Culture

Anna Kai believes in self-gaslighting. On TikTok, as @itsmaybeboth, she markets beauty products for Garnier, Nivea, and Nexxus Hair Care while dispensing relationship advice to her 1.3 million followers. “If you can gaslight yourself into…

You know you’ve gone too deep into YouTube fandom when you can’t remember which dude with an expensive microphone told you what while speaking straight to camera.Still, earlier this week, that was the particular sarlacc pit I had been…

On Wednesday, Juneteenth, Kendrick Lamar threw himself a party. Dubbed “the Pop Out: Ken and Friends,” the concert—held at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles—served as a celebration of West Coast hip-hop, and a “victory lap” for Lamar after he…

That’s fair.When you think about building stories from multiple audiences, not just audiences of color, but also queer audiences, disabled audiences, female audiences, I mean, we're seeing so much evidence at the box office lately…

Metroid Prime 4 is alive. During today’s Nintendo Direct event, the company revealed that the highly anticipated sequel, now called Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, is headed to Switch next year.It’s been roughly seven years since Nintendo first…

The penalty was invented in England on February 14, 1891. It was the last minute of an FA Cup quarter-final between Notts County and Stoke City when a defender for County stopped a shot on the line with his hand. Stoke were awarded a free…

When a new episode of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire aired the Sunday before last, a particular sort of fuse was lit in online conversations around the show. The fifth installment of the second season, “Don’t Be Afraid, Just Start the…

When a flattering email arrived inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I’d later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam. For one thing, the…

The rent is too damn high, even in video games. For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of…

Before Orkut launched in January 2004, Büyükkökten warned the team that the platform he’d built it on could handle only 200,000 users. It wouldn't be able to scale. “They said, let's just launch and see what happens,” he explains. The rest…