Huge week for the group chat
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It's been a huge week for the group chat. Not one of yours, certainly not one of mine. I'm talking about the Houthi PC small group chat, of course.
But you've never talked to him before, so how's the number on your phone? I mean, I'm not an expert on any of this, but it's just curious. How's the number on your phone? Well, if you have somebody else's contact, and then somehow it gets sucked in. Oh, someone sent you that contact. It gets sucked in. Nobody's texting war plants. As a matter of fact, they even changed the Title II attack plans. Now it turns out Judge Boasberg has actually been assigned to another high-profile case, this one surrounding the fallout from the signal messages in the Atlantic article, which we've been talking about all day, right?
Never before has the group chat been subject to this kind of scrutiny, and it's been a great reminder that we have lost our way. On Today Explained, we're going to talk about texting and how we kind of forgot how to do it right. Or maybe we never knew how to do it right in the first place.
Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are launching our much-anticipated book club, and we're doing it with Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle, who will introduce their upcoming book, We Can Do Hard Things, Answers to Life's 20 Questions. Plus, we've got some fun and important updates from The W and the NWSL, and of course, we've got a new Are You a Megan or Are You a Sue? Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
This is Today Explained. And this is Sean Ramos for him. Here with Max Reed of The Reed, Max Substack. Max has been thinking about group chats for years. In fact, he wrote a piece for New York Magazine way back in 2019 called Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again. And since a certain group chat made the internet fun this week for at least some, we thought we'd ask Max, did we this week, at least in the United States, hit peak group chat?
Yeah, I mean, I have to say, you know, as a journalist and as somebody who writes about the future, making predictions, it felt extremely vindicating to go from a kind of trend piece about how me and a bunch of my friends seem to be turning to group chats to revelations that national security operations at the absolute highest and most top secret level were also being conducted on group chats.
Are you in any of those kinds of group chats?
I mean, not to the best of my knowledge, but there's a couple group chats where I don't know every single phone number in there. And like maybe Michael Waltz is somehow infiltrated and is just waiting to drop some emoji. It gets sucked in.
What kind of group chats are you in, Max?
Well, you know, I'm a father and I would say most of my group chats these days are with other parents of similarly aged kids to coordinate play dates or to do the thing where, you know, it's 3 p.m. on a Sunday and you're going absolutely insane. And so you just have to throw a flag up and really hope that some other parent will meet you at the playground. I mean, a group chat that's almost exclusively about the movie Hunt for Red October, though also sometimes about submarines and fighter jets if they appear in the news. Does it have a clever name? It's called Ramius's Boys after Captain Marco Ramius, who is Sean Connery's character in Hunt for Red October.
A deep cut for the casual fan of Hunt for Red October.
Yeah, exactly.
Your signal said nothing.
I'm also in a group chat dedicated to analyzing and reading Ross Douthat columns, the New York Times columnist.
What's that one called?
It's called Douthat Chat Natalists Only. I want to be clear that's an ironic name. I'm not a political natalist or anything, though I have to admit this is one of two Ross Douthat group chats I'm even aware of. There's another one called The Falcon's Children, which is named after Ross's fantasy series. It sounds like I have a really disordered relationship to Ross Douthat. I want to be clear, this is very common for millennials to have group chats about Ross Douthat.
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