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 …
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As music from Universal Music Group artists started to disappear from TikTok recently, a different kind of earworm got stuck in my head. Even though it’s not a song, I sang it in the shower and whispered it in my sleep: “You have been promoted! You are now one of …
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Of the 12.5 million works currently hosted on the fan fiction hub Archive of Our Own, SenLinYu’s Manacled ranks as the second-most-read on the entire site—but you won’t be able to read it there for much longer. A dark romance between Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy set in …
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Joe Biden’s presidential campaign landed on TikTok with a thud, drawing ire from critics across the political spectrum. Left-leaning users have called the campaign’s posts tone-deaf in light of the ongoing atrocities in Gaza. Pointing to the app’s connections to China, Republicans demanded the president delete the account altogether. But …
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Charlotte is the TikTok generation’s Virgin Mary. Only she’s not human, and she’s carrying up to four messiahs. For a brief moment, some wondered aloud whether Charlotte, a round stingray about the size of a serving platter, might have been knocked up by a shark. She has been in a …
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In her delightfully cheeky Verizon Super Bowl commercial, Beyoncé swore to do one thing: Break the internet. As the commercial demonstrated, she could not—at least not in the literal sense. Instead, after the commercial ended, she did something else: She hacked the internet, dropping two new songs, “Texas Hold ’Em” …
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Like any good citizen of the internet, I went hunting for memes when I first heard the news. Rachel Dolezal, the notorious race grifter who courted controversy in 2015, had been fired from her teaching gig for operating an OnlyFans account. I was in need of a good laugh. Only, …
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President Joe Biden is officially on TikTok. In the middle of the Super Bowl on Sunday, the Biden campaign announced that it had joined the platform. In Biden’s first post, he’s asked a series of questions, like whether he prefers the Kansas City Chiefs or the San Francisco 49ers. At …
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For a man who claims to be written-off and censored by the mainstream media, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign for president has thrived online. In recent months, Kennedy has suddenly been everywhere. On Instagram, a video of him snorkeling off the shores of Hawaii with a shark advocate and environmental …
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Before I sit down to talk to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, he apologizes for the noise. The evening’s guests have been doing sporadic sound checks all day: Peso Pluma running through his opening number, Offset ad-libbing over a backing track. I passed by throngs of One Direction fans to …
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