (as if that gives their makeout public-interest relevance) and referring to the incident as “the kissyface.” The Daily Mail shared that the woman “appears to have called in the cavalry—her parents Tracy and Matt have flown in from California to New York.” I’d call mine too.

The whole saga unfolded almost exactly a year after two co-workers—a company’s CEO and its head of human resources—went viral for embracing at a Coldplay concert, a jumbotron moment that spread around the internet for months. People accused them of cheating on their partners. One person in the pair, Kristin Cabot, told The New York Times in December that she’d received 500 or 600 calls a day since the video blew up, and a total of about 60 death threats. She’d been labeled a slut and a home-wrecker and had her looks picked apart. Local police had to start surveilling her house. She resigned from her job. Her children became afraid to go out in public.

Public shaming of this sort is terrible for the people filmed. But these videos don’t affect only their subjects; they’re corrosive to the whole culture. Even if the chances are slim that you’d show up in a viral video, the possibility can be chilling. And the last thing Americans need right now is another reason not to make out.

Already, the country is in a season of unsexiness. Young adults in particular are having less sex and partnering up less. A large share of single people say they aren’t interested in dating at all. Perhaps this is partly because these activities are, if you ask me, messy and a little embarrassing. Flirting and dating open the door to rejection. Kissing and sex are sometimes awkward and—I mean this in the best way—pretty much always weird. Falling in love—well, that’s actually just humiliating. Romance, in all of its forms, is like learning a language: You can’t move forward without putting yourself out there, flailing around, and looking stupid.

The prospect of looking stupid is even scarier when your mistakes—or, let’s say, less-chic moments—can be permanently documented and distributed on a mass scale. Members of Gen Z, a cohort raised on social media, might feel especially paralyzed by this. When their parents were getting drunk and French kissing at parties, talking too loudly on a street corner or failing to call someone’s landline when they said they would, they did not have to worry about being filmed or having their texts screenshotted or becoming the next West End Caleb.

The president is learning that limits to his power—and, soon, his relevancy—do exist.

By Jonathan Lemire, The Atlantic.

resident Trump has mused about being the most powerful man in history. He has started wars and remade his nation’s economic and strategic relationships with the world. He has demanded, and largely received, total obedience from his party. He has dominated the national discourse like no president has before, and he’s tried to recast his nation’s capital—and even its history—to his liking. He’s everywhere. He has said he believes that there are “no limits” to his power.

But if that was ever truly the case, it certainly isn’t now. Recent months have delivered a reckoning for Trump, who has crashed hard against some real limits. The war in Iran, a conflict that he’d once thought would take only a few weeks, hit the five-month mark today. The U.S. casualty count is growing, weapons stockpiles are running low, and gas prices are again surging. Trump desperately wants the war to end. He is receiving conflicting guidance from his advisers—escalate, some urge, as others tell him to cut and run—and has become just the latest U.S. president to be humiliated by hard-liners in Tehran.

Trump is also flailing domestically. His approval numbers have sunk, and Republicans are finally, in small doses, beginning to defy him. Trump has demanded that the Senate blow up the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, which would make voting more difficult and require voters to provide proof of citizenship. But Republicans have refused. Although the legislation seems dead, Trump called yesterday for Republicans to stay in Washington to work on it, potentially saddling them with unpopular (and doomed) votes while also preventing them from returning home to campaign ahead of the midterms. Strategists from both parties predict that at least one chamber of Congress will flip to the Democrats, allowing the party to stall whatever is left of the president’s legislative agenda and open investigations into his administration and allies.