Apps
Story Stream
Nobody Wants to Be Real July 10, 2024
At 9:01 p.m. on Monday, my phone buzzed with a notification: “⚠️Time to BeReal.⚠️ 2 min left to capture a BeReal and see what your friends are up to!” I clicked the notification and snapped a photo, which captured images with my front and back iPhone...
Can You Read a Book in a Quarter of an Hour? May 23, 2024
There are many reasons not to read a book. One, because you don’t want to. Two, because you started reading, crawled to page 17, and gave up. Three, because the idea of reading never crosses your mind. (If so, lucky you. That way contentment lies.) F...
Scrabble, Anonymous May 16, 2024
This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone. I won thirteen. It took less than an hour. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve played Scrabble every day, predominantly on ISC.RO, a website hosted in Romania that all...
Does Testosterone Make You Gay? May 16, 2024
On Evolutionary, a bodybuilding forum, one guy puts it like this: “I ran Trenbolone [a synthetic androgen] for the first time the last 15 weeks… after a month of random sex hookups [with women] I started getting more weird feelings where it wasn’t go...
Can AI Flirt for You? May 15, 2024
Last week, Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd made a prediction about the future of dating: “There is a world where your AI dating concierge could go and date for you with another dating concierge. . . and it will scan all of San Francisco for you and...
The Most Earnest Thing You Can Do Is a Book Deal May 14, 2024
One time really late at night I tried to draw the definitive scale of irony versus earnestness in the Notes app on my phone. My best friend was muddling through why she didn’t mesh with a certain person, why conversations hung so awkwardly that being...
Who’s Afraid of the Internet Novel? May 07, 2024
“Why would anyone want to remember last week’s internet,” writes Calvin Kasulke in his 2021 novel, Several People Are Typing. “We don’t, but we want to remember the fifteen-years-ago internet and that was last week’s internet, once.”Humorously, this ...
Our Dystopian Future Is Inside Your Gambling App May 07, 2024
Earlier this month, basketball player Jontay Porter, former Toronto Raptors benchwarmer, saw his short and unimpressive NBA career come to an abrupt end. This severe penalty stems from his involvement in a gambling scheme that exploited his access to...
Fake Livestream Apps With AI Audiences May 01, 2024
In March, the influencer ItsPoloKidd posted a video to TikTok and Instagram in which he shows a woman at a bar that he’s livestreaming to 20,000 people on TikTok. “Are you rich?” she asks in the video. “Yes,” he responds. “Do you want to come with me...
