The Money Is In All The Wrong Places

Two weeks ago, Sydney Sweeney was on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter. The accompanying profile was full of glamorous photos, as is the custom. In the story that ran under and around those images, Sweeney talked about how frustrating it has been for her to watch nepotism babies breezily enter an industry she fought to be in, and how Hollywood doesn’t encourage loyalty, and how she still feels somewhat financially insecure. This, as you can imagine, created swift and immediate backlash—against Sweeney.

Dave Karpf on the problems with "longterm-ism"

Longtermist philosopher William MacAskill has a book coming out soon, and he’s been on quite the media blitz. You can read an adapted excerpt in the New York Times (which I included in yesterday's newsletter), or read his Time Magazine cover story, or his Foreign Affairs article or listen to Ezra Klein interview him, or read Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s in-depth profile in the New Yorker. But Dave Karpf, a professor at George Washington University, says "there’s something troubling about Longtermism. I don’t mind it as a philosophical thought-experiment, but it has adopted the trappings of a social movement (one that is remarkably popular with rich technologists like Elon Musk), and we ought to ask some hard questions about who is promoting it and what it ultimately aims to achieve."

On TikTok, Election Misinfo Thrives

Ahead of the midterm elections this fall, TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information, in many ways as problematic as Facebook and Twitter, say researchers who track online falsehoods. The same qualities that allow TikTok to fuel viral dance fads — the platform’s enormous reach, the short length of its videos, its powerful but poorly understood recommendation algorithm — can also make inaccurate claims difficult to contain.

The Masters of the Guitar do "Billie Jean"

Les Maestros de la Guitarra, a Barcelona musical group, do an amazing acoustic version of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," with all four of them playing the guitar at the same time

Science Confirms Depression Is Complicated

Can you really blame your sadness on your serotonin levels? Recent research says “probably not.” While the public has been led to believe that depression is due to an “imbalance” of one or more chemicals in the brain, a paper in the journal Molecular Psychology says the evidence for serotonin just isn’t there. Of course, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but neuroscientists have been testing the serotonin hypothesis—which proposes that a deficiency of serotonin is a cause of depression—for almost 60 years, apparently

Planet of the Bored Apes: Inside the world's most famous NFT success story

The evening of February 4, business partners Greg Solano, 33, and Wylie Aronow, 35, were at their respective homes with their significant others when they got some alarming news. They had just learned that BuzzFeed News was going to publish a story revealing their identities — heretofore carefully hidden, or so they thought — to the wider world. “We got 20 minutes warning,” Solano recalls, speaking earlier this month at a hotel in downtown Manhattan.

An underwater fashion show