Caroline Mimbs Nyce

This past spring, I participated in the sacred tradition that comes around once every few years: I got a new iPhone. The speaker on my old one had broken, forcing my hand. But let’s be clear. I didn’t care about the speaker. The real reason you upgrade an iPhone, of course, is to get a better camera.Within a couple of weeks of unboxing my new iPhone 14 Pro, however, I noticed something odd happening. I’d take a selfie, think I looked great, and lock my phone, satisfied.

There is no easy way to explain the sum of Google’s knowledge. It is ever-expanding. Endless. A growing web of hundreds of billions of websites, more data than even 100,000 of the most expensive iPhones mashed together could possibly store. But right now, I can say this: Google is confused about whether there’s an African country beginning with the letter k.I’ve asked the search engine to name it.

The man I am looking at is very hot. He’s got that angular hot-guy face, with hollow cheeks and a sharp jawline. His dark hair is tousled, his skin blurred and smooth. But I shouldn’t even bother describing him further, because this man is self-evidently hot, the kind of person you look at and immediately categorize as someone whose day-to-day life is defined by being abnormally good-looking.This hot man, however, is not real.

The future of driverless cars in America is a promotional booth with a surfboard and a movie director’s clapboard. Robotaxis have officially arrived in Los Angeles, and last week, residents lined up in Santa Monica’s main promenade to get a smartphone code needed to ride them. For now, the cars, from the Alphabet-owned start-up Waymo, won’t leave the tame streets of Santa Monica.

This week, a teenager might open up their TikTok feed and immediately be served a video about a hairbrush that promises to gently detangle the roughest of tangles. Or a clip about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s rumored romance. Or the app could show them a scene from the Israeli Supernova music festival, where on Saturday a young woman named Noa Argamani was put on the back of a motorcycle as her boyfriend was held by captors.

In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, both Facebook and Twitter decided to suspend lame-duck President Donald Trump from their platforms. He had encouraged violence, the sites reasoned; the megaphone was taken away, albeit temporarily. To many Americans horrified by the attack, the decisions were a relief. But for some conservatives, it marked an escalation in a different kind of assault: It was, to them, a clear sign of Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias.

This past Sunday, Keila Shaheen woke up to find that, once again, she was the best-selling author across all of Amazon. To get there, she’d outsold every other book on the platform—including Walter Isaacson’s buzzy biography of Elon Musk and the Fox News host Mark Levin’s screed The Democrat Party Hates America. She’d even beat out Oprah.At just 24, she is a bona fide publishing juggernaut. And yet few outside of TikTok have even bothered to notice.

Do you find yourself constantly closing your eyes and seeing marble? Do thoughts of Caesar and chariot races and a nascent republic punctuate your daily goings?All roads lead to Rome—and apparently so do all male thoughts. Across social media, women have been encouraged to ask the men in their life how often they think about the Roman empire and to record the answer.

Matt Warshaw still remembers the jolt of horror he felt when the camera went up. It was September 2000, a decade since he quit his job as the editor of Surfing magazine and fled the crowded breaks of Southern California for the cold, isolated waves of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. When he saw the cam on the flagpole at a beachfront house his friend was renting, he was livid, certain that the website it broadcast to, Surfline, would bring crowds to his favorite spot.

TikTok’s algorithm knows. People speak of the unseen program governing the platform’s “For You” page, where videos populate based on ones you’ve previously interacted with, as an omniscient, omnipresent god. The algorithm has figured out your every interest and hobby, every thought you’ve ever had. More than once, it’s been alleged to have figured out that a person is queer before they knew themselves.

Updated at 9:15 p.m. ET on August 10, 2023A few days ago, the hurricane forecasts looked good. Dora was going to miss Hawaii, passing by far to the south. And yet the storm still ended up wreaking havoc on the islands, not as a rain-bearing cyclone but as wind—hot, dry wind, which, as it blew across the island of Maui, met wildfire.

This has been a landmark summer in the world of “floaty rock drama.” Two weeks ago, in a pair of draft papers that have not been peer-reviewed, scientists in South Korea claimed to have found a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor, and described how to make it. In theory, this magical material could revolutionize our world. It also levitates. The purported discovery became an internet sensation.

It’s August, but Santa Claus is hard at work. No, he’s not busy checking his lists or helping the elves make presents for all the good little children around the world. He’s livestreaming on TikTok, where he has 1.3 million followers.And this year, Santa’s the one with the wish list.

Krysten Wagner, a Los Angeles–based TikTok influencer, is defending her decision to promote products on TikTok while wearing a face mask that’s on sale for $50. In a video from June, Wagner squeezes white cream from a shiny blue tube and begins applying it to her taut, perfectly clear skin. “If you’re not familiar,” she says, smearing the cream on her forehead, “you can now shop in the TikTok app.

Earlier this year, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app of all time, reaching 100 million active users in what seemed like an astonishingly brisk two months. Now, just six months later, that record has been usurped: Threads got there in less than a week. According to data from Sensor Tower, a market-intelligence firm, Meta’s Twitter clone had the best launch day of any app in the past decade.The internet is moving faster than ever before.

Just past midnight on a Tuesday in June, an e-bike battery erupted into flames while charging in a Manhattan repair shop. The blaze was quick and likely very, very hot. Firefighters responded within five minutes, but it was already too late: Flames spread to nearby apartments, killing four people.It was not the first incident like this. New York City has been rattled by more than 100 battery fires so far in 2023, according to its fire commissioner, killing 13 people.

The smoke is back. Large swaths of America are once again engulfed in a toxic haze that’s drifted down from Canada, which is experiencing its worst fire season on record. Our northern neighbor has burned through a record-breaking 8.2 million hectares so far this year, sending smoke plumes as far as Europe.

After more than a decade, autocorrect “fails” could be on their way out. Apple’s much-maligned spelling software is getting upgraded by artificial intelligence: Using sophisticated language models, the new autocorrect won’t just check words against a dictionary, but will be able to consider the context of the word in a sentence.

In the past six years, California has logged three of its five deadliest fires on record, and eight of its 10 biggest. More than 100 people have died, tens of thousands have been displaced, and millions more have been subjected to smoky air, the health consequences of which we don’t fully understand.We know that climate change supercharges these fires thanks to the drier environments it creates, but by how much is tricky to say.

The Mona Lisa is small. Less than three feet tall and about two feet wide, it hangs tiny in the biggest exhibition room at France’s Louvre Museum. And in the past two or so weeks, some vigilante AI artists have decided that it should be bigger—much bigger. They’re making that happen using a beta tool in Adobe Photoshop called “generative fill.

This winter, storm after storm after storm dumped rain and snow on California, and now, as the spring poppies bloom, the state is lush. Hillsides once prickly with dry vegetation have softened. Ski resorts, once thawed out and closed by late spring, are buried under record snow and planning to stay open into July. Satellite photos show a state transformed from brown to green, streaked from top to bottom with bright-emerald patches.

For the past decade or so, the social internet has been largely controlled by secretive algorithms. Designed by tech companies to capture attention and drive engagement, they determine which posts end up in your feeds and which sink like a rock, never to be seen again. These algorithms play a role in polarization, rocketing ordinary people to overnight fame, and the spread of extreme, violence-provoking content.

AI Taylor Swift is mad. She is calling up Kim Kardashian to complain about her “lame excuse of a husband,” Kanye West. (Kardashian and West are, in reality, divorced.) She is threatening to skip Europe on her Eras Tour if her fans don’t stop asking her about international dates. She is insulting people who can’t afford tickets to her concerts and using an unusual amount of profanity. She’s being kind of rude.But she can also be very sweet.

If you believe in the multibillion-dollar valuations, the prognostications from some of tech’s most notable figures, and the simple magic of getting a computer to do your job for you, then you might say we’re at the start of the chatbot era. Last November, OpenAI released ChatGPT into the unsuspecting world: It became the fastest-growing consumer app in history and immediately seemed to reconfigure how people think of conversational programs.

When the Washington State–based travel guide and TV host Rick Steves decided to return to Europe in early 2022, he wasn’t sure how many of his favorite local spots had survived two years of pandemic life.

More than 350,000 Tesla vehicles are being recalled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration because of concerns about their self-driving-assistance software—but this isn’t your typical recall. The fix will be shipped “over the air” (meaning the software will be updated remotely, and the hardware does not need to be addressed).Missy Cummings sees the voluntary nature of the recall as a positive sign that Tesla is willing to cooperate with regulators.

“Sometimes a journey must end for a new one to begin,” the Panic! at the Disco lead singer Brendon Urie wrote in an Instagram post last month announcing the band’s separation after 19 years. Urie, the band’s only remaining original member, said that he and his wife were expecting their first child (who has since been born), and that, going forward, his focus would be on family.

The Maryland State Capitol building is older than America. It is the only state capitol to have also served as the nation’s capital; in the country’s earliest days, Congress met in its chambers. To work in Annapolis is to operate in the shadow of history. So maybe that explains why, 246 years into the American project, one state lawmaker sees his four-day-workweek bill as carrying on in the tradition of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

The scar first appears on Annie Bonelli’s TikTok on March 18, 2021. In the video, she is in a car, earbuds in, lip-synching to the song “I Know,” by D. Savage. The mark on her cheek is blurry and soft, like a smudge of dirt. She is bobbing her head underneath a caption about how it feels when someone accidentally likes a social-media post that’s more than a year old.

Gas stoves are a new front in the culture wars. This month, an errant comment from a bureaucrat caused a full-blown conservative panic over whether such stoves would be banned, eventually prompting a White House statement that effectively walked the whole thing back.Amid all this posturing, a more practical concern is getting lost: How much does gas actually matter when it comes to cooking? Are there some dishes that just can’t be made on electric stoves?I called up J.