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The Last Good Place on the Internet March 04, 2025
The internet was probably never a net pleasant or edifying place. For most of its life, the web has been a repository for maladjusted losers and the collective id, a ceaseless stream-of-consciousness delivered by mass humanity at its most gormless an...
How Tech Created the Online Fact-Checking Industry March 04, 2025
Earlier this year, Meta pulled the plug on its US fact-checking program. Google now refuses to add fact-checks to Search and YouTube. Nearly a decade of work — hundreds of millions of dollars spent, thousands of people hired — is gone, essentially ov...
Bet on YouTube December 23, 2024
Over the past year, I’ve been a skeptic various social media platforms and technological developments. I do not think artificial intelligence represents a revolution on the order of what came before us in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I do ...
Lily and the White Rose December 18, 2024
A ghost is haunting the Internet: the ghost of Lily Phillips. Millions of people last week saw this poor wreck of a girl, in a clip from YouTuber Josh Pieters’s interviews with her, crumpling into sobs after sleeping with 100 men in one day....
Hughes for the Holidays December 09, 2024
The older I get, the more convinced I become that the golden age of entertainment was in the late-1980s and 1990s. Historian Rudyard Lynch of the popular YouTube channel, “WhatIfAltHist,” quite astutely calls this pre-millennium era “John Hughes and ...
Kid Dynamite’s Last Ride December 06, 2024
Last month, I briefly tuned in to see Jake Paul and Mike Tyson dance in the ring for a boxing match that was really just an example of televised elder abuse. Paul is a 27-year-old YouTube star and novice pro boxer, and Tyson is a 58-year-old former h...
The Mr. Beastification of Entertainment March 21, 2024
A helicopter drops Mr. Beast and his friends onto the roof of an abandoned hotel, resting on the water’s edge of a Mediterranean resort town. They’re about to spend the next seven days there, trying not to die, all in service of a recent YouTube vide...
Healers Who Harm March 11, 2024
A few years ago, during a very intense session of expert procrastination, I noticed that the algorithm of my YouTube ads pushed a new sort of service. BetterHelp, the presenter gleefully repeated, aimed at delivering a “personalised therapy for a ha...
Jelly Roll’s Journey From Juvenile Hell to Country Gold March 08, 2024
When I click the YouTube link, what comes up first is an ad. It’s a commercial for the Beautifully Broken Tour, which will take Jelly Roll—the husky, 39-year-old Nashville native who has belatedly become one of the biggest stars in country music, and...
In the Belly of MrBeast February 19, 2024
“The idea is that he will be strapped to this,” says Kyle Bennett, pointing to a contraption that looks alarmingly like the bed in a lethal-injection chamber. “And we have a glass case that’s gonna go over the top and we have 1,000 spiders that are a...
Inside the NBA's Chess Club February 05, 2024
Last NBA season, while flying to Cleveland for a road game, Kristaps Porzingis noticed his then-teammate Deni Avdija playing chess on his phone.Porzingis was mesmerized. He had never played chess before, and watching the pieces move, each one a part ...
10 YouTube Videos I'm Enjoying Right Now November 06, 2023
My life is pretty much like yours. Except that total strangers send me all sorts of things.I get press releases and paparazzi photos. I receive business plans from music startups (no, I will not invest). I get album download links up the wazoo—and do...
‘Subliminals’ Have a Power No Teen Can Explain August 23, 2023
In the world of high school, every day is a battle. Recently, one of the most intimidating foes is the air. “School air,” as they call it on social media, is the latest way to explain the universal feeling of not looking your best at school. It smudg...
Yes to Life August 21, 2023
The Austrian psychiatrist, author, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Emil Frankl was a quintessential humanist. His memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, a psychological portrait of life inside the concentration camps, has become a go-to for seekers of every ...
The Subversive Success of Alfred Hitchcock August 11, 2023
Alfred Hitchcock was born 124 years ago and has been dead for just over four decades, and we still can’t stop talking about him. He’s a household name with an instantly recognizable profile, and his films are required viewing for both movie nerds and...
The New Cynicism of Final Fantasy XVI August 03, 2023
The following is a condensed version of "The New Cynicism of Final Fantasy XVI" by S.P. Cooper, published at Law & Liberty.At first glance, the video game industry seems to be about as far removed from the American political situation as it is possib...
Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal August 01, 2023
For many years, those in the know in the tech world have known that “artificial intelligence” is a scam. It’s been true for so long in Silicon Valley that it was true before there even was a Silicon Valley. That’s not to say that AI hadn’t done impre...
