When they came up with machine-sliced bread, did we start referring to other bread as “annoying”? After the invention of the dishwasher, did we start calling our sinks “stupid”? Post-railroad, did we slander boats as “useless and embarrassing”?Obviously not. Yet after the smartphone came along, a category of product that was once known simply as “phones” became, rudely, “dumb phones.
Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them.
For the first time, the Supreme Court is considering its opinion on the brief but powerful “26 words that created the internet.”Enacted in 1996, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes online platforms from liability for anything that is posted on their site by a third party—a protection that allowed the web to bloom by encouraging experimentation and interactivity in its early years.
Sign up for Kaitlyn and Lizzie’s newsletter here.Lizzie: Do they call it a bar crawl because by the end of it you’ll be crawling? Or is it because if you attend one in February, you’ll be crawling out of your apartment wondering why the host, generally understood to be a party genius, decided to throw a bar crawl in the East Village on the coldest weekend of the year?Our friend Andrew (the brain behind last year’s Watergate party) was hosting this bar crawl.
When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals considered a lawsuit against Google in 2020, Judge Ronald M. Gould stated his view of the tech giant’s most significant asset bluntly: “So-called ‘neutral’ algorithms,” he wrote, can be “transformed into deadly missiles of destruction by ISIS.
Whatever else it is, Twitter is a place where the average person can subject others to their displeasure. They have been mistreated by Southwest Airlines. They have been angered by the comments of a man who sells beans. They have learned, to their horror, that the father of their favorite indie-pop star previously worked for the U.S. State Department.
Last night, several well-known journalists, including Ryan Mac of The New York Times and Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, were suspended from Twitter.The suspensions were ostensibly related to the journalists’ reporting on an account—@ElonJet, operated by the 20-year-old Jack Sweeney—which was dedicated to publishing the location of Elon Musk’s private jet based on public data.
Over the weekend, Elon Musk welcomed Donald Trump back to Twitter. Or rather, he tried to lure him back after lifting a 22-month suspension. Trump, who was banned for encouraging insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol and violating a content policy against inciting violence, has not actually tweeted anything yet. Musk would like him to, and so began posting some you know you want to memes, one using an image from the cartoon-for-adults Family Guy (which Donald Trump Jr.
Early on Wednesday morning, while I was scrolling through Twitter in order to learn the midterm-election results in the most piecemeal and confusing fashion possible, I noticed something a little off.
Here’s a very popular tweet: “she’s a 10 but she cries on her birthday every year.”Solid. Concise. I can see why people would relate to the sentiment. Who doesn’t want to think of themselves as hot? And further, who doesn’t already think of themselves as emotionally complicated enough to shed a tear on a day that is supposed to be happy? Nearly 246,000 accounts liked this tweet, and I have no problem with that.
About 40 percent of my first full-time job was dedicated to making GIFs—a skill I had professed to have during the interview process, and that turned out to be much harder than I thought. It took trial and error to figure out how to make sure the colors weren’t too weird, the frame rate too fast, the file too big.This was 2015, and GIFs had to be smaller than 1 megabyte before you could upload them to most social platforms.
Recently, at a fancy arts complex in Manhattan, the billionaire Frank McCourt led a three-day series of talks and workshops about the future of the internet—part of his expensive effort to “fix technology, save democracy.
The original iPhone SE is a great little phone, and I love it. It has a headphone jack—remember those? It fits in a butt pocket. It was announced in the Obama era.Sure, the first one I owned, which I purchased in 2017, had only 16GB of storage.
A viral video starring an adorable child has briefly united the world in shared understanding: “It’s corn!”The child, whose first name is Tariq and whose last name is unknown, but who also goes by “CEO of Corn,” appeared in a video on a popular Instagram account called Recess Therapy. (Recess Therapy is a man-on-the-street-style interview show on which all the guests are children.
Last spring, my boyfriend sublet a spare room in his apartment to an aspiring model. The roommate was young and made us feel old, but he was always game for a bottle of wine in the living room, and he seemed to like us, even though he sometimes suggested that we were boring or not that hot.One night, he and my boyfriend started bickering about which Lorde album is better, the first one or the second one.
The president is terrifying! He has laser eyes, or he has laser eyes and he’s screaming, or he has laser eyes and he’s commanding bolts of lightning, like God. He is drinking Republican tears with a splash of lime. He is eating Mitch McConnell’s head?Although Joe Biden has often been the subject of memes related to his friendship with Barack Obama or his obsession with ice cream, he has lately become a different sort of internet figure, known as “Dark Brandon.
In February 2021, Facebook abruptly wiped all of the news from its platform in Australia. The country’s lawmakers were trying to force the company to share its profits with media outlets, and this was the dramatic response. The gambit worked: After a nearly week-long blackout, which extended to pages from Australian nonprofits and government services, the new regulations were scaled back.
Sign up for Kaitlyn and Lizzie’s newsletter here.Lizzie: It’s getting hot out there, huh? The weather, the housing market, the trend of eating eggplant parm while wearing a claw clip. Everything costs $32, my lease is up in two weeks, and my landlord won’t respond to any texts or emails. Better get out and let off some steam before we boil over.Cut to: a recent Thursday night, looking for something to do.
“If you want to come ‘see my cows’ for the weekend, let me know,” Laurel Ysebaert, the owner of a small Ontario cattle ranch posted on TikTok in May, as the U.S. Supreme Court prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade. “I can give you a safe space while you recover from ‘seeing my cows.’”You get it.
Sign up for Kaitlyn and Lizzie’s newsletter here.Kaitlyn: The Hampton Jitney, according to a New York Times article from 1985, is “the quintessential transportation for a certain kind of New Yorker.” George Plimpton claimed to have written one and a half books while riding it. Lauren Bacall was also a well-known patron. Passengers were given free seltzer and newspapers then, but that is no longer the case.
When I was 21, the cool thing to be was famous on Instagram. Now the cooler thing to be is a mystery. Anonymity is in.The youngest adult generation and the most online generation is frustrated with being surveilled and embarrassed by attention-seeking behaviors. This has instigated a retreat into smaller internet spaces and secret-sharing apps, as well as a mini-renaissance for Tumblr, where users rarely use their full names.
On the morning of August 25, 2014, a 16-year-old girl arrived at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in baffling condition. She was short of breath but had no chest pain. She had no history of any lung condition, and no abnormal sounds in her breathing.
Kaitlyn: I need to be careful so you don’t think I’m speaking hyperbolically. These are my real feelings: Coney Island is heaven on earth. I think if “they” ever touched it—if they ever tore things down and put boring things in their place—that would be it for me. My heart would be broken.
A shadow box above Rebecca’s dining-room table, hanging there since 2006, displays an autographed copy of the Pirates of the Caribbean script—signed by Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom, and Johnny Depp. Though Rebecca, at age 36, is emphatically no longer a Depp fan, she says she keeps the script on her wall as a conversation starter. If someone asks about it, maybe she’ll go into the full story, rather than pretending she never liked Depp.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. “We were all ugly,” Amanda, a 22-year-old student from Florida told me, recalling the online community she found when she was 18. “Men didn’t like us, guys didn’t want to be with us, and it was fine to acknowledge it.
Elon Musk is buying Twitter and taking the public company private in order to save “free speech.” That much we know: He has made his intentions clear.But what will actually change about the social-media platform is still largely a mystery, and the hints don’t suggest that Twitter’s about to become a free-speech free-for-all. Maybe Musk will reinstate Donald Trump on the platform.
The Twitter account @libsoftiktok has gained a significant and influential following by reposting TikTok videos of LGBTQ teachers and suggesting that they may be guilty of “grooming” or other forms of sexual predation. In The Washington Post on Tuesday, the reporter Taylor Lorenz identified the previously pseudonymous woman behind Libs of TikTok as the Brooklyn real-estate salesperson Chaya Raichik. (Lorenz is a former Atlantic staff writer.
About six months ago, my Twitter feed started getting confusing. I couldn’t tell the NFTs of cartoon women apart.World of Women, which is a collection of illustrated portraits of women, was one of the earliest and splashiest—the one with a film and television deal. Women Rise, which is a collection of illustrated portraits of women, expressed in its “roadmap” a commitment to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
The confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson have been marked by bizarre lines of questioning from Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Maybe none was weirder and more surprising than an attack by Josh Hawley, who planted the idea that Jackson is abnormally sympathetic toward consumers of child pornography.
The actor Julia Fox met Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, on New Year’s Eve in Miami, and by the following week she was on the phone with Interview, providing behind-the-scenes commentary on all of the photos of them wearing dramatic outfits, going on expensive outings, and kissing on the floor.The first flashy celebrity romance of 2022 was glamorous to some and unsettling to others.