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☆ The Triumphant Comeback of the Kamala Harris Meme
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-23 | by ( Amanda Hess | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Kamala Harris is a highly memeable presidential candidate. Videos of Harris dancing at campaign events were labeled “cringe.” The stickiest anti-Kamala meme of the 2020 election — that the former prosecutor Harris “is a cop” — united leftists, Black Twitter and Republican trolls in an internet-wide project of framing Harris as either a reactionary or a hypocrite. Since President Biden bowed out of the race and threw his support to Harris, the familiar old Kamala memes have risen again. Her dance moves have been set to Charli XCX songs and filtered through Charli’s lime-green “Brat”-era branding, bathing Harris in her chill hot-mess pop star glow. Even “Kamala Harris is a cop” has been reclaimed, with an exaggerated wink, by supporters eager to fashion it into a winning general-election pitch.

Persons: Kamala Harris, Harris, ”, Harris “, —, Black, Biden, Kamala, Charli, “ Kamala Harris Organizations: Republican YouTube, Black Twitter

☆ The Voices of A.I. Are Telling Us a Lot
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-28 | by ( Amanda Hess | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

developers are cribbing from the movies, crafting voices for real machines based on dated cinematic fantasies of how machines should talk. She was agreeable and self-effacing; she sounded like she was game for anything. After Sky’s debut, Johansson expressed displeasure at the “eerily similar” sound, and said that she had previously declined OpenAI’s request that she voice the bot. The company protested that Sky was voiced by a “different professional actress,” but agreed to pause her voice in deference to Johansson. Bereft OpenAI users have started a petition to bring her back.

Persons: OpenAI, Scarlett Johansson, Spike Jonze, ”, Johansson, Sky

☆ The Very Online Afterlife of Franz Kafka
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-01 | by ( Amanda Hess | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Also, “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka, a fat black bug on its cover. The video’s creator is 25-year-old Margarita Mouka — @aquariuscat444 on TikTok, where she frequently posts about Kafka, integrating his work, his likeness and his life story into her online persona of romantic intellectualism. “Franz Kafka becomes an unlikely HEARTTHROB on TikTok — where Gen Zers are swooning over the Czech novelist nearly 100 YEARS after his death,” ran a Daily Mail headline. On BookTok, where a flashed book jacket conveys a glimmer of a user’s inner life, a classic text can leave a durable impression. It plays like a deep cut, reaching back through time to ground a TikToker’s content in a more enduring human experience.

Persons: Ottessa Moshfegh, Sylvia Plath, Franz Kafka, Margarita Mouka —, Kafka, “ Franz Kafka, Zers, ”, Harry Styles Organizations: Daily Mail, The, Austro Locations: TikTok, Czech, Hungarian

The first draft of Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk,” was 600 pages long. As she worked to cut the manuscript, Hanna found herself excising page after page of male violence. “It’s pretty sad, if you read the book, because there’s still a lot in there,” she told me. But when it came time to write her life story, she realized that she could not playfully twist away from her past. “I keep trying to make my rapes funny, but I have to stop doing that because they aren’t,” she writes in the book, which comes out on May 14.

Persons: Kathleen Hanna’s, ”, Hanna, there’s, “, Tigre, Julie Ruin

Within days, millions of TikTok videos using music from Universal artists went mute, and since then guessing which side would blink first has become a media-business parlor game. Backing this up, one study found that TikTok users reported experiencing higher levels of flow than Instagram users. Corey Basch, who analyzed 100 popular TikTok videos with the hashtag mentalhealth for a 2022 study, emerged concerned about the looping effect of the algorithm. Cerave Sales increased by more than 60 percent in 2020 after skin care became a lockdown pastime and TikTok users discovered the drugstore mainstay. Cat Crack Catnip It briefly sold out in 2021 after TikTok users posted videos of their cats going crazy for it.

Persons: randos, TikTok, you’ve, Sydney Sweeney, Glen Powell, ”, “ Wonka, Barbie, “ Oppenheimer, —, goofing, cavorting, Sue Fleishman, Z’s Walter Cronkite, Spehar, Donald J, Trump, he’s, Caitlin Clark’s, Joe Biden, Justin Bieber, Abbie Richards, Richards, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Lil Nas X, Fleetwood Mac, Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Drake, Swift, ByteDance, can’t, Mark Warner, hasn’t, Al, ear on, Li Organizations: Fleetwood Mac, Facebook, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros, White, Pew Research Center, YouTube, The New York Times, Kansas City Chiefs, Media, Colgate, Universal Music Group, ByteDance, Intelligence Committee, e Locations: United States, Beijing, Biden’s, TikTok, Singapore, View, Calif, China, American

☆ The Top-Reviewed Chicken Recipe in Our Cooking Database
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-14 | by ( Sam Sifton | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

My Boston baked beans taste different from Amanda Hesser’s now that I’ve made the dish a gajillion times. They’re both the same recipe. Take my recipe for oven-roasted chicken shawarma, which lots of people make. (More than 17,000 readers have given it a rating on New York Times Cooking.) It was utterly fantastic, and utterly her own — more lemony than mine, a little warmer in spice, the meat cut a little differently — even though she followed the recipe exactly.

Persons: Amanda Hesser’s, I’ve, They’re Organizations: New York Times Locations: Boston

☆ The Complex, Enduring Friendship of Shane MacGowan and Sinead O’Connor
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-30 | by ( Amanda Hess | More About Amanda Hess | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In a 2021 biography of MacGowan, O’Connor recalled performing a version of “Haunted” with him while he was using heroin. “The producers were freaking out because Shane was nodding out on smack in between the verses,” she told MacGowan’s biographer, Richard Balls. O’Connor and MacGowan first encountered each other in the 1980s in London, MacGowan told me over email in 2021, though he did not remember the exact circumstances. “In the locked ward where they put you if you’re suicidal, there’s more class A drugs than in Shane MacGowan’s dressing room,” she wrote. Shane MacGowan sounds Irish.” In our interview, MacGowan called O’Connor “a brilliant singer and a brilliant Irish singer, one of the best.”

Persons: MacGowan, O’Connor, Shane, ”, MacGowan’s, Richard Balls, “, Moya Brennan, Joey Cashman, Joey, “ Rememberings, ” O’Connor, Shane MacGowan’s, Bob Geldof, ” Geldof, “ Bono, Shane MacGowan Organizations: Pogues, “ Locations: London, St, Dublin, Irish

☆ If I Embarrass My Baby on TikTok, Will He Stay My Baby Forever?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-25 | by ( Amanda Hess | More About Amanda Hess | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

That is the eeriest part of these videos — the parents are barely interacting with their kids. The apps are always coursing with some new prompt beckoning parents to show off their big babies, their ugly babies, their ugly babies’ glow-ups. It feels so easy: You’ve got your phone, you’ve got your kid, and because of the kid, you’ve got nothing else to do except look at your phone. It’s seductive for new parents to think of our children as an extensions of ourselves, and social media makes that fantasy visceral. Babies are cute (even the ones their parents advertise as ugly), and their emotions are sweeping and operatic.

Persons: ”, vlogger, You’ve, you’ve Organizations: YouTube

☆ New York Times Staffers Walk Off Job Amid Contract Fight
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-08 | by ( Steven Perlberg | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

New York Times staffers walked off the job on Thursday for one day. Union staffers are in heated contract negotiations with the paper over issues like pay. More than 1,100 union members had pledged to stop working at midnight on December 8 if an agreement had not been reached over a new union contract, with the stoppage planned for 24 hours. That is not where we are today," New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn wrote in a memo to staff, according to an unbylined Times story about the one-day strike beginning. Union members plan to picket outside of the New York Times headquarters on Thursday.

☆ New York Times journalists will stage historic 24-hour strike after management and union fail to reach deal
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-07 | by ( Oliver Darcy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

An executive at The Times, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, acknowledged to CNN on Wednesday that the work stoppage would certainly create difficulties. Joe Kahn, executive editor of The Times, said in a note to staff, “We will produce a robust report on Thursday. “We’re asking readers to not engage in any [New York Times] platforms tomorrow and stand with us on the digital picket line!,” Amanda Hess, a critic-at-large for the newspaper, wrote on Twitter. And we need productive negotiations to get to a deal.”Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild of New York, said in response, “Union democracy is crucial to union power. “When Times management comes to the bargaining table with their insulting and disrespectful offers, they have to explain it to a room full of their own employees—and they hate it.

☆ New York Times journalists stage historic 24-hour strike after management and union fail to reach deal
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-07 | by ( Oliver Darcy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

Stacy Cowley holds a sign outside the New York Times building in Manhattan, New York, U.S., December 8, 2022. Joe Kahn, executive editor of The Times, said in a note to staff, “We will produce a robust report on Thursday. “We’re asking readers to not engage in any [New York Times] platforms tomorrow and stand with us on the digital picket line!,” Amanda Hess, a critic-at-large for the newspaper, wrote on Twitter. New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones speaks outside the Times' office, Thursday, Dec. 8, 2022, in New York. “When Times management comes to the bargaining table with their insulting and disrespectful offers, they have to explain it to a room full of their own employees—and they hate it.

☆ Sinead O’Connor Remembers Things Differently
▼ + stars: | 2021-05-18 | by ( Amanda Hess | More About Amanda Hess | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Sinead O’Connor is alone, which is how she prefers to be. She has been riding out the pandemic in a tiny village on an Irish mountaintop, watching murder shows, buying fairy-garden trinkets online and mainlining American news on CNN. Bubble-gum roses lined the windows, and the Hindu goddess Durga stretched her eight arms across a blanket on a cozy cherry couch. “Deliberately, I bought uncomfortable chairs, because I don’t like people staying long,” she said. “I like being on my own.” But she disclosed this with such an impish giggle that it sounded almost like an invitation.

Persons: Sinead O’Connor, “, ”, Durga, O’Connor, weren’t Organizations: CNN, Amazon.com Locations: Irish

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