Culture

Seeking out witches, psychics, mediums, or other purveyors of magic or mysticism during times of change or uncertainty has been happening for centuries. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Yelp noted a 74 percent increase in Americans searching…

Time capsules turn up in the most unexpected places online. This one surfaced by design. It’s a YouTube video, dated September 25, 2010. In it, dozens of people packed on a dark dance floor hold their hands up in anticipation of a beat…

Inside a nondescript brick warehouse on Preston Street in Houston, a crowd gathered with their hopes cast on the future. Assembled among the 60-person flock were Byron Spruell, president of league operations for the NBA, and TikTok food…

No question about it: Nadella’s Microsoft is a triumph. Finally, in the 2020s, Microsoft has centered on the most innovative tech since the PC itself. And though revenues from AI products haven’t begun to offset Microsoft’s huge…

Neither would be simple. The Sexypedia had withstood other attempts to remove the site, including one by its original owner after they left. Fandom received multiple takedown requests, but community members pointed the finger at a YouTube…

In the mid-1990s, the masterminds behind Pokémon were building a powerful trifecta: a handful of role-playing adventures for Nintendo’s Game Boy, a physical card game, and an animated kids’ TV show following the adventures of a tween and…

At an upscale sushi bar in New York last week, a smattering of media and policy types chowed down on a menu of sushi rolls, peking duck tapas, and mushroom salad. But what made this menu unusual was the one ingredient that ran through the…

The morning of November 5, hours before I was confronted with the sick realization that the world was again about to get exponentially harder for me and the people I love, I received an email from Kunal Lunawat, CEO and cofounder of Wildr,…

The Swifties were the canaries in the coal mine. Last week, as the fallout from the US presidential election ricocheted across the internet, Taylor Swift fans took a stand. In droves, they left X and went to Bluesky, where, as one Swiftie…

TikTok creator @lizabookrecs had a question: When did BookTok become political? It was in the hours after Donald Trump had won the election for US president and the subset of TikTok that likes to talk about literature was already starting…