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Cockburn never would have expected a porn influencer to bring religious discourse back to the public square, much less one who cosplays as anime characters. Yet months after her come-to-Jesus moment, OnlyFans starlet Nala Ray has TikTok theologians arguing: “Is she too far gone to be saved?”  Ray, a self-described nerd who grew up a pastor's kid, started her OnlyFans account in 2020. After being drawn to pornography because of the beauty of the human body (what else?!), Ray is “giving it all up for Christ.”  Conveniently, Ray is leaving OnlyFans after making over $9 million as one of the platforms top one percent of earners. She has deleted all but one video from the website since her conversion.

If you ask anybody under twenty about their life plan, social media will likely play some part in the answer. A friend’s nine-year-old son has just launched his own YouTube channel. My prepubescent cousins are telling their parents that TikTok is “the key to financial freedom.” When I was their age, my entrepreneurial skills went as far as selling single cigarettes to my classmates for loose change. The appeal of the influencer life isn’t hard to understand. Over the last decade, it’s been touted as the sexy, well-paid, democratic career of the future. A 2019 Morning Consult survey found that one in ten young people consider themselves “influencers.” But now these micro-celebrities are trading in their tripods and ring-lights for real jobs.

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!

Ten years ago today, Adam Lanza murdered twenty-seven people in Sandy Hook, Connecticut: his mother, six educators, twenty first-graders. Then he shot himself. Speculating about what might have motivated Lanza to commit an atrocity of this scale was difficult in 2012. What information was available about Lanza was sparse; what we did have was difficult to make sense of. A bug-eyed photo of him. A single mother who loved guns. A crazy, isolated kid — maybe it was the medication? There was very little to weave a story out of. It was haunting; it was horrifying; but it made no sense. There was no ready-made narrative for a twenty-year-old who could step into a first-grade classroom and open fire. There was nothing we could compare it to. Mental health, probably. Guns, probably.

Summarizing the tale of Christian Weston Chandler in a paragraph is like trying to squeeze an octopus into a bottle. You can’t. Chris is known for being the ‘most documented person on the internet’. A biographical documentary on YouTube has 59 episodes, all 40 minutes long, which add up to over 40 hours footage. Imagine that there was a remake of The Truman Show, except that instead of being a fairly functional married insurance broker, Truman Burbank was a mentally ill aspiring cartoonist who lived with his aged mom. Do you get the picture? Well, not any more. Chandler, who claims to be transgender and now goes by Christine, has been arrested after appearing to admit in online conversations to raping said aged mom, and faces up to 10 years in prison.

(If this were a documentary, I would open with the track ‘Turning Japanese’ by The Vapors which, yes, I know that’s the wrong ones, but I still think it would work so please have that song in mind as you read the opening paragraph.) Today something beautiful happened. A tortured soul was finally able to present themselves to the world as their authentic self. YouTube star, songstress and social media guru Oli London came out as Korean. Oh, and also nonbinary too, but to be honest all that gender stuff is getting a little old these days. When almost every social media influencer is either nonbinary or genderqueer, the market becomes somewhat oversaturated. Like what happened with Beyblades.