Tiktok

Today

Freya India

How iPhones became birth control

A new study has found that smartphones are a likely cause of falling American birth rates. Economists Caitlin K. Myers and Ezekiel Hooper tracked the rollout of the iPhone across the country and found that the more people used smartphones, the further birth rates fell. This was especially true for the youngest cohort of women. Between 2007 and 2011, use of the iPhone was correlated with between 33 to 52 percent of America’s fertility decline. There’s been a lot of discussion about smartphones and falling fertility rates lately. Most arguments go something like this: smartphones and social media are linked to rising rates of anxiety and depression, less sex and less in-person socializing.

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Monday

Ben Clerkin

Meet Alex Bruesewitz, Trump’s Gen Z celebrity whisperer

Alex Bruesewitz is the President’s celebrity whisperer. He has brought the likes of YouTube personality Jake Paul and rapper Nicki Minaj into the MAGA fold. He is also the director of a social media empire with 50 million followers, which includes such X accounts as @TrumpWarRoom and @TeamTrump. Bruesewitz is an influencer, both online and in the corridors of the White House. A sense of loyalty to Donald Trump is what motivates him. It started when Bruesewitz was a teenager in Wisconsin. In 2015, he posted a picture of the Trump Tower in Chicago, saying the sign would look good over the White House. Trump retweeted him. So began his life as an online crusader for MAGA.

alex bruesewitz

Thursday

Max Pemberton

Is your wellness smoothie giving you cancer?

There’s a question I’ve started being asked at work. Given I’m a psychiatrist, it isn’t one I’d ever expected to hear: “Do I have cancer?” A young woman with anxiety wants to know whether the lump on her neck is sinister; she has been watching a great deal of TikTok. A man in his late thirties, in for a routine review, mentions in passing that his sister has been referred for a colonoscopy and wonders whether he should be too. At a dinner party a few weeks ago, a friend leant across halfway through her low-alcohol natural wine and asked me, in a small voice, whether it was true her generation was getting cancer in their thirties. Yes, I said, perhaps a little too bluntly. She looked rather panicked for the rest of her evening.

Saturday

Stuart Heritage

The horror of the male wig

Horrible injuries are commonplace in boxing but none, surely, has been quite so devastating as that sustained by the heavyweight Jarrell Miller. In the moment it took for an uppercut to land, the Brooklyn boxer’s life changed forever. Miller went from professional athlete to, well, "the man who got his wig punched off." I have rewatched Miller’s hairpiece getting punched off countless times, my hand clamped to my mouth. Why didn’t his team throw in the towel? Why didn’t the referee just stop the fight? Why didn’t Miller, his wig flipped up at 90 degrees like a kitchen trashcan lid, simply step out of the ring, exit the arena and start a new life several thousand miles away under an adopted identity?

wig

Thursday

Katherine Dee

The new power of cryptid belief

Last month, during the Arctic Blast that still has a few states trapped under ice (greetings from Illinois), someone posted an altered Google Earth screenshot to Facebook. The image displayed a snake-like shape in the Atlantic Ocean, east of Virginia. “The Leviathan is waking up,” the caption read. “This is why they are creating a FAKE snow storm and manipulating the weather so they can freeze it because of the military bases in the area.” The post gained enough traction to land on Know Your Meme, the internet’s best-kept meme encyclopedia. But it wasn’t just a meme, at least in the sense we usually mean. A lot of people earnestly believed that the biblical Leviathan was waking up from beneath the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Tuesday

Neal Pollack

The John Lennon visa is now the OnlyFans visa

The US created the O-1B visa system in 1972 after John Lennon was nearly deported, and it became clear that there was no immigration system to attract artists to the country. Lennon couldn’t possibly imagine what the system has become now – nearly half the applicants for the O1-B in the last year are OnlyFans models, according to a report published by the nonprofit Florida Phoenix. This makes sense in the Trump 2.0 era, where the President is a game-show host, the War Secretary is a news anchor, Dr. Oz runs Medicare and the former first lady of World Wrestling Entertainment is in charge of the Department of Education. Our cinemas are empty and the average American reads negative five books a year. Bonnie Blue, there’s a luxury condo in Miami waiting for you.

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