It’s not exactly clear what will happen to TikTok at 12 a.m. on Jan. 19. According to Reuters, TikTok leadership will comply with the rapidly approaching ban by “going dark.” According to the Biden administration, they’re not going to enforce the law, and the app will continue to be available. …
Read More »Everything You Need to Know About the TikTok Ban
With just days left before a Jan. 19 deadline for TikTok owner ByteDance to sell its U.S. assets, or otherwise accept a ban of the app in the country, some 170 million American users have pressing questions about what’s about to happen to the mega-popular video platform. The Supreme Court …
Read More »You Have a Neil Gaiman Tattoo. Now What?
Whispers about English author Neil Gaiman‘s behavior with women have circulated in the publishing world for some time, but a bombshell article published in New York magazine this week laid out a horrifying series of allegations that left readers sickened and stunned. Multiple women interviewed for the piece accused him …
Read More »Family Vlogging Is a Lucrative Industry. This Max Docuseries Asks If It Should Be
In 2019, Myka Stauffer was the voice behind a fairly successful family vlogging channel. She posted about her husband, children, and parenting journey to close to 700,000 subscribers on YouTube and with support from major brands like Pampers, Walmart, and Fabletics. No topic was off limits, so when she adopted …
Read More »This Artist Has Trump Down to an Art
“Lady Liberty stood me up!” the artist Isabelle Brourman announced, faux-pouting, on a recent Thursday evening at the Will Shott Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. It was the opening of Exhibit 1: Paper Trail, a collection of work Brourman had created alongside courtroom sketch artists during Donald Trump’s …
Read More »Octavia Butler Wanted to Prevent Disaster in Los Angeles. Instead, She Predicted It
When Octavia Butler published 1993’s Parable of the Sower — a sci-fi novel about California burning in 2024, following a presidential election of a candidate whose slogan is “Make America Great Again”— her intentions weren’t to prophesize, but rather make an observation backed by historical research and future optimism. “Parable …
Read More »How 'Raising Your Ya Ya Ya' Became a Way of Life Online
In the first verse of “I’d Rather Be Me” from the musical Mean Girls, there’s a note that’s frankly a bit too high for your average voice to sustain. It requires a clear tone and solid belt —a vocal technique that comes from using your chest voice to hit a …
Read More »What 'Hotshot' Reveals About the Life of California Wildland Firefighters
For more than six years, filmmaker Gabriel Kirkpatrick Mann embedded with a crew of wildland firefighters in California whose expertise is working with large, high-priority fires. Referred to as Hotshots, these specialists, managed by a band of agencies including the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, undergo intensive training …
Read More »'No One Treated Us Like Inmates': Why Prisoners Opt to Fight Fires
Amika Mota was drenched, bone-tired, and shaking after her first-ever pump and roll, a fire-fighting technique where the fire truck creeps toward the blaze as personnel wield the massive hose alongside it. It was just her and five other women — along with the fire chief — against a brutal …
Read More »'Watch Duty' Is Saving People From the L.A. Wildfires. Here's How the App Actually Works
This week, as wildfires erupted across Los Angeles, residents anxious for real-time information about the rapidly-shifting perimeters of the fires passed around a tip: download Watch Duty. The app is run by a nonprofit nominally based in Sonoma County, but is staffed by a dozen employees and hundreds of volunteers …
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