When Your Fat Pic Goes Viral as a Feminist Cautionary Tale

I had just finished Christmas dinner with my family when I got the call: “A picture of you is on the front page of r/funny,” my friend told me. I’m not a regular Reddit user, but I know about r/funny—it’s a popular subpage, a place with a lot of cat pictures. Funny? Had I been funny? I traced back through the past…
The First Webpage Went Live 25 Years Ago, and the Internet Has Been Going Downhill Ever Since
25 years ago this week, the internet’s first webpage went live. Created by Tim Berners-Lee, it was essentially “an explanation of how the hypertext-based project worked.” Engadget has images of what the page, entitled “Welcome to the Universe of Hypertext,” looked like at the time.
Seamless Will Now Verify That Their Restaurants Are Real, Which Is Probably Good...
In the wake of an extremely distressing report which found that Seamless and GrubHub restaurants often use unregulated “ghost kitchens,” the company has officially changed its policies.
Nancy Meyers Says Robert De Niro Plays 'the Best Guy I've Ever Written'
The return of Nancy Meyers is nigh! The writer-director behind What Women Want, The Holiday and the Father of the Bride movies, is back with her latest film since 2009’s It’s Complicated. It’s called The Intern, and stars Anne Hathaway as the founder of a fashion startup who befriends her new senior intern, played by…
Russell Crowe Learns What Clickhole Is. Congratulations, Russell Crowe!
ClickHole is a site owned by The Onion that satirizes online media’s never-ending quest for creating viral content. Though it began as a site that specifically parodied BuzzFeed-style listicles and content, it’s grown to satirize internet publications in general. Most recently, it’s begun posting brilliant faux oral…
Dance Moms Fans React in Totally Normal, Sane Way to Essay About Them
Yesterday, we published a quick internet deep dive essay investigating the young, Instagram-based fandom of the Lifetime show Dance Moms. Amy McCarthy wrote about this manic and self-contained social media universe: the constellations of fake accounts, password-hacking, promises to leak "secrets" about the young…
The Promise in Elena Ferrante
In a year so crammed with both cultural stasis and accelerated political mania that it resembled nothing else so strongly as a trash fire, there was Elena Ferrante, oasis of the terrifyingly good. The pseudonymous Italian author has made a quiet, graceful transition from cult fame to widespread obsession, and rightly:…
16 Signs You’re in a Women’s Magazine List About Some Bullshit
What with human banality, the steady expansion of female-centered media and the slow morph of the internet into a honeycomb bristling with echo chambers for one, it's hard not to feel that we are truly living in a golden age of the woman's magazine list about some bullshit. Every day, more and more web content is…
I Met Grumpy Cat and It Was Fucking Abysmal
Before last Thursday, I had no idea that Grumpy Cat was coming to San Francisco. And if someone had told me that less than 24 hours after learning about her impending arrival I would be in a conference room trying to ask her questions and sweating profusely, I wouldn't have believed it. I would have also been wrong.
Hey, Why Hasn't Anyone at the New York Times Seen Good Burger?
The internet has recently burned its way through another meaningless ouroboros of enthusiastic self-trolling via the #AlexFromTarget "phenomenon," in which a checkout-line cutie pie got Twitter famous and a bunch of dummies rushed to alternately take and deny credit for his Bieberesque rise to fame.
Students at the University of Pennsylvania will be pleased to learn that their extracurricular activities have been turned into a class they can pay for: ENGL 111.301: Wasting time on the Internet is being taught by Professor Kenneth Goldsmith. According to the description, attendees "will be required to stare at the…
I Am Mozart Boob Twerk Girl. I Twerked My Boobs to Mozart.

My name is Sara, but by now you might better know me as "the Mozart boob twerk girl" from sites all over the internet, including this one. A week ago exactly, I was sitting where I am now, editing a video I had no idea would garner over 21 million views worldwide in seven days. I was a…
Overanalyzing 'Basic' Is the Most Basic Move of All
Let us begin, as we so often do, by acknowledging that the term "basic bitch" has been expertly Columbused by white people. In 1984, the R&B group Klymaxx had a hit Billboard single with "Meeting In The Ladies Room," where one of the ladies sings about a basic woman who is trying to get up on her man. But rapper…

