For the first thirty years of my life, I lived within a one-mile radius of Willesden Green Tube Station. It’s true I went to college—I even moved to East London for a bit—but such interludes were brief. I soon returned to my little corner of North West London. Then suddenly, quite abruptly, I left not just the city but England itself.
Gen Zers are still in the early stages of their careers and personal finance journeys, but their financial habits are already proving to be radically different from those of their predecessors. With heightened levels of anxiety about the future grounded in very real socioeconomic and environmental issues, Gen Zers are reconfiguring their approach to money.
There’s plenty to consider about Barbie, but let’s start with her feet. Perfectly arched, but not quite demi-pointe—the ideal position to fit into any pump. They’re instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever played with the iconic doll. So when the trailer for the upcoming live-action Barbie movie opened with a shot of star Margot Robbie stepping out of Barbie’s marabou stilettos, still on tiptoes, the internet exploded.
In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed. Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites.
After the nadir of Covid travel restrictions, summer travel season is in full swing. Air travel is projected to exceed pre-pandemic levels, according to the Transportation Security Administration. People are dusting off their passports, or waiting weeks to get them renewed, and applying for the visas they need for their destinations. International vacations take planning, even more so now. While the world has mostly opened back up since lockdowns, most nations have strict limits on how long noncitizens can visit.
Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the world’s most popular TV show, is supposed to be an everyman. The Truman Show is set in an island town, Seahaven, that evokes the prefab conformities of American suburbia. Truman is a brand in a setting that is stridently generic. Since his birth, he has navigated a world manufactured—by Christof, the creator of his show—for lucrative inoffensiveness. Everything around him exists to fulfill the primary mandate of a mass-market TV show: appealing to the widest possible audience.
The brain-powered individual, which is variously called the self, the ego, the mind, or “me,” lies at the center of Western thought. In the worldview of the West, we herald the greatest thinkers as world-changers. There is no more concise example of this than philosopher René Descartes’ famous statement, “Cogito, ergo sum,” or, “I think, therefore I am.” But who is this? Let’s take a closer look at the thinker, or the “me,” we all take for granted.
During the summer months in the Oxfordshire town where I live, I go swimming in the nearby 50-metre lido. With my inelegantly slow breaststroke, from time to time I accidentally gulp some of the pool’s opulent, chlorine-clean 5.9m litres of water.
The call came in to the concierge at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, the fabled luxury hotel on the French Riviera. It was spring 2007, and an assistant to Angelina Jolie said that Jolie and her fiancé, Brad Pitt, were seeking a sizable property in the South of France to rent.
In 2007, three experimental psychologists, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, coined the word ‘sugrophobia’, which would translate to something like a ‘fear of sucking’. The researchers – Kathleen Vohs, Roy Baumeister and Jason Chin – were looking to name the familiar and specific dread that people experience when they get the inkling that they’re ‘being a sucker’ – that someone is taking advantage of them, partly thanks to their own decisions.
A handful of global giants dominate the industrialisation of the Amazon rainforest, extracting tens of billions of dollars of raw materials every year, according to an analysis that highlights how much value is being sucked out of the region with relatively little going back in.
Do you remember life before podcasts? Yes, obviously, is likely to be the short answer. Podcasting is still a relatively youthful medium, after all. In fact, it is exactly 20 years this month since the format’s invention: Open Source – a politics and culture discussion show hosted by the journalist Christopher Lydon – debuted in the summer of 2003, and is widely considered the first ever podcast. (Not that it was actually called podcasting at that point; the term was coined the following year by Ben Hammersley in an article for the Guardian.)
On July 13, 1833, during a visit to the Cabinet of Natural History at the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson had an epiphany. Peering at the museum’s specimens—butterflies, hunks of amber and marble, carved seashells—he felt overwhelmed by the interconnectedness of nature, and humankind’s place within it.
On Wednesday, for the first time in over seven months, sneakerheads put aside their love-hate relationship with Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, and resumed a love-hate relationship with his Yeezy sneaker brand—which is to say, loving to buy them and hating to miss out.
A touchscreen hanging in the middle of the exhibition highlighted all the questions for everyone to see. Would you have a chip implanted in your brain to make you smarter? Would you leave your elderly mother or baby in a robot’s care? Should that robot have rights? Would you allow supposedly impartial artificial intelligence (AI) software to judge your legal case? Would you transfer your consciousness to the cloud in order to live forever?
