memes

On July 14, internet history was made. After capturing video of a cryptid-like raccoon with a hunched spine and stumpy tail in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, Kiana Hall uploaded the footage to her Instagram account, referring to the…

The flyer on a pole in San Francisco was very straightforward, if a little bewildering. It read, “Seeking New Polycule Member: We recently had a defector in our polycule and are seeking a new member.”A link at the bottom invited anyone…

OpenAI has a goblin problem.Instructions designed to guide the behavior of the company’s latest model as it writes code have been revealed to include a line, repeated several times, that specifically forbids it from randomly mentioning an…

As ceasefire announcements between the US and Iran—and separately between Israel and Lebanon—dominated headlines over the past two weeks, they also prompted a look back at how war spread online: through memes.There were jokes about…

Minutes after President Donald Trump announced that he would not wipe out “a whole civilization” on Tuesday evening, a team of self-described young Iranian activists jumped into action.Members of the group known as Explosive Media were…

Last year, a couple in San Francisco accidentally paid way too much money for a dirt road. On an auction bid starting at $1, they put down $25,000, thinking they were getting a screaming deal on a parcel of developable land right next to…

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential race wasn’t just a prelude to mass deportations and geopolitical chaos. The MAGA faithful also saw it as the final, definitive rebuke of “woke” ideology.By that point, the term had been fully…

Taylor Lorenz doesn’t want to touch grass. The technology and culture journalist wrote the bestselling book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, and she has the screen time to prove it.…

There are a few ways to wrap your head around watching a seven-and-a-half-hour movie.When I was a kid I used to mark time in “Roseannes,” where 30 minutes would equal one Roseanne—the run time of the sitcom. My junior hockey games were two…

Brian Barrett: The irony is my favorite part because I feel like venture capitalists have largely positioned themselves as immune to the effects of AI because they're very special and surely a machine can—Zoë Schiffer: It's art, not…