LUIGI MANGIONE, CURRENTLY the internet’s main character, probably isn’t who you think he is. Main characters are like that. As soon as someone achieves main character status, they become the screen onto which the world’s opinions and preconceptions get projected.
In their iconic song “Bohemian Rhapsody”, Queen asks a question that feels increasingly relevant in our digital age: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?” As we navigate a world where virtual reality and information overload increasingly influence our perception of reality, this question becomes more than just a catchy lyric—it’s a philosophical conundrum at the heart of our modern existence.
“Apple computer used to be famous for the fact that you wouldn’t even need a manual. You could just pick up the telephone or plug in the computer and in seconds, you could use it and learn. It was self-explanatory”...
If you’ve ever walked a city street so late at night that it’s very early in the morning, you may have been greeted by a strange and unbidden thought. In the eerie stillness, it can feel for a moment as though you’re the last person alive.
WE ARE FINALLY back with the fifth instalment of our popular series, Talking Points, after a very long hiatus, and this week, we’re looking at the concepts of core values, false ideals, and hyperreality.
When we first launched our Substack, we used our current name but quickly abandoned it, focusing instead on TIG for over a year. In August of last year, we created a new Substack under a different name, only to realize we already had an existing one that readers were discovering.
The influencers, yes, with their perfect makeup and strategic camera angles and professional lighting, all to make their lives seem enviable while narrating their days in a strange monotone. They show off massive homes with the house numbers in the font of gentrification.
Imagine a place where you can taste some of the finest wines in the world, enjoy delicious gourmet meals, hike on sea-sprayed oceanfront trails, explore deep ancient caves, surf world class waves, and meet some of the friendliest people anywhere on earth.
Emerging science suggests that the effects of trauma—from war and genocide to abuse and environmental factors—could be genetically passed down from one generation to another.
Paris, that most presentable of capitals, is being polished before it hosts the Summer Games. Around the Champs-Élysées, where some of the benches date to the 1850s, the seats are getting a new layer of paint before an estimated 15 million visitors arrive to scuff them up again.
There’s no such thing as a miracle cure for weight loss, but the latest obesity drugs seem to come pretty close. People who take Ozempic or other weekly shots belonging to a class known as GLP-1 agonists, after the gut hormone they mimic, can lose a fifth or more of their body weight in a year. Incessant “food noise” fueling the urge to eat suddenly goes silent.
For most of advertising history, “red” or “blue” as partisan loyalty signaled more your taste for Coke or Pepsi than your identity as Republican or Democrat. Mass markets, by definition, necessitated selling to both sides of the aisle.
If you attended the 2019 Venice Biennale, you might have waited in a long line to see the prize-winning piece “Sun & Sea (Marina),” an opera performance staged by three Lithuanian artists on a sandy faux beach that had been installed in a warehouse.
This past summer, I booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles with the hope of investigating what seems likely to be one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade: the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face.
On a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow-passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains.
