The Algorithm Age

Eboni Elektra , friend of the late Kim Porter , broke her silence on the Sean “Diddy” Combs verdict, where he was ruled guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution and not guilty on one count of racketeering conspiracy and two counts of s-- trafficking by force, fraud or coercion. The socialite, who often posts about her fond memories with Porter — Diddy’s ex-girlfriend of nearly 17 years — shared a photo of the rapper to her Instagram , where she questioned, “Who are we to judge? That’s God’s job.” Eboni Elektra's Reaction to the Sean 'Diddy' Combs Verdict Elektra elaborated on her faith in God, whom she credited for Combs’ favorable ruling. “PRAISE GOD,” she wrote. “OPINIONS ....we are all entitled to them. MISTAKES... we all make them JUDGING... we all do it. GOSSIP .... we are all guilty of it. GOD’S WILL... is higher than any opinion, mistake, judgement, or gossip.” Elektra’s caption continued, “If this is God...

Three seasons later, " Squid Game" has ended . Was protagonist Gi-Hun's (Lee Jung-jae) fate spelled out in Season 1, Episode 1? The evidence is convincing, fans are saying online. In the hit Netflix show out of South Korea, financially desperate people battle each other for a prize pot of 4.56 billion won, or just over $33 million . After winning the first game in Season 1, Gi-hun returns, this time with the intention to take down the craven competition. He makes it to the end again. In the final moments, he chooses between sparing himself and taking the life of an infant born during the games, or leaving the infant as the sole winner. The words he says are a clue into his journey in the show. How do Gi-hun's last words tie back to Episode 1? In a dramatic, intense moment, Gi-hun turns to Front Man and the VIPs, who spectated the final game, and makes his thoughts clear. “We are not horses. We are humans. Humans are…” Gi-hun says as his voice t...

As the first digital native generation, Gen Z is grappling with exposure to global instability in a way that no other generation has. "We were raised with war bleeding through our screens ... we've seen more armed drones, missiles and mutilated children before 9 a.m. than any generation before us," said 25-year-old neuroscience and AI researcher Amogh Mehrotra. Geopolitical turmoil has rocked the world in recent years, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war , as well as the conflict between Israel and Iran during which nuclear tensions were heightened. Gen Z is also struggling with inflation , increasing housing prices , climate change and mass corporate layoffs — and they're seeing all of it play out right in front of their eyes. This has created a profound sense of uncertainty for many in the generation as they try to build their future. "Many of us feel like we're inheriting broken systems, ...

Who mops the kitchen floor in your house? Or oversees the grocery shop and meal prep every week? For generations, the burden of household labour often came down to traditional gender roles — dad went to work, while mum stayed home with the kids. Today, many families split these responsibilities or juggle them alongside dual careers. But now some young women are choosing to quit work altogether and stay at home. They call themselves "traditional wives", or "tradwives". The term was made famous by social media influencers like Nara Smith, a model and mother of three young children, with a fourth on the way. She seemingly spends most of her day cooking food from scratch, from the cereal she serves her kids at breakfast to the hundreds and thousands she uses on their ice cream. In highly curated clips posted on their online accounts, self-proclaimed tradwives tend to their gardens, homeschool their children and bake sourdough bread. ...

Milan Kundera opens his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a scene from the winter of 1948. Klement Gottwald, leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, is giving a speech to the masses from a palace balcony, surrounded by fellow party members. Comrade Vladimir Clementis thoughtfully places his fur hat on Gottwald’s bare head; the hat then features in an iconic photograph. Four years later, Clementis is found guilty of being a bourgeois nationalist and hanged. His ashes are strewn on a Prague street. The propaganda section of the party removes him from written history and erases him from the photograph. “Nothing remains of Clementis,” writes Kundera, “but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.” Review: Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember – Ciara Greene & Gillian Murphy (Princeton University Press) Efforts to enforce political forgetting are often associated with totalitarian regimes. The state endeavours to control not only its citi...

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has urged Britons to have more children because of the “worrying repercussions” of a plummeting birth rate. What she seems to be forgetting is that not everyone sees having kids as the ultimate goal. I certainly don’t. In an article for The Telegraph, Phillipson stated that too many young couples were hesitant to have children due to the high costs involved. Finances have influenced my decision not to have children. As a freelance writer I was never going to be a high earner – I have never been ambitious nor hungry enough to make a lot of cash – and I vividly remember watching my parents struggle with money throughout my childhood. They didn’t have much outside help, so to keep childcare costs down, my parents worked shifts, with my dad starting work at 6am and finishing at 2pm, coming home in time to wave my mum off to work for the rest of the day. It meant they barely saw each other except for weekends. But it’s not just abou...

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has urged Britons to have more children because of the “worrying repercussions” of a plummeting birth rate. What she seems to be forgetting is that not everyone sees having kids as the ultimate goal. I certainly don’t. In an article for The Telegraph, Phillipson stated that too many young couples were hesitant to have children due to the high costs involved. Finances have influenced my decision not to have children. As a freelance writer I was never going to be a high earner – I have never been ambitious nor hungry enough to make a lot of cash – and I vividly remember watching my parents struggle with money throughout my childhood. They didn’t have much outside help, so to keep childcare costs down, my parents worked shifts, with my dad starting work at 6am and finishing at 2pm, coming home in time to wave my mum off to work for the rest of the day. It meant they barely saw each other except for weekends. But it’s not just abou...

For more than a decade, South Korean director Hwang Dong-hyuk couldn't convince a studio to fund his film project about a brutal game show that preyed on society's most vulnerable. It wasn't until the late 2010s, after Hwang became a household name in South Korea, that Netflix took notice. They convinced the director to elongate his proposal, and he created an eight-episode miniseries that would become Squid Game. When he was writing Squid Game, he had one goal: to make the show rank "No 1 on the Netflix US chart for at least a day". The success of the show's first outing resulted in a second season, released while South Korea was in the middle of political unrest. Now, the third and final season has arrived. K-drama-mania While the international interest in capitalism-critical dramas from Korea might seem to have come from nowhere, appetite has been steadily growing in the country for decades. To understand its rise, ...

As my eyes scanned my local library’s notice board, something stopped me dead in my tracks. Among the flyers for gardening and painting clubs, I spied one from the National Autistic Society about the challenges autistic adults face, such as struggling with daily routines, the impact of sensory difficulties in a busy world, and how relationships with others may be hard at times. It resonated with me straight away, even though I wasn’t really sure what autism was. This was the beginning of March 2019 – and this poster is what eventually led to me getting an autism diagnosis just before my 40th birthday. As a child, I was often drawing or reading alone – away from the hustle and bustle of everyone around me. The noise of school was chaotic and just too much, but I learnt to mask my discomfort with it. I didn’t realise I was doing that at the time, but masking is a strategy used by some autistic people – consciously or unconsciously – to appear neurotypical. Finding ...

A mid all the talk about the state of our economy , little noticed and even less discussed was June’s employment data . It showed that the unemployment rate for recent college graduates stood at 5.8%, topping the national level for the first and only its 45-year historical record. It’s an alarming number that needs to be considered in the context of a recent warning from Dario Amodei, CEO of AI juggernaut Anthropic, who predicted artificial intelligence could wipe out half of all entry-level, white-collar-jobs and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years. The upshot: our college graduates’ woes could be just the tip of the spear. The warning is playing out in real-, right before our eyes.  As someone who has spent nearly half a century as a professional risk manager, every alarm bell in my being is ringing, and they should be in yours, too. Frighteningly, Washington doesn’t seem to be hearing anything because buried in the Trump administrati...