The shocking and apparently random fatal stabbing of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Aug. 22 has inflamed already furious debates over race and crime in U.S. cities. This uproar comes at a particularly perilous moment, with the Trump administration widening its National …
Read More »Inside IShowSpeed's Rolling Stone Office Takeover
T he first thing you notice about IShowSpeed isn’t his face. It’s the wave of chaos that follows him. Practically, it makes sense — you don’t build a streaming empire with 43 million subscribers by the ripe old age of 20 unless you’ve got the infrastructure to back it up. …
Read More »Druski Went Viral for Turning Into a White NASCAR Fan. Meet the Makeup Artist Who Did It
Comedian Druski’s latest sketch video only has nine words in its description: “That Guy who is just Proud to be AMERICAN.” But in the 36 hours since he posted it on social media, the video of him assuming the persona of a NASCAR fanatic— attending an actual NASCAR event complete …
Read More »Graham Linehan's Second Arrest Fuels Backlash to U.K.'s Online Speech Laws
For decades, the Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan was celebrated as the creative force behind hit sitcoms like Father Ted and The IT Crowd. But following his success in television, he has largely focused on anti-transgender diatribes and protests, alienating many former fans and colleagues in the entertainment industry. And, …
Read More »'Anonymity Online Is Going to Die': What Age-Verification Laws Could Look Like in the U.S.
Want to check a Discord message, comment on a Reddit thread, or visit a porn site? Well, if you live in the U.K., all of those things are possible, as soon as you hand over some ID. The Online Safety Act, which went into effect there on July 25, requires …
Read More »Should We Really Be Calling It 'AI Psychosis'?
It was inevitable that once people starting noticing the phenomenon, they’d come up with a catchy, descriptive name for it. And sure enough, when one redditor sought help with a partner who had gone down a rabbit hole with ChatGPT to find “the answers to the universe,” she had to …
Read More »How One Man's Struggling Tallow-Fried Food Stall Got Caught Up in the Culture War
Last Saturday, Abed “Abe” Ibrahim reached a breaking point. The fledgling restaurateur, who fully embraces the current trend of frying foods in beef tallow rather than the seed oils commonly used throughout popular eateries, even naming his food stall “Tallow” for good measure, took to X and bemoaned how poorly …
Read More »The Best Tips and Tricks to Spot AI
For tens of millions of people on TikTok, the realization that AI might be getting better wasn’t a press release or an article— it was a video of a dozen bunnies jumping on a trampoline. The clip, first posted by an unknown TikTok account @rachelthecatlovers, showed a herd of bunnies …
Read More »These Katrina Survivors Feel Overlooked. Now, They're Using TikTok to Tell Their Stories
Years before the storm, Tonie Waltman had been told a premonition of its disastrous aftermath. Around 1997, her dad, a Black man named Hardy Jackson, was hit by an oncoming train. He’d ultimately survive, but not before being induced into a coma, from which doctors predicted he’d never recover. “In …
Read More »The Bookie at the Center of the Ohtani Betting Scandal Is Ready to Talk
I t was a round of poker, fittingly, that upended Mathew Bowyer’s life in spectacular fashion. While he preferred to sate his appetite for risk by playing baccarat, poker had served as his formative introduction to the pleasures and possibilities of gambling. Back in the early Nineties, as an enterprising …
Read More »