A few years ago, advertisements for a software service named Monday.com seemed to be suddenly everywhere online. This ubiquity didn’t come cheap. An S.E.C. filing revealed that the product’s developers had spent close to a hundred and thirty million dollars on advertising in 2020 alone, which amounted to roughly eighty per cent of the company’s annual revenue.
“They were the new Charles and Diana, in some ways,” Gary Neville, the former Manchester United player, says in the first episode of “Beckham,” a new, four-part documentary on Netflix. They, of course, are David Beckham, Neville’s friend and onetime teammate, and Beckham’s then girlfriend, Victoria Adams, a.k.a. Posh Spice.
Many people have put forth theories about why, exactly, the internet is bad. The arguments go something like this: Social platforms encourage cruelty, snap reactions, and the spreading of disinformation, and they allow for all of this to take place without accountability, instantaneously and at scale.
omething strange happened the first time I encountered an article online that I wrote for a print magazine. The article was an old-fashioned feature that had taken me months to report, then perhaps six weeks to write, plus another six to eight weeks to edit and rewrite with the help of capable editors, copy editors and fact-checkers who helped give the magazine prose of yesteryear its distinctive glossy finish.
The Web site Stack Overflow was created in 2008 as a place for programmers to answer one another’s questions. At the time, the Web was thin on high-quality technical information; if you got stuck while coding and needed a hand, your best bet was old, scattered forum threads that often led nowhere.
Time is not to be trusted. This should come as news to no one. Yet recent times have left people feeling betrayed that the reliable metronome laying down the beat of their lives has, in a word, gone bonkers. Time sulked and slipped away, or slogged to a stop, rushing ahead or hanging back unaccountably; it no longer came in tidy lumps clearly clustered in well-defined categories: past, present, future.
ON SUNDAY WE went on a epic 50 km bicycle ride past Wimbledon and Clapham Common (where we stopped for a bit to lounge in the sun and nibble on the mini ice cream bars and pan au chocolat we picked up along the way) before heading into the city centre...
There’s a three-story, three-bedroom town house at 514 Broome Street in Manhattan with an expansive ivy-laden terrace. Entry is through a dining room swathed in exposed brick. A dramatic wooden staircase services the second floor. Venture to the basement and you’ll find a wine cellar big enough for 2,500 bottles.