Katherine Dee

This Monday, a fifteen-year-old named Natalie Rupnow murdered Erin M. West, a substitute teacher, and fourteen-year-old Rubi P. Vergara, a fellow student, injuring six others — two critically — at her school in Madison, Wisconsin. Before the police could intervene, Rupnow shot herself. It is not a bold prediction to say that this tragedy will not meaningfully shift our national conversation. These events blur together in the American psyche, like car crashes, their horror dulled by repetition. That Rupnow was female and younger than the median age of school shooters does not disrupt the pattern. It is — to my increasing horror, every time I write an article like this one — another story in our endless churn of violence.

Avi Schiffmann wants to create what he calls an “Ozempic for loneliness.” He believes Friend — his AI-powered chatbot and forthcoming wearable pendant — can address the loneliness epidemic. “I’m definitely motivated by curiosity more than anything,” he explains, “but also by how controversial the topic is. It’s just so culturally relevant.”  He wants to fill a void people feel they can’t fill elsewhere, and he wants to do it now, not years from now. AI companions are, in his words, a “very effective way” to counter isolation, a salve against the atomization we’ve lamented since the dawn of urbanization. Schiffmann reached out to me after I posted a negative review of Friend’s chatbot on my blog.

The news that UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson, had been killed sent an immediate shockwave across America, prompting quick assumptions about the assassin’s motive. Early chatter on platforms such as BlueSky speculated that the shooter, who is now suspected to be “tech whiz” and UPenn graduate Luigi Mangione, might be some kind of anti-capitalist folk hero. As details emerged, these hypotheses began to fall apart. Mangione, who was taken into custody Monday, was skeptical of “woke” culture, followed several right-libertarian figures online — and curated a GoodReads list heavy on Silicon Valley self-help, futurism, psychedelics and advice on treating chronic back pain.  The tidy ideological script many anticipated did not materialize.

In the sinister annals of the men's rights activist internet back in 2017, an alt-right personality called Matt Forney popularized the term, or depending on your outlook, slur, “tradthot.” According to Forney, a “tradthot” (a portmanteau of “tradwife” and “thot”) was a woman who entered the alt-right pretending to believe in traditional gender roles but, in reality, wanted to exploit a male-dominated audience by catering to their fantasies.  Forney, although not well-known for his charitable views about women at the time — he's since repented, naturally — may have been onto something.

Have you made your “date-me doc” yet? “Date-me docs” are, per an article in the New York Times last week, “long, résumé-like dating bios” — think of them as the antidote to terse, image-reliant dating apps.  They're thus far confined to the digital outposts of startup, Rationalist and Post-Rationalist communities; at this point it would be more accurate to describe them as a specific cultural phenomenon than a reaction to dating apps. Whereas dating apps such as Hinge and Tinder are made for “normies,” websites such as OkCupid — where the term “sapiosexual” was originally popularized — or even Craigslist tended to attract a more eccentric caliber of dater.

A woman behind a popular Instagram meme account, @manicpixie.transgirl, with 34,900 followers, this week admitted that she had been “transfishing.” In other words: she was a cis woman who had been lying the whole time about being trans. Welcome to the other side of the coin of the very similar, controversial “transtrending”: when people pretend to be transgender without altering their appearance. For example, a gender-conforming man who claims he is a transgender woman for attention or pity may be a “transtrender,” where a natal woman who purposefully dresses or speaks in a particular way and claims she is trans is a “transfisher.

How did Yevgeny Prigozhin, the hot dog vendor-cum-leader of the Wagner private military company, become addicted to the allure of likes, retweets and digital validation? From the outside looking in, the warlord posts like a rich kid splayed over his dad’s Porsche — except rather than a swanky car, Prigozhin brags of the travails of the world’s deadliest private military, replete with tanks and artillery.   The early war days of PMC Wagner’s social media presence could be compared to that of ISIS or other paramilitary groups: the posts had a clear agenda, including intimidation, like the “hammer of revenge” video they circulated over Telegram, which documented the brutal murder of Yevgeny Nuzhin, a former Wagner Group member.

The internet thinks Brian Szasz is a “piece of shit.” Even Cardi B has weighed in on the stepson of Hamish Harding, one of the billionaires currently on the missing OceanGate submarine that was headed to the site of the Titanic wreckage. Cardi “clapped back” at a Facebook post where Szasz explained his decision to attend a Blink-182 concert in the wake of his stepfather’s disappearance (in case you’re curious, the reason he gave was that seeing his favorite band helps him cope).  It wasn’t just the thirty-seven-year-old’s — yes, you read that correctly, thirty-seven — idiosyncratic defense of his concert-going that set the mob off, though. Szasz is a strange person — to put it lightly.

How will we know when we’ve reached “peak trans?” The term, which dates back almost a decade, refers to the point at which the number of people who consider themselves trans reaches its apex and starts to drop. A report from last year shows the number of people who identify as trans or nonbinary is declining. Researcher Eric Kaufmann, who conducted it, notes that in the last decade, there was a 1,000 percent increase in the share of American teenagers who identified as transgender.  What can account for that kind of increase? Visibility? Awareness? An evolving social landscape that de-emphasizes the differences between men and women? Maybe all of the above — but I think there’s a more persuasive argument: it was trending, and now it’s not.

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.

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.

In the 2010s, fanfiction had a serious moment in the United States. After nearly 30 years of hiding — first in handmade snail-mail fanzines, then in closed-off fan communities online, then on websites like LiveJournal, Fanfiction and AO3 (An Archive of Our Own) — ‘geek culture’ broke into the mainstream. For a moment, fanfiction was everywhere. Finally, it wasn’t just the diehard fans who wanted to participate: it was everyone or, at least, what felt like everyone. Reporters took notice. Vulture published ‘It’s a Fan-Made World: The Fan Culture Revolution’. VICE commented on the ubiquity of fanfiction about the boy band One Direction and the impact of Fifty Shades, among other things. Jezebel and BuzzFeed both marveled at the Omegaverse, not once, but twice each.