Roblox and Fortnite are two of the biggest games around, and a huge part of why is because they aren’t just one game: instead, they’re vast platforms where you can party up with your friends, dress up in ridiculous digital outfits, and quickly jump from one experience to another. Back in the day, Fortnite copied […]
On July 25th, the UK became one of the first countries to widely implement age verification. Its Online Safety Act requires sites hosting porn and other content deemed “harmful” – including Reddit, Discord, Grindr, X, and Bluesky – to verify that users are over the age of 18. The early results have been chaotic. While […]
President Donald Trump and other Republicans have railed for years against foreign regulation of US tech companies, including online safety laws. As the US fights a global tariff war, it may bring those rules under fire – just as some of them are growing teeth. Over the past weeks, Trump has touted a blitz of […]
The 2025 TV Shootout went down over the weekend, and the results are shocking: yes, the Sony Bravia 8 II won the overall competition and my personal award for silliest name, but the LG G5 came in last place by a huge margin. I was one of the judges, and I think I have a […]
Two of the biggest digital games stores have stopped selling thousands of titles following pressure from a coalition of anti-porn advocates and the world’s biggest payment processing companies. It’s happened before, will likely happen again, and is suppressing art, free expression, and marginalized creators. Last week, the indie gaming storefront itch.io sent out a sudden […]
Few things scratch my brain like a good beef. Kendrick vs. Drake. Justin Baldoni vs. Blake Lively. On my beat, it’s usually two companies fighting over health tech patents. So-and-so copied a feature from so-and-so. The latest dispute on my radar is all about semantics. More specifically, the exact meaning of wellness. Let me catch […]
Cassey Ho was getting her roots dyed when she started receiving hundreds of ecstatic messages. In a video clip promoting her song “Fortnight,” Taylor Swift was shown wearing the Pirouette Skort, a flouncy, tutu-style skirt with built-in shorts underneath, that Ho had designed for her athleisure brand Popflex. She knew immediately this exposure — one […]
The ultimate source for The New York Times’ story about Zohran Mamdani’s college application is an open secret. It’s an anime-loving neo-Nazi whose hobbies include furry drawings, posting fan art of a video game character, and hacking universities. On X, the alleged hacker is followed by New York Times freelancer Benjamin Ryan, who was the […]
Knox Morris stands onstage, stares out into the depths of the famed 9:30 Club in Washington, DC, and raises his arms to the heavens. The backing track to his song, a synth-heavy pop-punk number called “Going, Going, Gone,” begins to play at an absolutely deafening volume. Morris grins through the first few staccato bars of […]
On a balmy night in October 2019, the defector rode his bike home. He’d just finished a long shift helping waiters serve yogurt-smothered kabobs at a restaurant in Yalova, a seaside town an hour from Istanbul, Turkey. By this time of night, many of the shops had closed. Most of Yalova was home watching TV; […]