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.
In 1925, a new, highly desirable trait was invented. Press reports hailed a new Hollywood star: Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten, an Austrian noble and tennis champion, who was rumored to be appearing in a film from the megaproducer Samuel Goldwyn.
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.
IT IS, in fact, possible to have a decent time on Goodreads. You just have to ignore everything about the way the site is designed and how you’re supposed to use it. When I first signed up in early 2012...
Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide.
Since the pandemic upended the world, we’ve been getting plenty of mixed signals about cities. We’ve heard both that cities like New York are over and that they’re immensely popular. Are they bastions of disease that people will forever avoid?
One of the stultifying but ultimately true maxims of the analytics movement in sports says that most narratives around player performance are lies. Each player has a “true talent level” based on their abilities, but the actual results are mostly up to variance and luck.
“Blurred Lines” wasn’t supposed to be a meaningful song. It was, by design, a trifle: Pharrell, in imperial-superstar mode, goofing off with the white soul singer and textbook sex idiot Robin Thicke and tossing in a tongue-twisting T.I. verse later for good measure.
Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them. In the comments, viewers—aghast at the goofiness and self-obsession on display—like to say that it’s time for a proverbial asteroid to come and deliver the Earth to its proverbial fiery end.
What is a newspaper? Though a few decades ago the answer might have been obvious, it’s no longer so easy to say. Newspapers have long been about more than just news; they appear less and less on paper and, despite their geographically inflected names, aren’t firmly rooted in any particular place. The New York Times is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think of an old-fashioned extra-extra-hear-all-about-it newspaper, but it’s also the poster child for the medium’s metamorphosis.
Nearly two months ago, on April 26,2022, it was announced that Elon Musk was buying Twitter. Upon hearing the news, we immediately deleted the Belgrave Crescent Twitter account. Of course, the last time we’d tweeted anything there was in 2017 so it wasn’t being used anyway, but we thought it was a good time to finally make it official.
I am not a huge fan of aphorisms, but every once in a while I come across something that makes PERFECT SENSE and lately, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about these words: Your energy is your currency. Spend it wisely. Invest it well ...
His relationship with social media is a striking manifestation of the worries expressed by the French philosopher Guy Debord, in his classic work The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Social life is shifting from ‘having to appearing – all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances,’ he claims. ‘At the same time all individual reality has become social.’
AFTER I LEFT the (traditional) working world for good two years after I began This Is Glamorous, every night, before I went to sleep, I found myself really looking forward to the next morning. That first cup of coffee, reading, working at my desk in my pyjamas. It was, and has been ideal for a long time.
BEFORE THE LOCKDOWN, our Instagram feed was filled with fashion influencers in elaborate magazine-like editorials taken in exotic and far-flung locations. Over the past three months however, due to travel restrictions and stay at home guidance, we began seeing an influx of at-home mirror selfies ...
