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 …
Read More »Reddit’s ‘Celebrity Number Six’ Win Was Almost a Catastrophe—Thanks to AI
For every high-profile internet mystery that seems very grave—the Serial podcast listeners who dug deep on the case of Adnan Syed, the sleuths who tried to figure out what happened to the “Mostly Harmless” hiker—there are an equal number of online fascinations that are just fun. The search for the …
Read More »The End of ‘Brat Summer’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think
Charli XCX said it, so it must be true: Brat Summer is over. In a tweet so echoey it got several news hits, the club rat/pop girl said goodbye to the season that may come to define her career—and America’s political future. It was September 2, 87 days after Charli …
Read More »The Trademark Tug-of-War Over ‘Demure’ Shows a Massive Meme Power Shift
From the second the message popped up on X, it had a familiar ring. Jools Lebron, the TikTok creator who went viral just a few weeks ago for a post discussing “very demure, very mindful” work looks, was upset that, seemingly, someone had attempted to trademark her viral phrase. In …
Read More »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 …
Read More »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 …
Read More »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 …
Read More »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 …
Read More »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 …
Read More »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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