Story Stream
Instagram Is Not a Cigarette June 19, 2024
Many teens and adults use the word addictive when describing social-media sites, as if the apps themselves are laced with nicotine. The U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, wants to drive that point home as glaringly as possible: In an op-ed published...
Another Productivity Hack? June 03, 2024
Everyone wants to get things done, but it can be hard to predict how long they’ll take. Mathematicians needed three centuries to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem—first proposed around 1637, the solution only came in 1994. Was that remarkably fast, or path...
How Instagram Ruined Personal Style September 28, 2023
Real personal style died with the rise of Instagram. Plenty of people still look great, but the barrage of inspirational images, ease of consumption, and overabundance of trends and styles (often quickly duplicated by fast-fashion giants) have change...
Substack Can Redeem Online Journalism September 20, 2023
The popular newsletter platform Substack launched its short-form content feature, Notes, in April. Meta rolled out Threads via Instagram in July. Predating these was Mastodon, which had for years already provided the more technically inclined with a ...
Family Punditry September 20, 2023
“I’m not gay, sorry. I’m not. I’m attracted to big, strong muscular men,” Christian Walker says into his phone’s front-facing camera. “The gay word means you go to pride marches, you go to the gay club every weekend, you’re a leftist. Love me, hate m...
Watching Girls Die Online September 20, 2023
When raw food influencer Zhanna Samsonova died in July at the age of 39, after reportedly eating only fruit for the past seven years, she was just the latest person to join a tragic club: anorexic influencers who have starved themselves to death in p...
A Tool Kit for Tradition in Philadelphia September 08, 2023
“No half baths, and no skylights!,” my realtor snapped at me, half joking but exasperated. We were standing in a windowless closet on the third floor of what would soon be my very first property, and I was pointing out the places where my grand plans...
Caroline Calloway Sets the Record Straight July 25, 2023
As I was on FaceTime with Caroline Calloway, the Washington Post published a review of her memoir, Scammer, alongside one of a book written by her archnemesis, ex-best friend and former love interest, Natalie Beach. From her squealing — and the way h...
The “Scammer” and the Scammed July 20, 2023
“Some people are plagued by uncertainty—they don’t know what they want to do with their lives,” Caroline Calloway writes in “Scammer,” her new memoir. “My affliction is that I have only ever wanted to be one very specific thing.” Calloway is a thirty...
Stop Trying to Have the Perfect Vacation July 20, 2023
It’s sort of a cliché to remark that Americans make bad tourists, but on the other hand, it’s hard to argue with the evidence. In the past week, two videos of American tourists complaining about Europe have gone viral: In one, a traveler says that Pa...
Elizabeth Ellen Interviews Nazli Koca July 19, 2023
To be honest, the way I found your novel was someone emailed me to ask if they could review it. I said yes, having never heard of the book. When he sent me the review, it was pretty negative, critical, but the parts he quoted, that he was critical of...
When Presentation Becomes Personality July 18, 2023
Instagram provided users the ability to easily present curated documentation of their lives, photos of their friends, foods, pastimes, playthings and—perhaps above all— themselves. Selfie, a word that began bubbling up in Australia in the early 2000s...
Caroline Calloway Sets the Record Straight July 14, 2023
As I was on FaceTime with Caroline Calloway, the Washington Post published a review of her memoir, Scammer, alongside one of a book written by her archnemesis, ex-best friend and former love interest, Natalie Beach. From her squealing — and the way h...
The Bad Patient July 13, 2023
In July of 2022, a woman we’ll call F. logged onto Instagram and posted a selfie from the hospital. “Just been told I’m on life support for my blood pressure,” she wrote, tagging the post with various medical terms and conditions: #gastroparesis, #ad...
Twitter's Final Boss: Zuckerberg Wages War July 07, 2023
I am become Thottr, the destroyer of worlds. Last night Meta launched Threads, Mark Zuckerberg’s hotly-anticipated Twitter clone, and almost immediately blew a 10 million-person sized hole in the endless debate over Twitter’s fate: will the House tha...
The Rise of Fake Libraries June 13, 2023
There is a growing fashion for fake books. Not fake as in written by a series of AI prompts, but fake as in things — cleverly painted empty boxes, or a facade of spines glued to a wall — designed to mislead the casual onlooker into thinking that they...
Calm Down About 'The Little Mermaid' June 05, 2023
‘I do not think we do our children any favours by pretending that slavery didn’t exist,’ wrote Royal Academy of Dramatic Art chair Marcus Ryder, in a blog about the newly remade Disney adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Little Merm...
How TikTok Took Over the Menu May 18, 2023
The most important social-media food genre of the past decade is photos of avocado toast, bright and colorful and clean. But innovation is relentless, and the high-contrast gaze has been pushed off the timeline by videos like the 35-second review of ...
The Angst of the Male Thirst Trapper May 16, 2023
“Yo you looking hella ockey bro. For real,” Guy One says to Guy Two as they leave the locker room. The lights turn off. I notice that it’s 9:59 p.m. The last worker on shift wants to leave. Guy Three pulls up his weathered black Nirvana T-shirt to da...
On Recipe Writing May 11, 2023
Writing recipes means rarely knowing whether you’re stealing or not. Cooking is the sum of every bite we’ve ever taken informing our palates. And so one must ask, where does inspiration end and the need for citation begin? How can you cite every meal...
Meghan Markle’s Comeback May 08, 2023
Maybe it was always going this way. After being a briefcase girl, an actress, a D-list celebrity and blowing it as a real-life royal, perhaps the only natural next step for Meghan Markle was to become an influencer. Look at Fergie, once married to Pr...
On Internet Culture Reporting May 08, 2023
It’s the op-ed that people can’t stop publishing: “We’re already living in the Metaverse.”It started two years ago when Facebook went all in on its metaverse product‘s hype by changing the company’s name in October 2021. That month, I wrote a short b...
Lemon8 Is for the (Hot, Rich) Girlies April 28, 2023
If Instagram, Pinterest, and Canva procreated, Lemon8 would be their hybrid offspring. This, at least, is the line being parroted by scores of TikTokers, a substantial but unknowable number of whom have been paid by Lemon8 to promote the app. Paid or...
Damaged Women April 21, 2023
Anna, the narrator of Allie Rowbottom’s debut novel Aesthetica, desires the 21st century American dream—the influencer life. A few years out of high school and wasting time in her hometown of Houston, Anna “had reason to believe I could touch stardom...
Momfluencers Won’t Absolve Your Guilt April 19, 2023
Maternal guilt is a bottomless resource. Enter the momfluencer. She’s like an influencer — but her particular genius is to target the most vulnerable, the most guilt-ridden the most exhausted consumer. New mothers. The genius of the momfluencer is to...
