Group chats, including at least one of mine, can’t get enough. #KateGate—loosely, a collection of theories around the whereabouts and well-being of Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales—presently seems to be occupying more brain cells than oxygen. Gossip has been flying ever since January, when Middleton took a step back …
Read More »
On February 24, 2022, Stepan Bandrivskyi woke up before dawn and got ready for a special day: his birthday. It wouldn’t be a particularly happy one. Hours earlier, a couple dozen miles away, Russian tanks had rolled across the borders of his native Ukraine. The full-scale invasion had begun. Like …
Read More »
Scientists keep taking their own lives, and no one knows why. That’s the central mystery at the start of 3 Body Problem, the new Netflix series based on a trilogy of sci-fi novels by Chinese author Cixin Liu. But it soon unfolds into something far grander: There’s a mysterious VR …
Read More »
Willonius Hatcher was looking for a way in. He’d tried just about everything to break into Hollywood, and because there no longer exists a traditional entry point into its hallowed pantheon of performers—we can thank the internet for doing away with all notions of conventional success—the pursuit of it sometimes …
Read More »
This week the internet has been awash in confusion about what TikTok is: a video-sharing app with goofy viral dances; a trove of user data, ripe for the plucking; a political football; a place where scores of creators make their livings. All of these are true. Still, that hasn’t stopped …
Read More »
The accusations began around the release of Spider-Man 2 last October. More came when Alan Wake II hit a week later. They were all over the replies to the social media accounts of Sweet Baby Inc.: hateful comments, many of which hinged on the idea that the Montreal-based narrative development …
Read More »
Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, needs to brush up on her Photoshop skills, apparently. Over the weekend, the royal family released the first image of Middleton since her abdominal surgery in January. As the photo of her and her three smiling children started to circulate online, the Associated Press …
Read More »
How you stack and load your dishwasher is extremely important. Journalists, YouTubers, and dishwasher experts have all written guides on how to do it properly. One PhD student even wrote a 300-page thesis on the science behind dishwasher loading. Failing to load a dishwasher properly—or not at all—has led to …
Read More »
There’s no more important death in video games than that of Final Fantasy VII’s flower girl, Aerith. In the 1997 game, Aerith meets her end at the hands of Sephiroth, who brutally stabs her in front of the game’s hero, Cloud Strife, and by extension the players. It was a …
Read More »
Squander enough time on TikTok these days and the signs of creative deceleration are everywhere. “Try-hard” slang is spreading. Competitive aging is a thing. Classic episodes of The Sopranos are fed to you in polished 25-second bites. Last October, the 2004 cult teen comedy Mean Girls was portioned into 23 …
Read More »