After years of sitting on the sidelines, content creators became a part of the mainstream political media this year, delivering election news, analysis, and political commentary to their online fans—all while sidestepping the traditional press. Eighty-one-year-old Joe Biden was serenaded on camera by the delightfully cringe TikTok singer Harry Daniels. Bernie Sanders stumped for Kamala […]
Hilariously, almost all the third-party integrations the company launched—DoorDash, Uber, Midjourney, and more—are being retired, so those functions just don’t work. (Not that they really worked before.) The scroll wheel is less janky, and the interface improvements are welcome. For example, you can now press and hold the push-to-talk button and scroll up or down […]
Love it or hate it, you have to admit Temu had a banger year. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese-owned ecommerce site, known for selling a vast array of astonishingly affordable goods, took only two years to become a household name in the US. Over the past 12 months, it has topped download charts, surpassing […]
Every year has its own mix of digital security debacles, from the absurd to the sinister, but 2024 was particularly marked by hacking sprees in which cybercriminals and state-backed espionage groups repeatedly exploited the same weakness or type of target to fuel their frenzy. For attackers, the approach is ruthlessly efficient, but for compromised institutions—and […]
Irrational self-belief is one of the reasons villains deeply resonate across culture, says Kevin Wynter, a professor of media studies at Pomona College. “In a repressive society such as ours that champions conformity to better cultivate consumers, characters who actively reject the trappings of capitalist fantasia or who operate by the codes of a self-fashioned […]
Do you think they’re still doing a good job? I do. I think they’ve changed the narrative. I think they’ve taken something that was a threat to them and they’ve characterized it in a way that’s negative. And I think that people believe it, so I think it was effective. Yeah. I’m in the UK, […]
To fix that, several startups launched niche dating apps—some puzzling, others entirely predictable—designed to satisfy unique needs, with many of them built around the promise of AI. Volar, created by a former product director at Snap, uses a chatbot to message back and forth with potential daters on your behalf. There’s also Rizz, Irisand Elateall […]
Deshawn “DJ” Chow waited a year to receive a treatment that could change his life. The 19-year-old was born with sickle cell disease, which makes his red blood cells crescent-shaped and sticky. The misshapen cells build up and block blood vessels, cutting off oxygen to parts of the body and causing episodes of excruciating pain. […]
2024 was a big year for spatial computing, bookended by the release of two major virtual reality headsets: the powerful but expensive Apple Vision Pro and the more affordable Meta Quest 3S. While these devices transport their users to vast, strange digital realms, they can also feel limiting, because they reduce—or even sever—the wearer’s connection […]
Games with Black leads and characters were derided as forced. Female characters deemed unattractive or masculine were suffering from “DEI chin.” Dragon Age: The Veilguardwas criticized by far-right trolls for its customization options, which allow players to create characters with top surgery scars or play with a nonbinary companion. After reviews were released, conspiracists latched […]
