When the Universal Music Group decided to pull its songs from TikTok last month in the midst of a protracted rights dispute, some called the move the “nuclear option.” UMG handles major artists including Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny, and isn’t music the lifeblood of the social app? Billboard has a separate chart for the most popular songs on TikTok; artists such as Lil Nas X effectively owe their career to the platform.

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The temptation for a writer to turn their memoir into a self-help book must be strong. The author has looked back at her life, her choices, her blunders, her triumphs. And through this process of retrospection, she might see lessons learned that apply not just to her, but really, to everyone.

For nearly the entirety of the past decade, a question has stalked, and sometimes consumed, American politics: Why do Donald Trump and his acolytes heap such reverent praise on Vladimir Putin? The question is born of disbelief.

Almost one-third of the way through Usher’s performance at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, Alicia Keys appeared, attached to a billowing red cape and seated at a matching piano. As the Grammys-festooned pop and R&B singer-songwriter gently played the opening arpeggios of one of her biggest hits, 2004’s “If I Ain’t Got You,” something small but unexpected happened.

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A calendar is a site of order.

Earlier this week, I woke up, checked my phone, and noticed that everyone online seemed fixated on the same question: Where is Kate Middleton?
Many of these people were not devoted Royal Family watchers. Rather, they were casual perusers of the internet who’d seen a post, a message-board thread, or an article on the princess of Wales’s recent absence from public life and found themselves hacking through a dense jungle of rumors.

Last Friday, in a bathroom at the Newark airport, I encountered a phrase I hadn’t seen in a long time: Stop the spread. It accompanied an automatic hand-sanitizing station, which groaned weakly when I passed my hand beneath it, dispensing nothing. Presumably set up in the early pandemic, the sign and dispenser had long ago become relics. Basically everyone seemed to ignore them.

The original “Burn Book” from Mean Girls was used to spread rumors and gossip about other girls (and some boys) at North Shore High School. Kara Swisher’s new memoir, Burn Book, tells true stories about men (and some women) who ruled Silicon Valley. In the 1990s, Swisher was a political reporter in Washington, but tuned into the dot-com revolution early and moved to California to cover it.