Author: Sam Allcock

I was searching for a recipe my grandmother used to make when I first realized something wasn’t quite right. Twenty years ago, I would have happened upon an Ohio-based retired teacher’s blog, complete with a handwritten family narrative and a marginally damaged comment section. This time, I received an AI-generated summary that wasn’t quite correct, three pop-ups requesting that I sign up for a newsletter, a paywall, and a cookie banner. Somewhere beneath all of that was the recipe. I didn’t even try to dig. Even though it was a trivial moment, it continued to bother me. Because this is…

Something changes when you hear yourself cloned for the first time. Recently, Shari Vahl, a reporter for the BBC, sat through that exact moment and heard a banking passphrase read aloud by a synthetic version of her own voice. While phoning Santander, she had taken the audio from an old radio interview, put it into a voice generator, and hit play on her phone. In less than two seconds, the bank verified her identity. It’s the kind of thing that you would anticipate failing at some point. It didn’t. Despite its small scale, that experiment suggests something more significant. For…

This spring, you can witness the same thing taking place in any thrift store in East London, Brooklyn, or Karachi. With a sort of focused intensity, teenage girls flipped through racks of denim, pulling out cropped polos, wide-leg jeans with frayed hems, and the occasional belt adorned with rhinestones that someone had obviously purchased at a mall in 2003. The items are not being used as costumes. For feeds that haven’t really stopped feeding the same loop for nearly three years, they are being styled, layered, and photographed. According to most forecasts, Y2K fashion ought to have peaked and quietly…

Not too long ago, the word “Harvard” was enough to put an end to a dispute. It was a sign of intelligence, seriousness, and an inherited authority that didn’t require defense. The way people talk about the school now, half mocking, half resentful, as if the name itself has become a joke in a nation that has grown weary of being told who its brightest minds are, is a sign that that era is fading. The release of the Epstein document earlier this year caused serious harm. It was confirmed what people had secretly suspected for years, not because anything…

A new kind of media career emerged somewhere between the LinkedIn farewell posts and the layoff notices. It didn’t make a manifesto announcement. It simply kept showing up in inboxes week after week, written by people who had previously worked at the Washington Post, CNN, or The Atlantic but had decided, for a variety of reasons, that they would prefer not to. This drift was not created by Substack. It just created a neat landing spot. When you squint at the numbers, they become alluring. Together, the top ten publications on the platform earn roughly $40 million annually. Now, over…

When you were invited to Twitter, it seemed like an inside joke. While scrolling through it during the initial lockdown in the spring of 2020, there was an odd solace in witnessing strangers laugh in real time. There was a pulse in the feed. A comedian and a virologist could argue; they are both correct in different ways. Then the lights abruptly went out. Not all at once. The dimming occurred gradually, the way old hotels begin to smell slightly of moisture before anyone acknowledges that the carpet needs to be replaced. Your grandmother would scowl at the term Cory…

These days, a quiet thought often arises in offices between the second and third coffee of the morning: those who previously appeared to be the safest in their careers might actually be the most exposed. The radiologist who became well-known for reading scans for twenty years. The contracts attorney was the most knowledgeable person in the building about one area of commercial law. The software engineer is proficient in just one framework. That kind of limited mastery felt like a stronghold for decades. Now that the lights are on, it feels more like a glass house. You can practically feel…

It appeared as though the rules had been discreetly suspended for a while. You could bring a laptop, take a plane to Lisbon, Chiang Mai, or Tbilisi, and lead a strangely weightless professional life, paying rent in one currency, receiving compensation in another, and disregarding both countries’ tax codes. The cafés were packed. The number of co-working spaces increased. Estonia became a brand. It appeared that no one was doing a thorough check. The window is going to close. Not drastically, not in a single, all-encompassing announcement, but rather in the way these things typically change, through subtle enforcement memos…

A certain type of wealth has lost faith in the world it helped create. A tech founder purchasing another piece of farmland in Otago, an architect in Texas describing the steel doors he’s welding for clients who won’t identify themselves—you can see hints of it in the little headlines that keep coming up. These tales don’t come out loud. They sit there, slightly unsettling, after drifting in almost casually. In this image, New Zealand keeps coming up. It’s not because it markets itself that way, but rather because it has come to represent the final peaceful room in a burning…

You’ll notice it before you place an order if you walk into any Brooklyn coffee shop on a Saturday morning. After a five-mile run, a group of people in matching shirts are hugging as if they’ve survived something together. No one is discussing God. But there’s no denying the energy. You may have previously seen this in a 1972 documentary about the Jesus People or in an old picture of your grandmother leaving Mass. The environment has shifted. The appetite hasn’t. In America, religion didn’t exactly vanish; rather, it quietly vanished, much like sugar in tea. People continued to desire…