When the trailer for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was released on Thursday, social media users noticed that Mera, played by Amber Heard, appears for about two seconds toward the end. This movie is Heard’s first acting project since the infamous 2022 defamation trial that thrust her and her ex-husband Johnny Depp into the public eye and subjected Heard, in particular, to intense vitri…
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The internet can’t stop talking about “quiet luxury” and “stealth wealth,” trendy new descriptors for the type of expensive minimalism that has long been associated with a certain brand of old money. With thanks to TikTok, Succession, and Gwyneth Paltrow’s courtroom looks for setting and proliferating the trend, communicating wealth through under-the-r…
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Barbie is an icon, perhaps the best known toy in the world. As Margot Robbie points out in an interview with me for a TIME cover story, the word “Barbie” has the sort of enviable global recognition only achieved by brands like Coca-Cola. Since her debut in 1959, she has been a staple of the culture, a touchpoint for pop icons like Nicki Minaj, and has become synonymous with a specif…
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You could be forgiven for never having heard of The Butler’s Night Off, an obscure 1951 Canadian film that was a little bit of noir, a little bit of comedy and a whole lot of forgettable. Indeed it would have been forgotten entirely, were it not for a small part played by a 20-year-old actor whose character name was simply listed as “a crook” and whose real name, as p…
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Scrolling through social media these days, you’ll see that loud extremists continue to dominate COVID-19 discourse. At one pole are the denialists who argue—incorrectly—that COVID is “just a cold.” At the other are those who suggest that no meaningful progress has been made in controlling its devastation. The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle.
We h…
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Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced that the world had reached a new tipping point, with more than half of global energy investments going into clean and renewable technologies. But that spark of good news in an otherwise grim year for the climate seems to have largely sidestepped Africa. The continent received only 2% of global green energy investments in 2023, d…
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If the benefits of physical activity were distilled into a pill, everyone would be on it. Studies show that moving improves nearly every aspect of health: boosting sleep, strength, and mental well-being while slashing the risk of chronic conditions and premature death. What’s more, studies show that exercise has a positive impact even when done in very short chunks and with no equipment or fa…
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“This year, there are worse ticks than many of us have ever seen in our lives,” says Janet Foley, an epidemiologist at the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
Ticks are roaming American forests in greater numbers this year than any in recent memory leaving thousands of humans at risk for lyme disease, say public health officials. And things could get …
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South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) issued a warning urging people to stop eating deep fried toothpicks. Videos of people preparing and eating the toothpicks have gone viral on TikTok and Instagram in recent months, and appear to be especially popular in South Korea.
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As businesses, schools and other organizations were forced to quickly, and sometimes haphazardly, move their operations online amid the COVID-19 pandemic, they embraced a number of tools making that shift possible. Among them: Zoom, a video conferencing service that’s seen a huge increase in usage by everyone from teachers to coworkers to friends looking to host group hangouts with one an…
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