Vibes

Story Stream

Tony Tulathimutte and the Literary Vibe Shift January 28, 2025

For a while, the story about contemporary publishing has been that men are out. Especially unwelcome are stories about male desire and frustration. The last person anyone in literary publishing wants to hear from, or about, is a creepy, entitled ince...

How Do We Understand Culture? January 28, 2025

The liberal critics demand evidence. This is nothing new, and I don’t blame them. I practice journalism, which is evidence-based, and I have been consuming Nate Silver since he was a young baseball writer during the Bush administration. Statistics, f...

Vibe Drift January 27, 2025

In June of 2021, Sean Monahan, one of the founders of the trend forecasting group K-HOLE (of “normcore” fame) who now writes a newsletter called 8Ball, coined the term “vibe shift” to refer to an emerging cultural transformation, one whose contours w...

Don’t Mourn the Fact-Checkers January 10, 2025

The Great American Vibe Shift, rapidly reshaping U.S. culture and politics, has landed at 1 Hacker Way—the gleaming Palo Alto headquarters of Meta. In a video this week, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to content polic...