Tik tok

Wednesday

Ben Domenech

Mike Gallagher’s China challenge

Twenty-five years ago, bipartisan American consensus about China was built on hope, spin and money. Despite the trauma of Tiananmen Square and caution about China’s true economic intentions, many believed in the potential of capitalist principles to move the Chinese Communist Party into a more open, less aggressive posture. Henry Kissinger wrote books about it; pundits and think-tank scholars gave speeches about it; Republicans and Democrats alike parroted the line well into the twenty-first century. Tom Friedman even dreamed ambitiously of what the United States could accomplish if only it were willing to be “China for a day.” What followed? As Harold Macmillan put it, “Events, dear boy, events.

Gallagher china ccp confucius institutes china

Monday

Cockburn

The Trump scions are inviting e-girls to Vegas penthouse parties

Trump parties are usually littered with famous, Botox-ed faces. It's far rarer to find yourself rubbing shoulders with TikTok stars. Hailey Lujan, who has over 350,000 followers on her TikTok @lunchbaglujan, is a twenty-one-year-old soldier who is apparently in the US Army's 101st Airborne Division. Cockburn's nieces tell him that Lujan is also an "e-girl," which Vox describes as "hip young people whose defining qualities are that they are hot and online." In her latest TikTok, the influencer was recently seen chilling in Las Vegas with Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Rick Harrison from the reality show Pawn Stars. Lujan introduces her video by saying “OK I'm with my friend from IllPro, we’re about to go to Donald Trump Jr.’s party and if I meet Donald Trump Jr.

hailey lujan

Tuesday

Cockburn

Colleges join the war on TikTok

TikTok likely hasn't been too bothered about a bunch of crusty old senators and governors denouncing their social media platform. But Cockburn thinks the Chinese-owned company may be a little concerned by the latest wave of resistance as it directly affects their core demographic: young Americans. One of the South’s largest universities, Auburn, has banned TikTok from campus WiFi. The move was ordered by Alabama governor Kay Ivey, one of many Republican governors to bar the use of TikTok on state devices in December. “China doesn’t care if they are building a dossier on a nine-year-old or a ninety-year-old," Ivey said. "They will build it on all of us and really that’s a part of their five-year plan and really part of how China conducts their global affairs.

tiktok ban

Tuesday

Julia Sirmons

M3gan is a tale of millennial mothering

If horror films today are largely read as political satires or commentaries, then the “moral” of Gerard Johnstone’s M3gan, about a sentient robot doll unwisely invited into the family home, is clear enough. Playing on our fears of the AI technology increasingly being used as “labor-saving devices,” M3gan is a tale of bad mothering and the price to be paid by career-oriented millennial women if they try to “have it all.” This may make it catnip for trolls and conservative commentators who love to chide women for any parenting style that doesn’t involve frilly aprons and a plastered-on smile. But you need to squint a bit to see this latent message. If you do, you’re missing a more complex (and more horrifying) story.

Saturday

Cockburn

TikTok sleuths are convinced Britney Spears is dead

Cockburn understands that the period between Christmas and the new year is a weird time. His own days have been spent knocking back the bourbon and hiding behind the couch when family members come to check in. But it seems that others have been spending the festive period glued to TikTok and convincing the world that Britney Spears is dead. Remember the conspiracy that Avril Lavigne committed suicide and was replaced by a look-alike named Melissa? This is pretty similar. Spears’s fans — which Cockburn should mention aren’t exactly the most sane of people — have alleged that the singer is either missing, in trouble or dead, and have started the hashtag, #WheresBritney.

britney spears

Friday

Matthew Foldi

All I want for Christmas is a TikTok ban

What do Santa Claus and the Chinese Communist Party have in common? They both see you when you’re sleeping, and they both know when you’re awake — especially if you have communist spyware like TikTok installed on your phone. Whether you’re a teenage girl or a government employee with a top secret clearance, TikTok wants to brainwash you and steal your secrets — maybe even both! While spending all your time on any social media platform can’t be good for your health, TikTok in America is specifically programmed to hook its users, with documented mental health problems plaguing teenage girls. A recently viral “blackout challenge” on the platform literally resulted in kids dying while they strangled each other — or themselves.

tiktok

Saturday

Ben Sixsmith

In defense of Twitter

Twitter probably isn’t going anywhere. Major platforms don’t just vanish, after all. If we’re not still posting in 2023, then I’ll buy you all a drink — a bet you poor saps won’t be able to hold me to because you won’t be able to find me on Twitter. Still, if Musk’s “decimate and innovate” plans don’t work then Twitter will decline. It might get slower and buggier and more prone to crashing. Platforms don’t have sudden deaths, but they do have slow and painful ones. Even Myspace still exists. Will Twitter follow it into online obscurity? Not soon, perhaps, but it will in the end. Nothing lasts forever. So our thoughts turn meditative. Writers sometimes comment on Twitter as if it has trapped them in a toxic relationship.

taliban twitter

Monday

Stephen L. Miller

Why journalists shouldn’t be on TikTok

Americans: watch your backs. Last week, Forbes released a bombshell report that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, the popular video recording and meme app, was planning to monitor and track the physical location of Americans. It’s not the first time there have been national security and human rights questions swirling around ByteDance, the China-based technology company that owns all of TikTok’s offshore data and could easily be leveraged by the Chinese government. Forbes would not specifically say which Americans ByteDance was targeting, but it would not be too farfetched to assume they would be influential figures in media and politics — the same folks China tracked during Hong Kong’s volatile freedom and democracy protests.

tiktok

Saturday

Katherine Dee

Witchcraft is not Gen Z’s new religion

Everyone’s ringing the alarm bell: is witchcraft the new religion for Gen Z? If #WitchTok, the named used to describe witchy content on TikTok, is any indication — no. #WitchTok is a digital fortune-teller; it’s a place to find aesthetic inspiration; it’s sometimes a stand-in for political engagement. For some, it’s even a hobby. But it’s not a replacement for religious faith. On TikTok, witchy content falls under three broad categories. There is predictive content like tarot card readings, manifestation instruction and “good luck” videos, and there’s #WitchTok. The first two categories of video almost exclusively cater to people who are looking for something — usually good news.

witchcraft

Thursday

Josh Hammer

Now is the time for a strong social conservatism

President Biden’s recent interview with transexual TikToker Dylan Mulvaney is a clarifying event for anyone who pays attention to America’s culture wars. The first notable aspect of the interview was the mere fact that it happened — that the president of the United States, in the home stretch of a midterm election season, deemed it a prudent use of his time to sit down with such a radical activist. The second notable aspect of the interview is what our senile commander-in-chief said in the course of his conversation. At one point, Mulvaney asked our hapless supremo if he thinks states should be permitted to “ban gender-affirming health care.

left dylan mulvaney

Sunday

Kara Kennedy

The fall of the Birkin bag

If you had a spare $100,000, what would you spend it on? The deposit on a decent home, perhaps. Maybe a boat or a luxury car. For her twenty-fifth birthday, Kylie Jenner was given a bag worth that princely sum. The three-toned Birkin was one of just three made. By her own account, Jenner had “never even seen anything like this before.” Kate Moss famously used one as a diaper bag, Kim Kardashian, a gym bag. The Hermès Birkin bag was birthed in 1984, after Jane Birkin, the British-French actress and singer, sat next to Hermès chairman Jean-Louis Dumas on an Air France flight to London. The contents of her bag spilled out onto the floor, prompting Dumas to remark that she needed one with pockets.

birkin

Saturday

Amber Duke

My womanhood is not your costume

Today is my 10,369th day of "girlhood". I don't have a bow in my hair, nor am I wearing a Barbie pink dress. But I am still a woman. Because I was born one. Because I am. I will always pray that people suffering from gender dysphoria are able to find peace with who they are. However, I do not have any sympathy for those who play-act as women using hackneyed stereotypes, pretend to speak for us — and then have the stones to tell us we are the problem when we don't comply with their delusion. Such is the case with Dylan Mulvaney. Despite not actually being a woman and even only "identifying" as such for less than a year, Mulvaney has somehow become the woman du jour. Mulvaney is a TikTok influencer with over 8 million followers and a viral series he calls, "Days of Girlhood".

Dylan Mulvaney attends the red carpet premiere of Hulu's "Reboot" (Photo by JC Olivera/Getty Images)

Tuesday

Cockburn

Madonna comes out… as an attention seeker

Another day, another celebrity coming out on the internet. Madonna is the latest: this weekend, the pop icon posted a video on TikTok with the caption, “If I miss, I’m Gay.” The singer then tosses her underwear towards a waste basket, misses and then gestures “Oh well.” https://www.tiktok.com/@madonna/video/7152605555830426923?_t=8WQ5cXPY0Zi&_r=1 Some fans are sending their support for the sixty-four-year-old, who has long been a gay icon. But others are speculating that Madonna is just jumping on the latest bandwagon. Cockburn laughed out loud at a tweet that read, "Doesn’t Madonna do this once every couple of hundred years?" Cockburn has noticed that it now seems passé to be straight, as many ladies scramble to get out of the "straight white woman" box.

madonna

Monday

John Mac Ghlionn

Is Amazon’s newest competitor a Trojan horse for China?

Chinese e-commerce is synonymous with one company: Alibaba. With a market cap of $400 billion, the multinational tech giant is responsible for 80 percent of online sales in China. Yet while Alibaba is ridiculously popular in China, it’s not popular in the US. It’s notorious, yes, but it’s not popular. That’s why there’s another e-commerce giant trying to penetrate the American market. As TechCrunch’s Rita Liao recently noted, Pinduoduo, a sort of Alibaba 2.0, “has quickly gained momentum for its first international endeavor in the U.S.” Headquartered in Shanghai, the financial capital of China, Pinduoduo recently launched Temu, an American online shopping site. The site, we’re told, seeks to challenge Amazon, the king of online shopping.

Saturday

Angelica Frey

Dear America: moving to Europe won’t solve all your problems

“In Europe people wear breathable clothes made out of natural materials, in the USA people wear plastic.” “In Europe people sleep indoors, not in tents on the street like Los Angeles.” “Unfortunately people have a lot of reactions to gluten in the US and zero issues in Europe” “How can you avoid looking like an American tourist in France?” Scroll through your news feed and you’ll witness a lot of Americans, usually those who pride themselves on their progressive views, indiscriminately romanticizing “Europe.” In the wake of the endless Covid restrictions and after Roe v. Wade was overturned, there’s been endless social media chatter about how to move from the US to Europe.

europe

Monday

John Ehrett

The Princess is misanthropic TikTok schlock

The studio pitch for Hulu’s new direct-to-streaming action thriller The Princess probably went something like this: “What if we crossed The Princess Bride with The Raid: Redemption?” Honestly, though, that logline makes the film sound better than it is. The Princess is a dizzying, hyperviolent spectacle that blends nonstop combat with a decidedly progressive moral vision, resulting in an eminently GIF-able — but emotionally sterile — finished product. The eponymous Princess (Joey King, whose breakout role was Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby), who’s never given a proper name, inhabits a quasi-fantastical European kingdom devoid of magic or monsters on the model of The Princess Diaries’ Genovia.

Friday

Amber Duke

TikTok can’t escape its China problem

In 2020, then-president Donald Trump attempted to ban the wildly popular social media app TikTok. Its Gen Z influencers were horrified — how dare the bad orange man take away their right to vogue to teen beats in search of internet fame? Unfortunately, we would not be shielded from TikTok's insane viral trends (the latest involves users getting food poisoning after purchasing one creator's mysterious and apparently highly perishable "pink sauce"). Trump's order was stalled by legal proceedings and ultimately overturned by President Biden when he took office. Yet America still faces serious national security issues from TikTok due to its ownership by a Chinese company, ByteDance. ByteDance has long since scrapped any plans it had to sell TikTok to comply with Trump's order.

tiktok
Francesca Peacock

Literature reminds us that indolence is underrated

I put off writing this article for ages. Initially, I decided I would write it from bed, but the temptation of simply giving up and falling asleep again was too great. A change of tactic proved no less helpful: out of bed, it took every ounce of effort I had to avoid getting straight back in again. Not a jot was left over for the exertion of writing and typing. This isn’t the status quo for my productivity, I promise; it is more a reflection of the subject matter. It is absolutely impossible to write about indolence while running around busily ticking off a to-do list. You have to relax into it. Call it method article-writing, if you will. Indolence gets something of a bad rap these days.

Thursday

Amber Duke

Obese TikTok star angry she can’t cripple a horse

A so-called TikTok "star" went viral this week after complaining to her more than 2 million followers that a ranch prohibited her from riding their horses because she was over the weight limit. Remi Bader, who describes herself as a "curve model" — a new term for plus-size models that sounds "nicer," says former model Anna Shillinglaw — claimed in a TikTok video that Deep Hollow Ranch in Montauk, New York, made her leave because she weighed more than 240 pounds. "I don't really need any opinions on this one," Bader said in response to commenters who noted that horses cannot carry humans above a certain weight without severe strain or injury. "It's the fact of how it wasn't advertised and how poorly it was handled. This was my experience not yours. ...

Friday

Teresa Mull

Having fun again on Derby Day

The woes of the world are a’plenty. People are anxious, stressed-out, and burned-out. It seems that no matter what side of the political aisle you gravitate toward, there’s a new battle to be fought at the dawn of each day. Even innocent settings — school board meetings, comedy shows, the Magic Kingdom itself — are not immune from partisan vitriol. Luckily for us, though, this is Derby Day, which means it’s the perfect time to do something about the very real but underreported disorder that’s been plaguing our society for a while now: we’ve forgotten how to have fun. It’s a contagious disease that affects brain function and mood, and if left untreated, could result in everyone becoming a smug, humorless elitist (a prognosis worse than Covid).