Last June, six women came together on Zoom to create a magazine cover. The women included editors from Cosmopolitan, members of OpenAI, and digital artist Karen X. Cheng. They typed prompts into a field, tested different ideas and eventually produced a magazine cover for one the world’s most popular fashion magazines. The image was made by DALL-E, a digital imaging service powered by artificial...
For a company that receives almost half its revenue from customers aged between 25 and 40, Starbucks has been surprisingly successful at marketing on TikTok, a platform aimed at teenagers. The coffee firm’s TikTok account has almost two million followers, more than ten million likes and is packed with clips of customers talking up their drinks and shots of baristas going the extra mile. One...
For followers of Elon Musk, the last few months have been quite a ride. Before buying Twitter, the entrepreneur’s tweets had largely focused on his companies’ achievements. Videos showed the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, the expansion of Starlink satellite coverage and the release of new Tesla lines. Scattered between those tweets were also plenty of standard memes, the occasional crypto...
When war came to Ukraine,Kate-Yeonjae Jeong found out the same way most young people discover what’s happening in the world. The 17-year-old high school student from Houston learned about the Russian invasion on TikTok. In an essay published by The New York Times, she explained that in late February she was going about her usual routine—“homework, short respite on TikTok, repeat”—when between...
It took Dollar General less than a week to fire Mary Gundel. A store manager in Tampa, Florida Gundel was earning $50,000 a year, according to the New York Times, and had received an award for her hard work and dedication just months earlier. What moved her from a “Top 5%” Dollar General employee to a Lyft and Uber driver was a series of posts that Gundel made on TikTok. At the end of March, she...
At first, it looked like the biggest art heist in history. As rumors spread that online art marketplace OpenSea had been hacked, the estimated value of the stolen artworks reached as high as $200 million. It was as though someone had broken into Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and walked off with almost the entire gallery. In fact, the raid turned out to be a lot smaller than initial reports...
In May last year, Andrew Walker, a portfolio manager at Rangeley Capital, and host of the Yet Another Value podcast, made the switch. After several years of blogging, he decided that he’d had enough of the technical problems that came with managing a site on his own. At least once a month, he noted, something on the site would break, requiring a few hours to fix. So he followed the direction of...
When the blockchain launched in 2008, the expectation among enthusiasts was that Satoshi had created a new technology that would soon reshape the world. Money, in particular, would never the be the same. Instead of the whim of a central banker determining the value of a national currency through the printing of more cash, a connected world would use a limited currency whose value would be...
On January 1, 1971, Henry Darger wrote an entry in his diary. “I had a very poor nothing like Christmas. Never had a good Christmas all my life, nor a good new year, and now… I am very bitter but fortunately not revengeful, though I feel should be how I am.” It was his last entry. Two years later, the hospital janitor died aged 81 at St. Augustine’s Home for the Aged. He was buried...
Grime’s gestation lasted more than a year. In November 2018, the Canadian techno star registered a Twitter account called WarNymph. It wasn’t until January 2020, though, that the account received a matching Instagram stream and its first post. WarNymph, the world learned, was a winged baby with pixie ears and a bow and arrow. She grew up quickly. A few weeks after recording a message predicting...
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