On September 28, Bowen Yang performed one of 2024’s most resonant pieces of political theater while dressed as a pygmy hippo. Yang was behind the desk on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment, dressed like Moo Deng, who at the time the show aired was the internet’s current fave. What he was saying, though, sounded […]
A wooded area. A roaring fire. A bit of gently falling snow. This is my happy place. Except, it’s not out my window; it’s on TikTok. For months I have “taught” TikTok to serve me this content: people, usually dudes, building shelters by hand in the wilderness. Most of them are ultra-sped-up timelapses that start […]
Earlier this week, feeling somewhat inundated with memes and social media posts about Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I emailed Simone Driessen. She’s a professor of media and popular culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam and often has smart insights on the ways online commentary and real-world issues intersect. Mostly, […]
In the US, people have strong opinions about health insurance companies, and when it came out that the alleged shooter had written “deny,” “depose,” “defend” on some ammo casings, they rallied round. When it turned out Mangione had been spotted at a fast-food restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania, someone on Bluesky called it SnitchDonald’s; others briefly […]
In the mid-1990s, the masterminds behind Pokémon were building a powerful trifecta: a handful of role-playing adventures for Nintendo’s Game Boy, a physical card game, and an animated kids’ TV show following the adventures of a tween and his best friend, Pikachu. It was the early days of one of pop culture’s most beloved and […]
Following the US presidential election, Swifties, the name for Taylor Swift’s fans, are fleeing X for Bluesky. X’s owner, billionaire Elon Musk, was one of Donald Trump’s biggest backers, funneling over $100 million into the Trump-supporting America PAC; stumping for the candidate on the campaign trail; and boosting Trump’s messaging on X. Musk also helped […]
It’s really no wonder that there has been this scattering to the winds of people on social media now, as if they didn’t need another reason to migrate to other platforms. I remember that moment when there was Threads, Bluesky, Twitter, Mastodon, and some other ones—and I’m like, this is the fucking War of the […]
Twenty years ago, MySpace and Facebook ushered in an inspired age of social media. Today, the sticky parables of online life are inescapable: Connection is a convenience as much as it is a curse. A lot’s changed since those early years. In June, the US surgeon general, Vivek H. Murthy, called for a warning label […]
