Last week, just hours after exploding pagers and two-way radios killed dozens of people in Lebanon and injured hundreds more, a peculiar new show appeared on podcast apps. Pager Protocol isn’t about the attacks aimed at Hezbollah members or the Israeli operatives believed to be behind them. It’s an ongoing …

In mid-June, when NBCUniversal announced it was partnering with Meta, Overtime, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube to send 27 influencers to the 2024 Paris Olympics, it seemed like a big deal. These were huge content creators like Kai Cenat, Daniel Macdonald, and Zhongni “Zhong” Zhu, people with millions upon millions of …

When the new “ethically trained” artificial-intelligence-powered music generator Jen dropped a couple of weeks ago, it was at a fairly auspicious time: The Recording Industry Association of America had just sued Udio and Suno for copyright infringement, alleging that the programs were trained on copyrighted material without the creators’ permission. …

When The Bear first premiered, it was all in one fell swoop, eight feverish episodes dropped onto Hulu in June 2022. While the show was beloved by critics, it took a while, relatively speaking, to catch on, popping up as the second-most-watched show across all platforms three weeks later and …

When poet John Keats wrote in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” he probably didn’t have AI influencers in mind. Perhaps he should have. Back in April, Fanvue, an AI-infused creator platform that falls somewhere between OnlyFans and Cameo in terms of services, launched what …

On its surface, Marvel’s new “immersive story” What If…?, available to Apple Vision Pro users starting Thursday, seems like a win-win. Marvel gets to mess around with how to combine storytelling and spatial computing, and Apple gets a big-name experience to appease everyone who ponied up $3,500 for their new …

Until this past week, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been on a bike. In the past decade, I had kids and moved from flat, mostly bike-friendly Chicago to the hilly east side of Los Angeles, but I don’t really have an excuse. I’ve just been lazy. I miss …

For decades, it seemed like Hollywood couldn’t get a video game adaptation right. Movies like Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros., and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider were all critically panned, with their creators called out for either sticking too close to the source material, failing to capture the magic of the …

Now in its 16th season, RuPaul’s Drag Race has birthed more than a few iconic lip-sync battles, but precious few have featured Muppets. None, even. AI Drag Race changed that. In the Instagram account’s recent season finale, Miss Piggy, wearing an AI-generated drag look, faced off against lover-turned-rival Kermisha Ihman, …

Lanny Smoot builds lightsabers for a living. No, not like the ones kids used to create with flashlights and plastic tubes—realistic extendable ones, with penumbral edges and laser-blocking abilities. Like an actual Jedi. He’s whipped up giant electromagnetic eyes, too, as well as an omnidirectional HoloTile floor, which adapts to …