On December 8, when Britain’s first COVID-19 vaccination was delivered, official government guidance stated that people who were pregnant, breastfeeding, or planning to become pregnant should not receive it. The reason given was that these new...
At one point in season six of Line of Duty, which is currently airing on BBC One, Superintendent Ted Hastings – the proud, determined, grouchily folksy Northern Irish head of Anti-Corruption Unit 12 – is called into the office of some of the...
Is Twitter real life? This has become one of the perennial questions of social media. Indeed, it often seems as if prominent Twitter users enjoy nothing more than reminding the people they spend their lives, both professional and personal,...
Yahoo Answers is shutting down. Once upon a time, it was a juggernaut that pulled 31 million visitors a month and easily swatted away competition from the likes of Google and Amazon, both of which launched (and later scrapped) their own Q&A...
In 2018, Buzzfeed released a video of Barack Obama (or at least it looked like Barack Obama) calling President Trump a “total and complete dipshit.” The video was what’s known as a deepfake: the product of an advanced form of algorithmic video...
Legend has it that when the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was nearing his final moments in November of 1831, he purportedly uttered the following words: “Only one man ever understood me, and even he didn’t understand me.” This...
On February 24, 2021, Lisa Nandy and Yvette Cooper – both senior MPs in the U.K. Labour party – used their Twitter accounts to share a thread by Eric Feigl-Ding, a Harvard-trained epidemiologist specializing in nutrition.
I downloaded Nextdoor in March 2020. Nextdoor is an app and a website that aims to “connect neighbors to each other.” It offers a hyperlocal social network through which residents can share posts with people living within a mile or so from them....
On 12 May 2020, 62 days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Facebook updated its COVID-19 policy. In this update, they included a particularly tedious sentence written in corporate legalese — a soul-crushingly...