Tag Archives: the-monitor

Moo Deng Is More Than a Meme

Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of Moo Deng. The baby pygmy hippo is barely two months old and already famous. So beloved on TikTok, Instagram, and X is Moo Deng that workers at Khao Kheow Open Zoo, the place in Thailand where she was born, are doing all they …

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The Australian Breaker Who Broke the Internet

Before some of them were taken down, the memes about Australian Olympic breaker Rachael Gunn, aka Raygun, were all about poking fun. Videos of her flipping around or kangaroo hopping on the competition floor at the Paris Summer Games were accompanied by captions like “what my nephew does after telling …

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How Camo Hats Became an Instant Meme

On Tuesday, when Vice President Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz to be her running mate in her bid for US president, she commemorated it by sharing a video of her calling the Minnesota governor and asking him if he’d like to join her campaign. In the clip, he appears in …

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Welcome to the Weird Era

Y’all are weird. In a matter of days, this has become the go-to response in internet discussion. As with all things online, it’s hard to pinpoint where weird started. It may have been Minnesota governor Tim Walz on MSNBC saying “[Republicans] come across as weird.” Or maybe it was the …

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The Week of Brat Summer Will Go Down in Internet History

Jake Tapper looked as flummoxed as everyone else. After a week spent trying to figure out the whys and hows of the assassination attempt against former US president Donald Trump, the CNN anchor was now facing something far more perplexing: why a British pop singer was calling Vice President Kamala …

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The Trump Shooting Fueled an Online Sticker Battle

Ever since the assassination attempt on former US president Donald Trump last Saturday, the tenor online has been understandably tense. Far-right extremists are sending out calls for violence, militias are recruiting, and everyone, it seems, has a conspiracy theory about what led to the shooting. But in the corners of …

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RIP Redbox, a Bad Idea at the Worst Time

The crimson kiosks read “the smarter way to watch and play.” The accuracy of that statement largely depended on how one defined “smart.” Launched in the early 2000s, Redbox offered something of a hybrid: Blockbuster-style DVD and game rentals in a small stall that could sit in the corner of …

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