The facile scourge of paid speaking
Writing for Esquire, Stephen Marche writes about The real problem with Niall Ferguson’s letter to the 1%, which amounts to “paid speaking gigs.” Here’s the money quote: Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of… read more
When The Atlantic revealed last month that tens of thousands of books published in the past 20 years had been used without permission to train Meta’s AI language model, well-known authors were outraged, calling it a “smoking gun” for mega-corporate misbehavior. Now that the magazine has put out a searchable database of affected books, the outrage is redoubled: “I would… read more
Twitter has begun allowing its users to showcase NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, as profile pictures on their accounts. It’s the latest public victory for this form of … and, you know, there’s the problem. What the hell is an NFT anyway? There are answers. Twitter calls NFTs “unique digital items, such as artwork, with proof of ownership that’s stored on… read more
The World Health Organization has proposed a behavioral addiction pathology for excessive video-game playing. But maybe the problem is in the economy more than the mind.
The international health community has decided that if you play video games like Fortnite or World of Warcraft a lot, you might suffer from a mental-health issue: Gaming Disorder. It’s a behavioral condition that the World Health Organization has added to the proposed 11th revision of its International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, or ICD-11, the first… read more
A review of Dan Ackerman’s The Tetris Effect
In an official photo from April 6, 1993, Hillary Clinton smirks slightly while playing a Nintendo Game Boy aboard a flight back to Washington, DC. The record doesn’t note what game she was playing, but surely it was Tetris, the cartridge that shipped with the popular Nintendo handheld upon release in 1989. When the photo was released last year, Clinton was already… read more
Giving a gift is an act of competition as much as generosity.
Get $100 off the iPad Air 2 at Best Buy. Save $50 on the Xbox One Gears of War Bundle plus get a $60 Target Gift Card. At Walmart, one can buy a Samsung Smart HDTV for under $200. Under $200! These are the marks of Black Friday, the annual bacchanal for consumer excess. And excess, it is normally thought,… read more
A Review of Michael W. Clune's Gamelife
I am on an airplane reading Michael W. Clune’s Gamelife, a memoir about growing up playing computer games in the 1980s. I’ve just finished eating the smoked salmon and kiwi on the “fruit plate” I was offered by the flight attendant but had initially declined. Just like I had declined to review Gamelife for this publication, initially. For reasons, too. Michael… read more
Our telephone habits have changed, but so have the infrastructure and design of the handset.
One of the ironies of modern life is that everyone is glued to their phones, but nobody uses them as phones anymore. Not by choice, anyway. Phone calls—you know, where you put the thing up to your ear and speak to someone in real time—are becoming relics of a bygone era, the “phone” part of a smartphone turning vestigial as… read more
This is what realpolitik looks like on the Internet.
If you use Twitter, you’ve probably encountered the “subtweet,” a technique we defined last year in The Atlantic as “the practice of talking about someone without referencing them explicitly.” Alexis Madrigal exemplified subtweeting like this: So, “@alexismadrigal is a jerk” is one thing, but “Alexis Madrigal is a jerk” is a subtweet. It was a lesson distilled from the sociologist… read more
The creator of Flappy Bird is back with a game offering the sublime agony that comes with mastering a craft—and still failing.
Many of the highest-performing professional athletes are also the most superstitious. Serena Williams bounces the tennis ball five time before her first serve, twice before the second. Michael Jordan wore his University of North Carolina basketball shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform. Baseball hall of famer Wade Boggs bore a bounty of superstitions. Among them: He ate chicken before each… read more