How Michael Jordan Made $300 Million in 2024 Michael Jordan hung up his high tops for good more than two decades ago but still earns more than any athlete on the planet. Illustration by Lorenzo Gordon

His 2024 haul pushed his career earnings to $3 billion, or $4.15 billion when adjusted for inflation and highest all-time among athletes before accounting for taxes, expenses and investment gains.

Terms of Jordan’s Nike contract have never been revealed. The club paid him $92 million over 14 years—he also made $2 million during his final two seasons in Washington—but it was almost always Nike that represented the biggest line item on his annual tax return.

After three years at UNC, Jordan was the third pick in the 1984 NBA Draft and was paid $555,000 by the Bulls during his rookie season. Read more about it here.

Inside the Long, Strange Trip of the World’s Best LSD

It was the namesake of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, as eccentric a figure as has ever proweled the American underground. Wiry, furry, and proudly carnivorous, he also answered to “Bear.” He was ostensibly known for his work as an audio engineer, having designed sound systems for the Grateful Dead. (He also designed the band’s iconic skull-bisected-by-a-lightning-bolt logo, and inspired the Dead’s just-as-ionic “dancing bear” mascots.) Equally crucial to the band’s creative output was Owsley’s work as a chemist, leading a piebald crew of flower children who cranked out some 5 million doses of LSD into the world, turning on everyone from Jimi Hendrix to John Lennon. Even the reports of the Orinda bust doubled as both a coronation and premature abdication. “Stanley is known throughout the west,” one paper reported, making him sound like some neurochemistry cowboy, “as the King of Acid.” The bust was followed by months of prolonged legal rigmarole. Read more about it here.

Are Em Dashes Really a Sign of AI Writing?

Are Em Dashes Really a Sign of AI Writing?

By Miles Klee

Miles Klee

Contact Miles Klee on X Contact Miles Klee by Email View all posts by Miles Klee April 11, 2025 The em dash has been a staple of literary writing for centuries. ChatGPT itself, which if nothing else should know about the history of its own training, will inform you that em dashes “by themselves are not a reliable sign that a text was AI-generated,” and that the popular misconception to the contrary may be a vestige of earlier, less sophisticated models.

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“Some early AI-generated content (especially before 2023) used em dashes more frequently than the average human writer,” the bot says. “It was part of mimicking formal or stylized writing.” Now that ChatGPT and similar tools can fine-tune their cadence and tone based on descriptive prompts, it adds, punctuation will vary based on the writing style requested. 

On the one hand, the received opinion that the long dash is a product of generative AI that basically didn’t exist in years past is a worrying sign about public literacy: Celebrated poets and philosophers from Emily Dickinson to Friedrich Nietzsche have been known to flaunt them in expressive ways, and many people serious about the craft of writing find them useful. Getty Images

And in a recent viral Instagram clip from LuxeGen, a lifestyle podcast aimed at a Gen Z audience, one co-host referred to the em dash as “the ChatGPT hyphen.” She said that a fashion company that announced a rebrand with a short statement on social media was facing criticism in the comments from readers who saw two em dashes in the text and immediately assumed they had let ChatGPT write the ad copy. “It’s a longer hyphen, I don’t know if you’ve noticed it,” she added. Read more about it here.