Kaitlyn Tiffany

For all of my life, I thought eating breakfast with Santa was totally normal. Every year, he would come to my church in western New York and sit in the corner of the reception hall for a few hours. (Sometimes, he was played by my dad or my cousin Frank.) The kids would eat pancakes and drink hot chocolate in his presence and work up their courage. Whenever they felt ready, they could meet the big guy and discuss whatever they needed to. And then they would get a candy cane.

Teenagers are experiencing a mental-health crisis. And though the science is messy and the matter isn’t settled, many suspect that social media is, in some substantial way, tangled up in the problem. Following this instinct, legislators and regulators at both the state and federal levels have suggested a slew of interventions aimed at protecting young people from the potential harms of social platforms.

In any war, onlookers from far outside the conflict zone have to decide what to believe about what is happening. This sounds difficult in theory, and it’s even more so in practice.This week, after a deadly explosion at the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, anybody checking social media for news would have immediately seen conflicting stories about what had happened. Initial news reports cited Gaza’s health ministry in asserting that the blast had come from an Israeli air strike.

Coca-Cola often experiments with new flavors, and they’re usually flavors you can imagine, having tasted them before: vanilla, cherry, lemon. But the latest is called Y3000, a reference to the far-off year 3000, and one that Coca-Cola says was concocted with the help of, in some way, artificial intelligence. It smells like circus-peanut candies and tastes mostly like Coke.

Around the time of the 2016 election, YouTube became known as a home to the rising alt-right and to massively popular conspiracy theorists. The Google-owned site had more than 1 billion users and was playing host to charismatic personalities who had developed intimate relationships with their audiences, potentially making it a powerful vector for political influence. At the time, Alex Jones’s channel, Infowars, had more than 2 million subscribers.

In the world of high school, every day is a battle. Recently, one of the most intimidating foes is the air. “School air,” as they call it on social media, is the latest way to explain the universal feeling of not looking your best at school. It smudges your makeup. It gives you awful hair days. It makes you look “dull” and “bad.”But it might not be so much of a problem if you watch the right videos.

Sign up for Kaitlyn and Lizzie’s newsletter here.Lizzie: One night several years ago, Kaitlyn and I and a group of other friends ended up at a party in the South Street Seaport. It was at the apartment of someone none of us knew, and I can’t say for sure how we got there. We were excited to see what kinds of people lived in this gift-shop neighborhood, and what their apartment would look like.

“DEMOCRACY INTERCEPTED,” reads the headline of a new special package in the journal Science. “Did platform feeds sow the seeds of deep divisions during the 2020 US presidential election?” Big question.

When they came up with machine-sliced bread, did we start referring to other bread as “annoying”? After the invention of the dishwasher, did we start calling our sinks “stupid”? Post-railroad, did we slander boats as “useless and embarrassing”?Obviously not. Yet after the smartphone came along, a category of product that was once known simply as “phones” became, rudely, “dumb phones.

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.

For the first time, the Supreme Court is considering its opinion on the brief but powerful “26 words that created the internet.”Enacted in 1996, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes online platforms from liability for anything that is posted on their site by a third party—a protection that allowed the web to bloom by encouraging experimentation and interactivity in its early years.

Sign up for Kaitlyn and Lizzie’s newsletter here.Lizzie: Do they call it a bar crawl because by the end of it you’ll be crawling? Or is it because if you attend one in February, you’ll be crawling out of your apartment wondering why the host, generally understood to be a party genius, decided to throw a bar crawl in the East Village on the coldest weekend of the year?Our friend Andrew (the brain behind last year’s Watergate party) was hosting this bar crawl.

When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals considered a lawsuit against Google in 2020, Judge Ronald M. Gould stated his view of the tech giant’s most significant asset bluntly: “So-called ‘neutral’ algorithms,” he wrote, can be “transformed into deadly missiles of destruction by ISIS.

Whatever else it is, Twitter is a place where the average person can subject others to their displeasure. They have been mistreated by Southwest Airlines. They have been angered by the comments of a man who sells beans. They have learned, to their horror, that the father of their favorite indie-pop star previously worked for the U.S. State Department.

Last night, several well-known journalists, including Ryan Mac of The New York Times and Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, were suspended from Twitter.The suspensions were ostensibly related to the journalists’ reporting on an account—@ElonJet, operated by the 20-year-old Jack Sweeney—which was dedicated to publishing the location of Elon Musk’s private jet based on public data.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk welcomed Donald Trump back to Twitter. Or rather, he tried to lure him back after lifting a 22-month suspension. Trump, who was banned for encouraging insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol and violating a content policy against inciting violence, has not actually tweeted anything yet. Musk would like him to, and so began posting some you know you want to memes, one using an image from the cartoon-for-adults Family Guy (which Donald Trump Jr.

Early on Wednesday morning, while I was scrolling through Twitter in order to learn the midterm-election results in the most piecemeal and confusing fashion possible, I noticed something a little off.

Here’s a very popular tweet: “she’s a 10 but she cries on her birthday every year.”Solid. Concise. I can see why people would relate to the sentiment. Who doesn’t want to think of themselves as hot? And further, who doesn’t already think of themselves as emotionally complicated enough to shed a tear on a day that is supposed to be happy? Nearly 246,000 accounts liked this tweet, and I have no problem with that.

About 40 percent of my first full-time job was dedicated to making GIFs—a skill I had professed to have during the interview process, and that turned out to be much harder than I thought. It took trial and error to figure out how to make sure the colors weren’t too weird, the frame rate too fast, the file too big.This was 2015, and GIFs had to be smaller than 1 megabyte before you could upload them to most social platforms.

Recently, at a fancy arts complex in Manhattan, the billionaire Frank McCourt led a three-day series of talks and workshops about the future of the internet—part of his expensive effort to “fix technology, save democracy.

The original iPhone SE is a great little phone, and I love it. It has a headphone jack—remember those? It fits in a butt pocket. It was announced in the Obama era.Sure, the first one I owned, which I purchased in 2017, had only 16GB of storage.

A viral video starring an adorable child has briefly united the world in shared understanding: “It’s corn!”The child, whose first name is Tariq and whose last name is unknown, but who also goes by “CEO of Corn,” appeared in a video on a popular Instagram account called Recess Therapy. (Recess Therapy is a man-on-the-street-style interview show on which all the guests are children.

Last spring, my boyfriend sublet a spare room in his apartment to an aspiring model. The roommate was young and made us feel old, but he was always game for a bottle of wine in the living room, and he seemed to like us, even though he sometimes suggested that we were boring or not that hot.One night, he and my boyfriend started bickering about which Lorde album is better, the first one or the second one.

The president is terrifying! He has laser eyes, or he has laser eyes and he’s screaming, or he has laser eyes and he’s commanding bolts of lightning, like God. He is drinking Republican tears with a splash of lime. He is eating Mitch McConnell’s head?Although Joe Biden has often been the subject of memes related to his friendship with Barack Obama or his obsession with ice cream, he has lately become a different sort of internet figure, known as “Dark Brandon.

In February 2021, Facebook abruptly wiped all of the news from its platform in Australia. The country’s lawmakers were trying to force the company to share its profits with media outlets, and this was the dramatic response. The gambit worked: After a nearly week-long blackout, which extended to pages from Australian nonprofits and government services, the new regulations were scaled back.

Sign up for Kaitlyn and Lizzie’s newsletter here.Lizzie: It’s getting hot out there, huh? The weather, the housing market, the trend of eating eggplant parm while wearing a claw clip. Everything costs $32, my lease is up in two weeks, and my landlord won’t respond to any texts or emails. Better get out and let off some steam before we boil over.Cut to: a recent Thursday night, looking for something to do.

“If you want to come ‘see my cows’ for the weekend, let me know,” Laurel Ysebaert, the owner of a small Ontario cattle ranch posted on TikTok in May, as the U.S. Supreme Court prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade. “I can give you a safe space while you recover from ‘seeing my cows.’”You get it.

Sign up for Kaitlyn and Lizzie’s newsletter here.Kaitlyn: The Hampton Jitney, according to a New York Times article from 1985, is “the quintessential transportation for a certain kind of New Yorker.” George Plimpton claimed to have written one and a half books while riding it. Lauren Bacall was also a well-known patron. Passengers were given free seltzer and newspapers then, but that is no longer the case.

When I was 21, the cool thing to be was famous on Instagram. Now the cooler thing to be is a mystery. Anonymity is in.The youngest adult generation and the most online generation is frustrated with being surveilled and embarrassed by attention-seeking behaviors. This has instigated a retreat into smaller internet spaces and secret-sharing apps, as well as a mini-renaissance for Tumblr, where users rarely use their full names.

On the morning of August 25, 2014, a 16-year-old girl arrived at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in baffling condition. She was short of breath but had no chest pain. She had no history of any lung condition, and no abnormal sounds in her breathing.