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Thursday

Zack Christenson

Hunting for the Pizza Hut of my youth

About 15 miles off the I-80, tucked away in the Cleveland suburb of Warren, you’ll find a delightful bit of yesteryear, preserved from the 1970s and serving up your childhood dreams. Here you’ll find a Pizza Hut that forgot to evolve into a quick counter-service and delivery outpost like almost all the others. I had heard rumors of Pizza Hut Classics for some time. For years I’ve wanted to find one. As a person who would live solely on pizza if it weren’t for the heart disease and kidney stones that would inevitably follow, I knew I had to find one. Lo and behold, one such restaurant happened to be in my path on a road trip to Detroit over the holidays.

Saturday

Gage Klipper

Don’t let Serena bully you into taking the fat shot

Serena Williams is one of the world’s greatest living athletes, but in her retirement, she seems to have forgotten the basics of diet and exercise. You’ve likely seen Williams’ ad campaign for Ro, a telehealth provider that specializes in GLP-1 weight loss medications like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound. In the now ubiquitous commercials, Williams tells how she personally used the drug to burn stubborn postpartum fat, a respectable 31 pounds over 8 months.“It’s not a short cut, it’s science,” reads the company’s tagline. Williams looks great – of course, of course. But just because scientists have discovered a cure for fatness doesn’t mean she still hasn’t taken the easy way out.

Serena Williams

Sunday

Neeraja Deshpande

Boomer hate has gone too far

Charles Murray, whose work on race and IQ has made him something of a darling of the online right, found himself out of favor with his fan base when he posted on X that a young married couple – each making $15 an hour and working 48-hour weeks – can afford a baby and a place to live. The reaction was furious. “Charles Murray is a good man,” wrote Zarathustra, a popular dissident right-wing poster. “Sadly, however, he’s also a Boomer. Which by necessity, means his bumper sticker talking points on political economy are comically out of touch garbage, and read like a moldy Reagan Youth pamphlet from 1982.” Murray’s post broke X containment and made it to the subreddit r/BoomersBeingFools.

Sunday

Oliver Jia

The iPod reboot

Dig into your desk drawers or the recesses of your closet and there’s a decent chance you’ll find an iPod you haven’t powered on since Michael Jackson’s last live tour. With Apple selling over 450 million since their inception in 2001, iPods were once the hottest tech item and fulfilled Steve Jobs’ promise of being able to carry an audio library in your pocket.How times have changed. Today, the average zoomer is likely to draw a blank when you say iPod, probably mishearing the word for the AirPods line of Bluetooth headphones. But, for a plethora of reasons, the iPod is once again becoming desirable. The r/iPod subreddit has over 70,000 readers and retro tech enthusiasts like Australian YouTuber DankPods attract millions of views.

iPod

Saturday

Katherine Dee

Andrew Tate and the making of an internet villain

Andrew Tate, that rascally misogynist everyone loves to hate, has been in the news for the better part of this holiday season. First, the World Economic Forum’s favorite climate change influencer, Greta Thunberg, “clapped back” at him on Twitter, suggesting he had a small penis. This galvanized Tate to publish an insane response video. The story didn’t stop there, though, because how could it? In this video, a pizza box was in view, and according to Twitter conspiracy theorists, it alerted Romanian authorities to Tate’s location, where he was taken into custody for sex trafficking. What a neat narrative arc!

andrew tate

Friday

Bill Zeiser

Elon Musk is the Darth Vader of Twitter

When I think of Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, I think of Darth Vader. It’s not that Agrawal himself reminds me of the Star Wars protagonist, grave concerns over Twitter’s handling of free speech notwithstanding. I just can't help but think of the nervous imperial commander who receives Vader as he arrives to inspect the Death Star II at the opening of Return of the Jedi. “Lord Vader, this is an unexpected pleasure. We are honored by your presence,” the commander says, with a lump in his throat. The Dark Lord of the Sith flatly replies, “You may dispense with the pleasantries, Commander. I’m here to put you back on schedule.

Friday

Bill Zeiser

Beware the risks of tyrannical tech

“Just think about it. Our whole world is sitting there on a computer. It’s in the computer, everything: your, your DMV records, your, your social security, your credit cards, your medical records. It’s all right there. Everyone is stored in there. It’s like this little electronic shadow on each and every one of us, just, just begging for someone to screw with, and you know what? They’ve done it to me, and you know what? They’re gonna do it to you.” — Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett, The Net, 1995 A few weeks ago, I called the local Domino’s. The man who answered asked whether my address is an apartment or a private residence. I live in a fairly remote Michigan community of about 8,000 people.

Wednesday

Ben Sixsmith

The return of Thomas Pynchon?

The question of whether the novel is dead is one that often occupies those in the business of writing or commenting on novels, much as the question of self-driving cars doubtless occupies truckers. One’s attitude towards the question largely depends on one’s attitude towards genre fiction and Sally Rooney. Still, whatever its truth, it is inarguable that, as Joseph Bottum wrote in his 2019 book The Decline of the Novel, “art forms are not immortal or incapable of collapse when their social foundations shift.” To that end, authors have been attempting to innovate. The “alt-lit” community have been using social media for years, both as a source of thematic material and as a means of publication, and even grizzled vets are learning new tricks.

Wednesday

Mary Kate Skehan

Crypto casino

When I was in high school, I worked at an ice rink in the winter and a swimming pool in the summer. My friends toiled at Target and gofered at golf courses, making minimum wage and spending it on gas and low-rise jeans from Abercrombie: it was 2008, after all. These days, gas may still cost $4 per gallon, but now the jeans are high-waisted and the teens are more ambitious. My youngest brother Ted is 18. He spent the summer before his first year in college working in a cheese shop, sweeping floors and straining ricotta: a classic summer job, tedious and stress-free. Yet some of his friends are taking a different route. Ted’s buddy Tom just cashed out $3,000 in bitcoin winnings to buy a weeklong Airbnb in Ocean City, Maryland for all his friends.

crypto

Monday

Stephen L. Miller

The media’s TikTok blindspot

We learned about journalists this past weekend. Specifically, we learned about tech journalists who aren’t particularly interested reporting or analyzing tech as much as they are committed to harvesting click revenue from a young audience engaged with tech and social media platforms. They proved, in other words, that their industry is broken beyond repair.You probably heard that President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was looking at banning the social media video app TikTok on Friday. TikTok has come under scrutiny in the past months over security concerns and its parent company ByteDance’s connections to China. It’s understood to be hacking and using data collected from its users’ phones.

tiktok

Monday

Caroline McCarthy

Don’t tell your friends to quit their ‘problematic’ tech jobs

As civil unrest reverberated throughout virtually every corner of American life, culture, and industry this week, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced that he was resigning from the company’s board of directors. He hopes that his seat will be filled by a black person. ‘I’m doing this for myself, for my family, and for my country,’ Ohanian (who is married to tennis legend Serena Williams) wrote on Twitter. ‘I’m saying this as a father who needs to be able to answer his black daughter when she asks, “What did you do?”’Later, Ohanian tweeted, ‘I'm seeing more and more people in tech who are frustrated and have been hitting a wall in their companies leaving!

tech

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

The farce of the ‘Anonymous’ Trump official

Remember 'Anonymous'? He — or, of course, she (or 'zhe' or 'they', etc.) — was the person who, back in September 2018, wrote an anonymous op-ed for our former paper of record, 'I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.' 'Anonymous' claimed to be a 'senior Trump administration official'. He took to the pages of the official fish-wrap because he didn’t approve of President Trump. He and 'like-minded colleagues...have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda'. Indeed, according to 'Anonymous', 'many of the senior officials in [Trump's] own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda.' Who knows whether 'Anonymous' is for real — I mean, just how 'senior' do you suppose he (or, again, she, etc.

anonymous