In 2006, Oprah Winfrey couldn’t stop talking about The Secret. She devoted multiple episodes of her talk show to the franchise, which started as a kind of DVD seminar and later became a best-selling book. Its author, Rhonda Byrne, claimed to have stumbled upon an ancient principle, one that can teach anyone to manifest anything they want: money, health, better relationships.
As a little girl, I often found myself in my family’s basement, doing battle with a dragon. I wasn’t gaming or playing pretend: My dragon was a piece of enterprise voice-dictation software called Dragon Naturally Speaking, launched in 1997 (and purchased by my dad, an early adopter).
As a kid, I was enchanted by the idea of a computer that could type for you. The premise was simple: Wear a headset, pull up the software, and speak.
In the decade I have lived in California, I’ve learned to be on edge for “The Big One”—an earthquake so powerful, it can bring down houses. The roughly 10 or so tremors I have actually experienced haven’t been like that. Mostly, the shakes are big enough to jolt me upright but small enough to leave me doubting: Was that what I thought it was?
Today, tens of millions of East Coasters got to experience that feeling firsthand when a magnitude 4.
Lucchese is not the world’s cutest dog. Picked up as a stray somewhere in Texas, he is scruffy and, as one person aptly observed online, looks a little like Steve Buscemi. (It’s the eyes.)
Isabel Klee, a professional influencer in New York City, had agreed to keep Lucchese, or Luc, until he found a forever home. Fosters such as Klee help move dogs out of loud and stressful shelters so they can relax and socialize before moving into a forever home.
In January, Donald Trump laid out in stark terms what consequences await America if charges against him for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election wind up interfering with his presidential victory in 2024. “It’ll be bedlam in the country,” he told reporters after an appeals-court hearing. Just before a reporter began asking if he would rule out violence from his supporters, Trump walked away.
When the Universal Music Group decided to pull its songs from TikTok last month in the midst of a protracted rights dispute, some called the move the “nuclear option.” UMG handles major artists including Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny, and isn’t music the lifeblood of the social app? Billboard has a separate chart for the most popular songs on TikTok; artists such as Lil Nas X effectively owe their career to the platform.
A perfect day in Los Angeles starts with a stroll along the Venice Beach boardwalk. Then a ride on the Ferris wheel in neighboring Santa Monica. Then visit the Getty Museum, some nine miles away by car. After that, Beverly Hills, then Hollywood to see the Walk of Fame, then Griffith Park for a hike, then Chinatown for dim sum, then downtown, perhaps to catch an evening show at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Or at least, that’s what a chatbot thinks a “perfect day” is.
Updated at 9:40 p.m. ET on February 1, 2024
A little monster lives on my wrist, and every day, I wake up prepared to do battle with it. Most days, I lose.
That gremlin is an Apple Watch, which, like all fitness trackers, is designed to nudge users toward healthy behaviors. Apple uses three digital rings to measure a person’s daily activity in different ways. Each one has a bright color and a simple name. The blue “Stand” ring prompts you to, well, stand more.
The stories are hauntingly similar: A teenager, their whole life ahead of them, buys a pill from someone on Snapchat. They think it’s OxyContin or Percocet, but it actually contains a lethal amount of fentanyl. They take it; they die. Their bereaved parents are left grasping for an explanation.
A 2021 NBC News investigation found more than a dozen such cases across the country.
We live in the age of the short attention span. And yet: Finding a recipe in a blog post requires first scrolling past a novella detailing the chef’s personal experience with the dish. Streaming shows run long, dragging into feature-film territory. Episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast are sometimes longer than Avatar.
In late July 1980, a five-month-old Doberman pinscher puppy in Washington, D.C., started throwing up blood. It died the next day at an animal hospital, one of many pets that suffered that year from a new illness, parvovirus. “This is the worst disease I’ve ever seen in dogs,” a local veterinarian told The Washington Post, in an article describing the regional outbreak. It killed so fast that it left pet owners in disbelief, he said.
The ear is a marvelous, humble organ. It powers our hearing and also our balance, keeping us upright and connected to the world around us. In return, ear doctors tend to ask that we follow one very simple rule: Don’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear. Of course, you can’t actually fit your elbow inside your ear. But you can fit a Q-tip, which comes with this warning: “Do not insert swab into ear canal. Entering the ear canal could cause injury.
Dylan Longton really knows how to flip an egg. A 33-year-old line cook at an unassuming diner just outside Albany, New York, Longton can make an omelet do a backflip and land it smoothly right back into its pan cradle. And people love him for it. Not just people in Albany, or people in New York. People all around the world, sometimes more than a thousand at once, tune in on TikTok to watch Longton flip eggs, and reheat bacon and homefries on the grill.
This past spring, I participated in the sacred tradition that comes around once every few years: I got a new iPhone. The speaker on my old one had broken, forcing my hand. But let’s be clear. I didn’t care about the speaker. The real reason you upgrade an iPhone, of course, is to get a better camera.Within a couple of weeks of unboxing my new iPhone 14 Pro, however, I noticed something odd happening. I’d take a selfie, think I looked great, and lock my phone, satisfied.
There is no easy way to explain the sum of Google’s knowledge. It is ever-expanding. Endless. A growing web of hundreds of billions of websites, more data than even 100,000 of the most expensive iPhones mashed together could possibly store. But right now, I can say this: Google is confused about whether there’s an African country beginning with the letter k.I’ve asked the search engine to name it.
The man I am looking at is very hot. He’s got that angular hot-guy face, with hollow cheeks and a sharp jawline. His dark hair is tousled, his skin blurred and smooth. But I shouldn’t even bother describing him further, because this man is self-evidently hot, the kind of person you look at and immediately categorize as someone whose day-to-day life is defined by being abnormally good-looking.This hot man, however, is not real.
The future of driverless cars in America is a promotional booth with a surfboard and a movie director’s clapboard. Robotaxis have officially arrived in Los Angeles, and last week, residents lined up in Santa Monica’s main promenade to get a smartphone code needed to ride them. For now, the cars, from the Alphabet-owned start-up Waymo, won’t leave the tame streets of Santa Monica.
This week, a teenager might open up their TikTok feed and immediately be served a video about a hairbrush that promises to gently detangle the roughest of tangles. Or a clip about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s rumored romance. Or the app could show them a scene from the Israeli Supernova music festival, where on Saturday a young woman named Noa Argamani was put on the back of a motorcycle as her boyfriend was held by captors.
In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, both Facebook and Twitter decided to suspend lame-duck President Donald Trump from their platforms. He had encouraged violence, the sites reasoned; the megaphone was taken away, albeit temporarily. To many Americans horrified by the attack, the decisions were a relief. But for some conservatives, it marked an escalation in a different kind of assault: It was, to them, a clear sign of Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias.
This past Sunday, Keila Shaheen woke up to find that, once again, she was the best-selling author across all of Amazon. To get there, she’d outsold every other book on the platform—including Walter Isaacson’s buzzy biography of Elon Musk and the Fox News host Mark Levin’s screed The Democrat Party Hates America. She’d even beat out Oprah.At just 24, she is a bona fide publishing juggernaut. And yet few outside of TikTok have even bothered to notice.
Do you find yourself constantly closing your eyes and seeing marble? Do thoughts of Caesar and chariot races and a nascent republic punctuate your daily goings?All roads lead to Rome—and apparently so do all male thoughts. Across social media, women have been encouraged to ask the men in their life how often they think about the Roman empire and to record the answer.
Matt Warshaw still remembers the jolt of horror he felt when the camera went up. It was September 2000, a decade since he quit his job as the editor of Surfing magazine and fled the crowded breaks of Southern California for the cold, isolated waves of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. When he saw the cam on the flagpole at a beachfront house his friend was renting, he was livid, certain that the website it broadcast to, Surfline, would bring crowds to his favorite spot.
TikTok’s algorithm knows. People speak of the unseen program governing the platform’s “For You” page, where videos populate based on ones you’ve previously interacted with, as an omniscient, omnipresent god. The algorithm has figured out your every interest and hobby, every thought you’ve ever had. More than once, it’s been alleged to have figured out that a person is queer before they knew themselves.
Updated at 9:15 p.m. ET on August 10, 2023A few days ago, the hurricane forecasts looked good. Dora was going to miss Hawaii, passing by far to the south. And yet the storm still ended up wreaking havoc on the islands, not as a rain-bearing cyclone but as wind—hot, dry wind, which, as it blew across the island of Maui, met wildfire.
This has been a landmark summer in the world of “floaty rock drama.” Two weeks ago, in a pair of draft papers that have not been peer-reviewed, scientists in South Korea claimed to have found a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor, and described how to make it. In theory, this magical material could revolutionize our world. It also levitates. The purported discovery became an internet sensation.
It’s August, but Santa Claus is hard at work. No, he’s not busy checking his lists or helping the elves make presents for all the good little children around the world. He’s livestreaming on TikTok, where he has 1.3 million followers.And this year, Santa’s the one with the wish list.
Krysten Wagner, a Los Angeles–based TikTok influencer, is defending her decision to promote products on TikTok while wearing a face mask that’s on sale for $50. In a video from June, Wagner squeezes white cream from a shiny blue tube and begins applying it to her taut, perfectly clear skin. “If you’re not familiar,” she says, smearing the cream on her forehead, “you can now shop in the TikTok app.
Earlier this year, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app of all time, reaching 100 million active users in what seemed like an astonishingly brisk two months. Now, just six months later, that record has been usurped: Threads got there in less than a week. According to data from Sensor Tower, a market-intelligence firm, Meta’s Twitter clone had the best launch day of any app in the past decade.The internet is moving faster than ever before.
Just past midnight on a Tuesday in June, an e-bike battery erupted into flames while charging in a Manhattan repair shop. The blaze was quick and likely very, very hot. Firefighters responded within five minutes, but it was already too late: Flames spread to nearby apartments, killing four people.It was not the first incident like this. New York City has been rattled by more than 100 battery fires so far in 2023, according to its fire commissioner, killing 13 people.
The smoke is back. Large swaths of America are once again engulfed in a toxic haze that’s drifted down from Canada, which is experiencing its worst fire season on record. Our northern neighbor has burned through a record-breaking 8.2 million hectares so far this year, sending smoke plumes as far as Europe.