Some years back, I stopped by a French deli to buy some big chunks of cheese and carried them home in a plastic bag. The cheese was so heavy that the bag stretched and bulged, and the handle dug painfully into my hands.
During a reading project I undertook to better understand the “third wave of democracy” — the remarkable and rapid rise of democracies in Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa in the 1970s and 80s — I came to realize that this ascendency of democratic polities was not the result of some force propelling history toward its natural, final state, as some scholars have argued.
IT STARTS WITH a familiar intro, unmistakably the Weeknd’s 2017 hit “Die for You.” But as the first verse of the song begins, a different vocalist is heard: Michael Jackson. Or, at least, a machine simulation of the late pop star’s voice.
It was when I was researching a story on that I realized there truly was no escape from the influencer industry. If business bros with corporate jobs in tech and finance — stable, high-paying careers with cushy benefits! — felt the need to supplement their status (and possibly their income) by becoming influencers, what hope was there for the rest of us?
Microsoft is making a desperate play. Having spent billions on a search engine that no one uses, the company has sunk billions more into equipping it with the chatbot technology ChatGPT, on the theory that answering queries with automatically generated, falsehood-strewn paragraphs rather than links to webpages will be what finally persuades users to switch from Google Search.
In 2012, when Steven Soderbergh and Channing Tatum released “Magic Mike,” a moist, underlit caper about male entertainers at a Tampa strip club, they thought they were making an indie. Instead, the film grossed a hundred and sixty-seven million dollars, spawning an international franchise.
Last week in my Articles of Interest, I linked to an article about Bailey Richardson, one of the eleven original employees working for Instagram when they were purchased by Facebook for one billion dollars in 2012. The article discusses how Richardson and a few other original employees have now abandoned the popular social media platform by deleting their profiles, citing as their reasons, a move away from the original ethos of artistry, intimacy, discovery and free expression on the platform, giving way to a celebrity-driven marketplace.
