So-called Books of Secrets were a new and wildly-popular literary genre during the Italian Renaissance. Written in vernacular Italian, they instructed an increasingly literate public in the pursuit of alchemy, making secrets previously circulated in Latin manuscripts amongst the educated elite more broadly accessible.
How a years-long domain name feud for DoItForState.com ended in a bloody shootout. “Do It For State” is the hyperviral tagline associated with the social media company State Snaps, which aggregates and posts debaucherous college-aged behavior on its Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter.
Jerry Saltz’s new book gives a series of short instructions or prompts, some banal and others provocative, on both looking at and making art, for audiences of any level of art fluency. The appetite for this kind of advice has only increased in the past decade, as the art world has become more visible to the wider public.
Brand deals have dried up; sponsored posts have been delayed. The great reckoning is unlikely to topple the influencer industry—by now, it’s already too big—but the business of influence is going to change.
Adobe today announced a new mobile app called Photoshop Camera, which “brings Photoshop magic directly to the point of capture.” Photoshop Camera is a new Sensei AI-powered app that automatically recognizes subjects in photos and suggests artist-created image filters to apply.
Potent societal powers create a culture of nutrition confusion that not only obfuscate the truth about diet, they undermine science as a whole. Begin by asking critical questions when digesting diet news. Does the writer have an advanced degree in nutrition, or does she or he have expertise in science journalism?
We live in the age of envy. Career envy, kitchen envy, children envy, food envy, upper arm envy, holiday envy. You name it, there’s an envy for it. Social media has created a world in which everyone seems ecstatic – apart from us. Is there any way for people to curb their resentment?
Lurking behind a simple email in our inbox is a network of fake websites, letterbox companies and more than 100 victims around the world. We untangled a web of fake accounts and followed the digital breadcrumbs back to two Danish fraudsters. This is how we tracked them down, step by step.
Online, Steve Maraboli looks like the trope of a motivational speaker—photos of him speaking onstage, podcasts, apparent endorsements by celebrities, frequent mentions about best-selling books. He’s built his brand on an abundance of lies.
What Instagram has allowed me to do is to employ a kind of digital physics, to warp my experience of space and time in my favor. In the offline world, I spend precious hours with her and then she disappears. But online, she is with me again when I post, and then again each time I receive a notification.
India, the world’s largest democracy, has also become the world’s largest experiment in social-media-fueled terror. Muslims in India are poorer, less educated, more likely to be imprisoned, and far less socially mobile than Hindus.
To thousands of young millennials from humble backgrounds, Jordan Belfort’s Wolf of Wall Street story became a blueprint for how to escape an unremarkable life on low pay. Their social media feeds display super-rich lifestyles, but what are these self-styled traders really selling?
The oh-so-Instagrammable food movement has been thoroughly debunked – but it shows no signs of going away. The real question is why we were so desperate to believe it.
Social media has in a way made professional mourners of us all. While it is no one’s place to tell anyone else how to express sadness or pain, it sometimes feels there is a race to grieve. A race to care. A race to show that you have the most compassion.
A screen-obsessed teen ignores an Instagram meme chain and unleashes a Dickless Troll. Big mistake. “Double Tap” is a short, satirical, and fast-paced comedy/horror from Eros Vlahos.
In Bali, western immigrants are selling products they’ve never handled, from countries they’ve never visited, to consumers they’ve never met. Welcome to the world of dropshipping. Dropshipping is a “fulfillment” method.
Ramzan Kadyrov is the leader of Chechnya. He is a Putin proxy that has been in charge of the Russian republic since 2007. Despite revelations about kidnapping, torturing and killing gay people, Kadyrov has continued to maintain an upbeat profile on Instagram, where he is a prolific user.
For Japanese designer Manami Sasaki, making toast is a time to slow down and get creative. Every morning, she’s been using slices of bread as her canvas to create incredible breakfasts that look too pretty to eat.
Huge nationwide protests against corruption have been making headlines, but these young millennials are taking on power in a different way, by celebrating beauty, fashion and rap. They’ve got millions of followers, but, as Unreported World finds out, fame can have deadly consequences.
For years, Mormon mommy blogger Natalie Lovin curated a picture-perfect life. Natalie’s job was being a lovably quirky wife and mother who documented her idyllic life online. Then she left the church—and her husband.
The speed of machine learning is startling, often creepy. It is hard to tell what is creepier: the feeling that someone is somewhere out there, following your every step, or the fact that no one is, just the tracking device you carry with you in your pocket.
We’re spoiled, entitled, lazy, and failures at what’s come to be known as “adulting,” a word invented by millennials as a catchall for the tasks of self-sufficient existence. I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.
In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment. The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it?
For New Orleans entrepreneur Jesseca Dupart, social media isn’t just a tool for building her business—it’s a platform for inspiring other black women to do the same. She started as a simple hair salon in 2012, now her beauty products are available in stores in every state, as well as Canada, the Caribbean, and the UK.
The fear of missing out, a spawn of technological advancement and proliferating social information, is the feeling that we’re missing out on something more exciting, more important, or more interesting going on somewhere else. FoMO haunts our social networks and our real lives alike. But there is a way to break free.
Lindsay Ellis is a video essayist. She makes videos commenting on films, TV shows, and other media. More than 860,000 people subscribe to her YouTube channel. But there is also this difficult aspect to what Ellis does: online hate.
In a world of constant self-surveillance and curation, we may never see the Parises, the Nicoles, the Taras in the way we once did. The It Girl exists within the moral grey areas of life, but with the existence of social media, such grey areas no longer exist for her to live in – everything is now black and white, good or bad.
At the center of this powerful investigative film is Fatou, a 16 year old in Kuwait City who has been there for nine months. We follow her rescue and journey back home to Guinea, West Africa and ask: what’s being done to control the apps promoted on Google, Apple and Facebook-owned Instagram?
Unfold is an app and toolkit for storytellers. It’s used by celebs, influencers and other Instagram power users. Create beautiful and engaging stories from minimal and elegant templates. The app is available for iOS and Android.
The untold story of how Homepolish’s extremely Instagrammable house of cards came tumbling down. Instead of building a design juggernaut, the founder constructed something much more precarious — a fear-based culture where sound strategy couldn’t flourish, and where the pressure to grow led to reckless decision-making.
It took me years to really understand where all the information I saw online was coming from. So this isn’t just a guide to spotting when something is fake. It’s a system for slowing down and thinking about information — whether that information is true, false, or something in between.
