AvatarThe AtlanticAvatarAvatar18 hours agoThe New Empress of Self-Help Is a TikTok Starverified_publisherThe Atlantic - By Caroline Mimbs NyceKeila Shaheen outsold Oprah Winfrey with a journaling book marketed through TikTok. Now what? In 2006, Oprah Winfrey couldn’t stop talking about The Secret. She devoted multiple episodes of her talk show to the franchise, which started as a kind of DVD seminar and later became a best-selling book. …
AvatarThe AtlanticAvatarAvatar3 days agoThe Most Hated Sound on Televisionverified_publisherThe Atlantic - By Jacob SternFor half a century, viewers scorned the laugh track while adoring shows that used it. Now it has all but disappeared. When American viewers flipped open the July 2, 1966, edition of TV Guide, they were treated to a bombshell story. This was the first installment of a two-part series on “the most …
AvatarThe AtlanticAvatarAvatar5 days agoThe AI Revolution Is Crushing Thousands of Languagesverified_publisherThe Atlantic - By Matteo WongEnglish is the internet’s primary tongue—a fact that may have unexpected consequences as generative AI becomes central to daily life. Recently, Bonaventure Dossou learned of an alarming tendency in a popular AI model. The program described Fon—a language spoken by Dossou’s mother and millions of …
AvatarThe AtlanticAvatarAvatarYou Don’t Have to Type Anymoreverified_publisherThe Atlantic - By Caroline Mimbs NyceWelcome to the golden age of voice dictation. As a little girl, I often found myself in my family’s basement, doing battle with a dragon. I wasn’t gaming or playing pretend: My dragon was a piece of enterprise voice-dictation software called Dragon Naturally Speaking, launched in 1997 (and purchased …
AvatarThe AtlanticAvatarAvatar6 days agoThe Homepage of the Black Internetverified_publisherThe Atlantic - By Hannah GiorgisRevisiting BlackPlanet, and a lost era when social media was still fun A few years ago, Stephanie Williams and her husband fielded a question from their son: How had they met? So they told him. They’d first encountered each other on a website called BlackPlanet. To the 5-year-old, the answer seemed …
AvatarThe AtlanticAvatarAvatar6 days agoTupperware Is in Troubleverified_publisherThe Atlantic - By Amanda MullWe’re in a golden age for food storage. So why is America’s paradigmatic container brand failing? For the first several decades of my life, most of the meals I ate involved at least one piece of Tupperware. My mom’s pieces were mostly the greens and yellows of a 1970s kitchen, purchased from …
AvatarThe AtlanticAvatarAvatar6 days agoWelcome to the Golden Age of User Hostilityverified_publisherThe Atlantic - By Charlie WarzelThey don’t make ’em like they used to! What happens when a smart TV becomes too smart for its own good? The answer, it seems, is more intrusive advertisements. Last week, Janko Roettgers, a technology and entertainment reporter, uncovered a dystopian patent filed last August by Roku, the television- …
AvatarThe AtlanticAvatarAvatarAmerica Is Sick of Swipingverified_publisherThe Atlantic - By Lora KelleyDating apps are falling back to Earth. Modern dating can be severed into two eras: before the swipe, and after. When Tinder and other dating apps took off in the early 2010s, they unleashed a way to more easily access potential love interests than ever before. By 2017, about five years after Tinder …
AvatarThe AtlanticAvatarAvatarThe Web Became a Strip Mallverified_publisherThe Atlantic - By Ian BogostDomain names once gave the internet a sense of place. Now they are meaningless. One morning in 1999, while I sat at the office computer where I built corporate websites, a story popped up on Yahoo. An internet domain name, Business.com, had just sold for $7.5 million—a shocking sum that would be …
AvatarThe AtlanticAvatarAvatarWhat Neuralink Is Missingverified_publisherThe Atlantic - By S. I. RosenbaumIt turns out that connecting brains with computers is the easy part. Until recently, in all of human history, the number of true cyborgs stood at about 70. Ian Burkhart has kept a count because he was one of them—a person whose brain has been connected directly to a computer. Burkhart had become …
AvatarThe AtlanticAvatarAvatarDid You Feel That?verified_publisherThe Atlantic - By Caroline Mimbs NyceThe earthquake internet actually works. In the decade I have lived in California, I’ve learned to be on edge for “The Big One”—an earthquake so powerful, it can bring down houses. The roughly 10 or so tremors I have actually experienced haven’t been like that. Mostly, the shakes are big enough to …
AvatarThe AtlanticAvatarAvatarAI Has Lost Its Magicverified_publisherThe Atlantic - By Ian BogostThat’s how you know it’s taking over. I frequently ask ChatGPT to write poems in the style of the American modernist poet Hart Crane. It does an admirable job of delivering. But the other day, when I instructed the software to give the Crane treatment to a plate of ice-cream sandwiches, I felt bored …