It was a story straight out of Reefer Madness: A young woman smokes weed and proceeds to stab her date more than 100 times, killing him, before turning the knife on herself and her beloved dog. Tragic, stranger than fiction, and horrifying — the incident captured the headlines for its …
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I was watching a video of a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show for the Rabbit R1, an AI gadget that promises to act as a sort of personal assistant, when a feeling of doom took hold of me. It wasn’t just that Rabbit’s CEO Jesse Lyu radiates the …
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As sexually graphic AI-generated images of Taylor Swift flooded X (formerly Twitter) yesterday, causing the phrase “Taylor Swift AI” to trend on the platform, the singer’s fans grew apoplectic. They fumed that the site (whose content moderation team has been all but entirely dissolved by owner Elon Musk) wasn’t acting …
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When Marc Sebastian heard about a nine-month cruise around the world, his first thought was that it sounded like the perfect premise for a reality TV show. “Put cameras on that goddamn ship,” Sebastian said in a TikTok that’s now been viewed 7 million times. “There’s gonna be mutiny. There’s …
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When Kenneth Smith first reached out to Reverend Jeff Hood to be with him during his January execution, Smith’s first question was: “Are you prepared to die to be my spiritual advisor?” “Well, of course, that was absolutely shocking,” Hood says on the eve of Smith’s planned death. “He knew …
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TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are awash in content from supposed finance gurus who claim to have cracked the code of almost unlimited passive profit. Scrolling through these apps, you could be forgiven for starting to think you’re the only one not raking it in with a vaguely defined “business” (usually …
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Mark Zuckerberg bet tens of billions of dollars on the “metaverse” only to be mocked for the idea of an immersive virtual-reality social network at every turn. When all is said and done, his promise to add legs to users’ digital avatars (previously rendered as floating torsos) might be what …
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Nia D. is the streamer behind StarWarsTheory, a channel dedicated to the George Lucas science fiction universe, with over 3.3 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Most of his content revolves around dissecting Star Wars internet theories, debating casting choices, and discussing new announcements and releases. But it also draws viewers …
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I t was a perfect Hollywood afternoon. There was sun, a slight breeze, and some of the most famous faces on the planet. And for Demna Gvasalia, there was fear. The Balenciaga creative director has proven himself one of the most adept and blunt bottlers of our zeitgeist for the …
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& ldquo;Simo’s in this?” “Pfft. Fuck.” It’s 3 p.m. on a Friday in late July, and it’s 114 degrees outside. I’m 15 minutes off the Las Vegas Strip at South Point Casino, eavesdropping as I follow two twentysomethings up an escalator — I’m here to meet the guy they’re scared …
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