American conspiracy culture is a tradition with a long lineage, though not a simple one. It runs through the John Birch Society and Mae Brussell, through Bill Cooper and Alex Jones, into QAnon and beyond. There are other tributaries – black nationalist suspicion of COINTELPRO, evangelical end-times theology, militia movements, UFO subcultures – but one
Nancy Guthrie had been missing for less than 48 hours when the game began. Not the investigation, which was already under way, with FBI agents crawling the Catalina Foothills and more than 30,000 tips flooding in from the public, but the thing building around her disappearance, the thing that one could generously call “journalism” in
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
My father went into the kitchen for a cookie, then disappeared into his home office for a phone call. He was arranging a surprise for my mother – hired waitstaff for Christmas Eve dinner, one of the biggest our family would have hosted. Then he died. It took 15 seconds. We found him within minutes.
For years, I’ve had a fantasy of destroying my own life by following every piece of extreme self-improvement advice the internet offers. Not the wholesome stuff. I mean the industrial-strength protocols: starvation diets, rhinoplasty, Invisalign followed by double-jaw surgery, chemical peels that promise an entirely new layer of skin. Whatever surfaces in the algorithmic swamp.
She didn’t invent the game she’s playing
Audio-driven content is rendering reading and writing obsolete
With both the djinn and AI, we encounter answers that sound true, feel true, but lead us miles off the path
Residents and observers have basic questions that remain unanswered
Like fairyland and the astral plane, the online world is navigable only if you learn its rules
From our UK edition
Two days before Charlie Kirk was murdered, Claire Guinan, a writer for the US women’s website Jezebel, paid witches online to hex him. When I first read Guinan’s article, my thought was that it was quintessential Jezebel: clickbait that might have interested 19-year-olds in 2011, back when witchcraft still had a frisson of feminist rebellion.
Before the internet, killing manifestos would have stayed in evidence lockers. Now they circulate endlessly online
These shooters are radicalized, but in no particular direction. Their identities fragment. There is a deep fear of being forgotten
From our UK edition
I’m sitting in a meditation class at a yoga studio in Chicago, neon lights pulsing pink and purple while the instructor talks over a movie soundtrack. I almost can’t believe I’ve paid $30 to be here. When she runs out of scripted wisdom about mindfulness and presence, she starts ad-libbing: ‘And that doesn’t mean you
It’s easy for a teenager — precocious, angst-ridden, maybe lonely — to slip from observer to desensitized participant
The friends that greeted me on Friend.com weren’t insightful or socially adept
The suspect in the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO weaves a complicated digital footprint
How pretending to be homely online became lucrative
The problems between the sexes run much deeper than just being ‘sick of the apps’
When biological women pretend to be trans for clout
