The Internet's Surprising Reaction to Kim Kardashian Being Booed at Tom Brady's Roast

Man in Disbelief After Using Radiation Detector in His Kitchen

The Redditor is fascinated by the reading, and so far he has no plans to change his kitchen counters or move.

newsweek.com

An airstrike kills 20 in central Gaza as Israel's leaders air wartime divisions

An Israeli airstrike killed 20 people in central Gaza, mostly women and children, on Sunday, as fighting raged and Israel's leaders aired divisions over who should govern Gaza after the war.

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npr.org

Smellmaxxing, Explained

Some teenage boys have grown obsessed with designer fragrances that cost hundreds of dollars.

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nytimes.com

Would you eat this weird sandwich? Barry Enderwick would.

Barry Enderwick’s hobby is recreating historical sandwich recipes. Since 2018, he has created and eaten more than 700 sandwiches and posted results on TikTok.

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washingtonpost.com

Biden to deliver Morehouse commencement address as protests disrupt graduations across the country

President Biden will deliver the commencement address at Morehouse College on Sunday, marking an opportunity to reach out to Black voters.

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foxnews.com

Americans are down on the economy (again), with inflation topping election concerns

After a spurt of optimism, Americans are feeling a little more glum about the economy — again.

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washingtonpost.com

Bronny James is ready to be himself, but the NBA still sees LeBron James Jr.

Scouts and executives see Bronny James as a viable NBA player and confirm he could be leverage to force the Lakers into a trade to unite him with his father.

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latimes.com

Lakers and JJ Redick are a match made in Looney Tunes

JJ Redick could be the next Lakers head coach because he has a podcast with LeBron James. Period. End of resume. That's a joke, right?

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latimes.com

Sam Alito’s flag flew upside down. Are his ethics?

Justice Alito’s wife hoisted a “Stop the Steal” flag after Jan 6. Should her husband recuse himself now?

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washingtonpost.com

Wild Reason Student Reschedules Meeting Gets '10/10' From Professor

On her way to meet her professor, Annie Rogovin got sidetracked when she noticed a baby duck.

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newsweek.com

Putin's 'Revenge': Georgia's Jailed Ex-President Urges West to Act

Mikheil Saakashvili told Newsweek that Moscow "has everything to gain" from Georgia passing its controversial "foreign agent" law.

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newsweek.com

How Meghan Markle's Wedding Dress Was an Act of Royal Rebellion

Meghan's haute-couture Givenchy wedding gown for the 2018 ceremony broke a long-established royal tradition.

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newsweek.com

Inside look at some of Knicks’ other memorable Game 7s

Sunday’s Game 7 against the Pacers will mark the Knicks’ first since 2000. The Post takes a look at some of their most memorable Game 7s:

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nypost.com

A Much-Needed History of Queer Women’s Spaces

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slate.com

A Compelling Made-For-TV Reality Season

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest

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theatlantic.com

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Jinae West, a senior producer at The Atlantic who works on our Radio Atlantic and Good on Paper podcasts.Jinae has been catching up on Survivor to sate her voracious reality-show appetite; she’d watch Steven Yeun in anything, and she enjoys watching Shark Tank while doing laundry. (As she puts it: “This culture survey is a real win for network TV.”)First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The one place in airports people actually want to be The art of survival The Atlantic’s summer reading guide The Culture Survey: Jinae WestMy favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I take public transit to work, so I’m addicted to what I think of as commute-friendly games. My favorite, of course, is The New York Times’ Connections, where you group together words that have something in common. (My preferred playing order is: Connections > Strands > Wordle > Crossword.) If I don’t get all the groups right away, I revisit the game later, usually on the commute home. But then, if I don’t guess another group in a sufficient amount of time, I get self-conscious about the people sitting nearby, judging me for not knowing that loo, condo, haw, and hero are all one letter away from bird names. The reality is nobody cares, and I never think about loons.Sometimes I’ll do the mini crossword just to feel something. [Related: The New York Times’ new game is genius.]Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: A few weeks ago, my niece and nephews made me play Ultimate Chicken Horse on Nintendo Switch. It’s a multiplayer game where you collectively build an obstacle course that’s full of both helpful things and perilous traps. If the whole group fails to finish a level, you respawn and get to pick another item to add.The result is generally a chaotic minefield of wrecking balls, flamethrowers, and black holes—and I’m pretty sure I got hit by a hockey puck? I lost every round and died within seconds. But Ultimate Chicken Horse is my favorite kind of game: low commitment, fun for all ages, and less about winning or losing than about making sure other people have a hard time.A good recommendation I recently received: A friend suggested a while ago that I watch the back catalog of Survivor to sate my reality-competition-show appetite. I am a glutton for it in every genre: cooking, baking, glassblowing, interior designing, dating. Survivor has more than 40 U.S. seasons—and had somehow been a big cultural blind spot for me—so it was right up my alley. Who knew that watching a person build a fire or give up the chance at immunity for a plate of nachos could make for such thrilling television? And the blindsides! Oh god, the blindsides.I started with Season 37: “David vs. Goliath,” or: “The One Where Mike White Probably Thought Up The White Lotus.” I quickly moved on to Season 28: “Cagayan—Brawn vs. Brains vs. Beauty.” Most recently, I finished Season 33: “Millennials vs. Gen X,” which was interesting to watch as a now-30-something Millennial (it aired in 2016). But as the season wore on, and the contestants shed their generational stereotypes, it became a much more compelling show for other reasons. By the time I watched the finale, I was surprised to find myself in tears. It’s a near-perfect made-for-TV season. [Related: Survivor is deceptive. That’s what makes it so real.]An actor I would watch in anything: Steven Yeun. He’s endlessly watchable. And he can sing! Toni Collette is another.A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: If Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” is pure pop summer, Ultimate Painting’s cover of the song is its more muted slacker-surfer counterpart, and very much my vibe. It’s also part of a compilation album—Lagniappe Sessions, Vol. 1—that features another great cover song: Tashaki Miyaki’s version of the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You” (which is itself an adaptation).Wet Leg’s “Angelica” is the loud song I have on rotation. It’s a track about a dull party, and it has a good beat and deadpan lyrics such as “Angelica, she brought lasagna to the party.”The television show I’m most enjoying right now: If I’m being very honest with myself, it’s Shark Tank. (This culture survey is a real win for network TV, I guess.) Once a show I only considered watching in a hotel if nothing else was on, it has now been upgraded to a show I watch in my everyday life while doing other things. The stakes are just high enough to keep me invested and just low enough for me to walk away from the deal (to go fold laundry or something).Is the show an overt celebration of capitalism? Yes. Is it a warped version of the American Dream? Sure. Is “Hello sharks” a mildly funny punch line to use on many occasions? You bet! Unlike, say, America’s Next Top Model or The Voice, the show actually does have a track record of investing in a few hits. I mean, once upon a time, Scrub Daddy was just a man with a sponge and a dream.My fiancé has bought at least one thing from Shark Tank: a little fast-food-ketchup holder for our car. We’ve used it maybe once? Twice? It was fine. The show is fine.Also: Baby Reindeer. Watch it with a friend. You’re going to want to talk that one out. [Related: The Baby Reindeer mess was inevitable.]The Week Ahead Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, an action film starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the eponymous character trying to make her way home in a postapocalyptic world (in theaters Friday) Tires, a comedy series co-created by the comedian Shane Gillis about a crew working at a struggling auto shop (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Butcher, a novel by Joyce Carol Oates about a 19th-century doctor who experiments on the patients in a women’s asylum (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. The Dream of Streaming Is DeadBy Jacob Stern Remember when streaming was supposed to let us watch whatever we want, whenever we want, for a sliver of the cost of cable? Well, so much for that. In recent years, streaming has gotten confusing and expensive as more services than ever are vying for eyeballs. It has done the impossible: made people miss the good old-fashioned cable bundle. Now the bundles are back. Read the full article.More in Culture The Baby Reindeer mess was inevitable. Amy Winehouse was too big for a biopic. The cruel social experiment of reality TV What Alice Munro has left us The wild Blood dynasty Conan O’Brien keeps it old-school. Catch Up on The Atlantic The Israeli defense establishment revolts against Netanyahu. George T. Conway III: The New York Trump case is kind of perfect. Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves. Photo Album Gentoos, which are the fastest swimmers among penguins, surf a wave in the ocean. Levi Fitze / GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2024 Check out the top images from the German Society for Nature Photography’s annual photo competition.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The General Intendant’s Daughter

The girl’s expressive gifts surpass those of all the members of his company, even the aging starlet Klamt. That is something the General Intendant of the City Theater can no longer deny.Up to this point, he has done everything in his power to keep his daughter off the stage, for the General Intendant is intimately acquainted with the unscrupulousne

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The girl’s expressive gifts surpass those of all the members of his company, even the aging starlet Klamt. That is something the General Intendant of the City Theater can no longer deny.Up to this point, he has done everything in his power to keep his daughter off the stage, for the General Intendant is intimately acquainted with the unscrupulousness of theater people and is well aware that if he casts her in a leading role, she will be subjected to the most malicious slander.And so will he.But in light of her expressive gifts, which have now achieved a perfection he once hardly thought possible, he must concede that withholding them from the city whose theatrical life he has sworn to cultivate (but which, under his supervision, has grown only more decadent) would be an intolerable abdication of his duty.The General Intendant therefore risks the opprobrium of the public, and the rage of the aging starlet Klamt, by commissioning a play for his daughter to star in, one especially suited to her expressive gifts, the action of which should include, he suggests to the dramatist, the following basic elements:The curtain should rise on a man in a straitjacket scrutinizing the large stained-glass window above the altar of the chapel of a psychiatric facility. The man, who for some time has existed in a perpetual present tense, suddenly remembers that he himself, in his prior life as a glassworker, created this stained-glass window, which depicts five female saints who were decapitated for their faith. He marvels at the fact that he, who now feels so far from the beautiful, was once capable of bringing such beauty into the world. As he studies the window, the man feels an urge he has not felt in a very long time: the urge to bring more beauty into the world. If he cannot bring more beauty into the world, through his mastery of the craft of glasswork, he would prefer to die. The man proclaims as much to a chapel that the audience has thus far taken for empty. But from the two wings two stout old nurses appear, brusquely tighten the arms of his straitjacket (which had already seemed as tight as possible), and inform the man that in this institution there is of course no opportunity to work with glass. As if they would let the inmates work with glass! The laughter of the nurses echoes in the chapel long after they have clacked away. But a glassworker who can never again work with glass is better off dead. He opts to die. The facility, however, has seen to it that he has no means of doing so. He despairs. Yet at the height of his despair, more memories return to him. He suffered his first fit of insanity while he was installing this stained-glass window—he remembers that now. From the time of that initial fit, he could foresee the fate that has since overtaken him—namely, that upon completion of the window, he would be committed to this very institution for the rest of his life. But while his insanity was still only intermittent, he could outwit fate by means of his craft. Yes, he recalls realizing that, too. He had then done something to the stained-glass window, or committed to memory some secret about it. He had secretly installed it in such a way that the stained-glass window would later enable him to escape through it. The clarity and force of this recollection makes the man reel. But when he tries to remember what the secret of the stained-glass window is, he cannot. Yet even this he must have foreseen, for in those first transient fits of insanity, his mind was stripped of its memories and left only with such things as are common to the species. He must have known that supplying himself with a means of escape would not be enough: He had to find a way to remind himself of the form it took and the secret of its use. He must have known that he could not entrust his memory with something as important as this; nor could he write it down, since a written message would be confiscated on admittance. He must have relied on another person. But in the whole world, as far as the man was concerned, there was only one other person. The man suddenly recalls the existence of his beloved. He remembers teaching his beloved the words she should say to him after he went insane and was committed here: Your name is Gustav. You are a glassworker. The beautiful window you see before you is your own handiwork. You must simply … and come back to me. Simply what? The very words the man needs most have been expunged from his mind. He recalls rehearsing the lines again and again until his beloved could recite them without error. Yet his beloved has never been to visit him. Where is his beloved? What has happened to her? He confides in the chief physician about his beloved. Not about the message she was to deliver, only about her existence. But even this is a mistake, for the chief physician (to be played by the great actor and tenor Silberberg) lets it be known that he wants to hear nothing more about the beloved, in whose existence he plainly disbelieves. No one at the facility believes in the existence of the beloved—no one, that is, except the two stout old nurses, who until now have struck us as cruel and unfeeling crones (one to be played by the aging starlet Klamt). In the middle of the night, the nurses enter the man’s room and convey their belief in the existence of the beloved. They pledge to locate the beloved. Lo and behold, they do locate her. They bring the beloved to him. But can this be her? This is his beloved?! The man weeps. His beloved exists now in a lamentable state. She cannot walk. She cannot speak. Only her eyes move, to and fro. Yet the movement of her eyes, viewed even from the very last row of the balcony of the City Theater, is extraordinarily expressive. To the attentive theatergoer, this movement of the beloved’s eyes expresses everything that needs to be known about her relationship to the man. The one thing it cannot express, however, is the secret message she was supposed to impart to him. This secret message is locked within his quasi-vegetative beloved. He therefore sets out to do what not only the chief physician but even the nurses try to tell him is impossible: teach his beloved to speak again. He brings her to the chapel. Positions her cane-backed wheelchair before the altar. My name, he tells her, is Gustav. I am a glassworker. The beautiful window you see before you is my own handiwork. I must simply … and come back to you. Hour after hour, with remarkable tenderness and devotion, he says these words to his beloved, always pausing long enough at the ellipsis for her to leap in and impart with miraculously restored speech the secret of the stained-glass window. But she never leaps in. Her speech is never restored. Only her eyes move, to and fro, to and fro, in a manner that is exquisitely expressive, but not of the right thing. Now visiting hours are over. The clacking of the nurses gets louder and louder. They are coming to the chapel to take away his beloved. He knows that they will not bring her back. Not ever. He tries one last time: My name is Gustav. I am a glassworker. The beautiful window you see before you is my own handiwork. I must simply … He pauses. She says nothing. Yet this time—and it does seem to him a miracle, even if it is not the one he expected—he is able to whisper the missing words himself. I must simply smash my head hard through the glass and come back to you. Now the man shatters the glass by thrusting the crown of his head through the middlemost of the five female saints. As blood streams down his face, he kisses his beloved on the lips and then climbs through the opening where the window had been. He is now free to bring more beauty into the world. The nurses enter the chapel. Their clacking ceases. For a moment, the theater is absolutely silent. Then the beloved, her face streaked with blood, suddenly leaps to her feet and screams: Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! The implication is that he—who is to be played by the City Theater’s most physically massive actor—is responsible for her condition and is now free to commit more crimes. But this is something the attentive theatergoer will have long since deduced from the movement to and fro of her eyes. The nurses, who do not remark on the shattered window and actually seem hardly to notice it, now wheel the beloved out of the chapel. As they do so, the General Intendant suggests, the curtain should fall. Of course, he leaves the particulars to the imagination of the dramatist.The malicious slander anticipated by the General Intendant begins as soon as the cast list of The Glassworker is pinned to the wall and Klamt discovers that instead of the beloved, she is to play one of the two stout sexagenarian nurses. And that the beloved is to be played by the daughter of the General Intendant.The gist of the slander, which can no doubt be traced back to Klamt, is that the infirmities and limitations of the beloved are also those of the General Intendant’s daughter. That the daughter cannot walk, that she cannot speak, that she expresses herself with her eyes only because she is unable to express herself by any other means. That The Glassworker has been contrived specifically to allow her father to cast her in it. That only a play in which the leading lady is absent from Act I and sits mute and motionless for nearly all of Act II is one that could even conceivably feature the General Intendant’s daughter at the top of the bill.This malicious slander pains the General Intendant. But it moves him to see how little it seems to pain his daughter. She could of course disprove it in an instant. She would only have to stand up or speak. One word would be sufficient. What gives this slander some purchase is her determination to do no such thing. To rehearse the role of the beloved completely in character. To have her father wheel her into the City Theater every morning and wheel her out again at night. To have him lift her onto the stage in his arms. To communicate with no one, not even with him, not even one word. A part of him even envies the degree to which her commitment to her art leaves her indifferent to the world and its scorn.The world is something to which he himself, both as a father and as an arts administrator, has for a long time not been in a position to be indifferent.Nor is he indifferent now. The General Intendant gathers his company. It is true that The Glassworker is contrived, he says: It is contrived to remind you how much an actor can express with even the smallest gesture. The simplest gesture. The Glassworker is indeed contrived—contrived to remind the public of the power of the theater, to remind us in the theater of the power of our art. A power we have all forgotten.The company murmurs.But given the daughter’s refusal to disprove the slander, it does not go away. It only intensifies. It is whispered, presumably first by Klamt, that anything expressed in her eyes is in fact without meaning or intent and bears only an accidental relation to the text of The Glassworker. That her baffled expression isn’t acting, it is actual bafflement. That her horrified expression is actual horror. That when the General Intendant (who receives special permission from the director to join each rehearsal as a kind of informal co-director) devotes all of his co-directing energy to directing his daughter, and in particular to directing, or co-directing, her eyes—which must convey to the last row of the balcony that that man is no glassworker, he’s a bricklayer, and what he’s brought into the world is a far cry from beauty—those hours and hours of rehearsal time are gone, simply gone.How, the General Intendant points out to his company, if you honestly believe the cruel things that you say, do you suppose she will be able to leap to her feet at the climax of the play and exclaim, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer!The company murmurs. That’s true. But it is pointed out by Klamt in turn that the scene in which the beloved exclaims, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! is the one scene that is never rehearsed.Finally, and in front of the whole company, the General Intendant kneels before his daughter in her chair and begs her with tears in his eyes and his head in her lap to break character. Not for her sake, he knows she doesn’t care what they think, but for his! He is weak! He does care! But when she doesn’t break character even to decline what he begs of her, he tells the company that he is proud of his daughter and ashamed of himself. Only someone so committed to her role and so indifferent to the world is entitled to call herself an actor.After this, the malicious slander about her expressive gifts is repeated less often, and less gleefully.Not, however, by Klamt, who if anything only escalates her abuse.Klamt claims that the General Intendant does not even come from the world of drama. He comes from the world of dance. He impaired his wife with dance! Slew her with an undanceable dance! A dance no one could dance! So, first of all, they were taking their dramaturgical guidance from someone who has no formal training in theater! And who murdered his wife through choreography! This in the opinion of the finest physicians! But by his lights, she wasn’t dead! No, he took her home. Sustained her somehow, though not in a way anyone would wish to be sustained. Saw an opportunity in all this: a dance opportunity! An opportunity to “start from scratch,” dancewise! Didn’t have the decency to let her die, had to make her keep dancing instead! Of course, this dance didn’t pan out. At first, there was promise. Her movements struck him as entirely new. Or rather—old! Primordial! From a stage in the development of the human organism that preceded our fall into sociality and culture and the stink of the city! Never mind whether they could really be called “dance movements”! He was struck above all by one movement. At intervals, a finger shot to her now-bald brow and traced an arc across the side of her skull. A prehistoric gesture, he thought! The meaning of which was inscrutable to him! Must stem from the innate nature of man! Upon this one primeval movement an entire school of dance could be founded! But no. One day, he notices a painting of them on the eve of their wedding in which she is making the very same movement. Coquettishly tucking a strand of hair behind one ear. Now there is no hair on her head and possibly no essence to her person, but the fashionable world is still moving her muscles! There is no “preceding our fall into sociality”! No escape from “the stink of the city”! No “prehistory”! No “starting from scratch”! Not once you’ve walked even one city block! He decides to have another child by her. Doesn’t know if this is possible. Finds that it is! This one he raises properly! Pristinely! In the dark! In the midst of the city but sheltered from the gestural tyranny of the city! Food through a slot, water through a hole and into a shallow trough! Sheltered from a city that without our knowing it is always telling us how to move and how not to! Enters her room only when she is sleeping so as not to influence her with his movements! Wants nothing more than to embrace her tiny sleeping form but restrains himself in case upon waking she retains a memory of that motion! By a thousand such self-sacrifices ensures that hers is the first childhood free from violence! No movement possibilities are foreclosed to her! Everything is possible! She can move any which way! How his daughter chooses to move is for the first time in the history of man a genuine choice! Now he simply waits to see how she will choose to move! How she will choose to dance! But—she chooses not to move! She chooses not to dance! She chooses to sit! Or else (Klamt has heard it told both ways!) the way in which she chooses to move and dance obliges him to inhibit her movements by means of straps, for her own sake, after which, even once free again, she ceases to move! Whatever the case: After a certain point, there is no movement! No dancing! Yet he cannot quite disabuse himself of the notion that she is, for all that, a dancer! To admit that his daughter is no dancer is to admit that the way he raised her may not have been in her best interest! Only in time does he disabuse himself of the notion that she is a dancer! And only by means of another notion onto which he’s able to transfer the same psychological load: that she is an actor …Now Klamt has gone too far. The members of the company turn away from her in disgust. Imagine reacting so poorly to losing a role! And the stout old nurse is still a speaking part, that’s more than most of them got!Klamt herself becomes the subject of slander. In her increasingly baroque and frankly hysterical rumormongering, some in the company claim to detect not only the rancor of an ousted starlet but also the rage of a jilted lover, an innuendo that the General Intendant asks them to rise above but also does not explicitly dispel.Meanwhile, a consensus begins to form among the members of the company that the daughter’s performance is “powerful.”Rumors of her expressive gifts spread beyond the walls of the City Theater. Before the public has even seen her onstage, she becomes the recipient of an outpouring of adoration.And on the night of the premiere, she leaps to her feet at the climax of the play and exclaims, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! The company is willing to testify to that, the audience is willing to testify to that. She leaped to her feet and exclaimed, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer!—the whole city is willing to testify to that, no one will deny it.No one, that is, apart from the aging starlet Klamt. Again and again she refuses—and loudly!—to admit it. Eventually, she is sent to Dr. Krakauer’s sanatorium. Here, Klamt is asked continually by Dr. Krakauer whether it is possible that the General Intendant’s daughter said what everyone heard her say, and Klamt just missed it. She knows that admitting this possibility would be enough to get her discharged. She simply has to say the words It is possible that the General Intendant’s daughter said the words Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! and that night she would sleep in her own bed. And privately, she will admit that of course it is possible, anything is possible. But Klamt, too, is committed to her role.This story has been excerpted from Adam Ehrlich Sachs’ forthcoming book, Gretel and the Great War.

Is it ever okay to film strangers in public?

Getty Images Nobody wants to be filmed without their knowledge. Why does it make up so much of the content we watch? The experience of realizing you are being surreptitiously filmed by a stranger is now a relatively common one, but this is how it happened for Mitchell Clark: The 25-year-old was working a shift at his Atlanta Target when someone pr

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Getty Images Nobody wants to be filmed without their knowledge. Why does it make up so much of the content we watch? The experience of realizing you are being surreptitiously filmed by a stranger is now a relatively common one, but this is how it happened for Mitchell Clark: The 25-year-old was working a shift at his Atlanta Target when someone propped up a phone nearby. “I thought it was for some dumb prank channel,” he says. It wasn’t until a young woman bent over directly in front of him, her dress short enough to expose her entire bare bottom, that he realized what was going on. The resulting video captures his shock — his eyes widen and his hands grasp his chest, agog — and later ended up on the OnlyFans model’s Instagram account. “It made me look like a creep,” he tells me. The video was an extreme example of a trend where women secretly film men’s reactions to them, often in the gym or in public spaces, either to shame the men for being inappropriate or to highlight the power of their own beauty — in Clark’s case, arguably both. But this time it caused an uproar: After Clark made a video about how uncomfortable he felt, other accounts reposted and responded to it, highlighting the ways in which public filming culture had gotten out of control. (Vox was unable to reach the model for comment.) @mitchelliguesss ♬ original sound - mitchell It’s been a decade and a half since social media made it possible for anyone’s camera phone video to go viral. But it’s TikTok, a platform where overnight fame is more achievable than ever, that has turned filming strangers in public into a controversial cottage industry. While influencers on Vine, YouTube, and Instagram have long used passersby as unwilling background actors to gain clout, TikTok has also allowed those people to offer their sides of the story and actually get heard. This is, in part, because of editing tools like stitching or dueting, and also because you don’t necessarily need to have a large account in order to go viral on the app. Viewers are invested in watching all sides of the drama unfold. Thanks to these responses and a handful of watchdog accounts, a major backlash against public filming has been brewing: Outlets from the Guardian to The Verge to Vice have issued pleas to quit filming strangers, while BuzzFeed christened the unsettling genre with an equally unsettling name: “panopticontent.” Ask pretty much anyone in the world if they’d like to have someone film them without their permission and post it on the internet, and it’s difficult to imagine a normal person saying yes. And yet, these videos continue to rack up millions of views, forcing us to reckon with the fact that in 2024, some of the most-viewed content on social media is essentially nonconsensual voyeurism. There’s clearly an appetite to watch as strangers are shamed, ridiculed, gawked, or generally caught off-guard, even when we know it isn’t exactly morally sound. A precursor to the form came in 2009: The blog People of Walmart was devoted to making fun of customers wearing embarrassing clothing (unsurprisingly, much of the humor relied on classist, fatphobic, and transphobic stereotypes). Instagram wrought the rise of many more of these types of accounts, like Subway Creatures, with nearly 3 million followers, which collects images of bizarre-seeming people and circumstances on the New York City subway; Passenger Shaming, for videos of plane freakouts and other bad airport behavior; or Influencers in the Wild, which has more than 5 million followers and invites people to laugh at those who dare film themselves in public. Its website encourages viewers to submit videos by promising “Your clip could be seen by millions!” The irony that it’s objectively worse to sneakily take a photo of someone else taking a photo of themselves comes secondary to the main goal: driving engagement by laughing at people who don’t know they’re being filmed. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Influencers in the Wild (@influencersinthewild) Even supposedly wholesome content has fallen into the same trap. In 2018, an influencer posted an Instagram Story saga about a potential romance budding between two people on a plane seated in front of her, then later had to apologize when the woman felt that her privacy had been violated. The “Plane Bae” story went massively viral before anyone questioned whether what they were watching was exactly ethical. It would be easier if we all collectively decided that it was never acceptable to film random strangers in public, under any circumstances. But rarely are social questions, especially ones that collide squarely with the ever-evolving norms of our online lives, this uncomplicated. You do, in fact, have the right to film in public places; as the ACLU points out, the ability to do so “creates an independent record of what took place in a particular incident, one that is free from accusations of bias, lying, or faulty memory.” This is especially important when filming the police or recording an encounter that could become violent: The video of George Floyd being murdered, for instance, was crucial in sparking the wave of protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020. Camera phone videos depicting racism and harassment, particularly during and after the lockdown period, have also opened important conversations about acceptable behavior in a uniquely distressing time. Do arguments about First Amendment rights and social justice really apply to people who make strangers uncomfortable for engagement on TikTok? That depends on who you ask. Most will say they’re simply trying to “spread love” or that they never expected the content to go viral, while refusing to ask themselves tougher questions. It’s not difficult to imagine, for instance, someone being concerned about their digital privacy for more serious reasons, such as avoiding a stalker. One woman who was filmed being approached for a high-five by a dancer in Times Square and then began crying was both mocked for her reaction and accused of being racist because the dancer was Black. Her sister then made a video explaining that she was autistic and has contamination OCD, and therefore doesn’t like being touched. Another woman was falsely maligned for riding the subway with monkeypox after someone made a TikTok of her, but the reason for the bumps on her skin was actually due to a genetic condition. There’s little legal recourse for people who find themselves unknowingly caught on camera. As Derigan Silver, chair of the University of Denver’s media, film, and journalism department, explains, a successful defamation case requires proving that the material contains a “false statement of fact” — but a video tends to show events as they happened, even if divorced from crucial context. Clark is hoping to get the help of a lawyer to get the original video taken down, but he’s aware that that’s likely as far as it will go. “It sucks that we’re so far behind with our legal system that not more can be done about this right now. But it’s real, and it’s getting worse,” he says of the scourge of content creators who use strangers as background props. The idea that privacy laws should evolve to incorporate situations like Clark’s, however, could be a dangerous one. “We want the ability to record things in public and to document them because it supports very important First Amendment ideals,” says Silver. “The flip side of that is not everybody is doing this with good motives.” Silver notes that where the law could catch up is by differentiating between newsworthy and non-newsworthy events — say, an encounter with police versus recording an anonymous Target employee — and making it harder to prosecute people who film matters of public consequence. In a paper on what she coined “forced faming,” British intellectual property law scholar Hayleigh Bosher also points out how the legal system must contend with the rise in deepfake content, which creates real-seeming content out of unwilling people’s likenesses. No law can solve the problem of people being assholes on social media, but there are other ways to influence people’s behavior online. “There’s the law, there’s technology, there are cultural norms, and there’s the market,” explains Silver. “We can exert pressure on platforms and say, ‘Stop monetizing these accounts.’ Or they could write technology that makes it more difficult to upload material that violates someone’s privacy. Or we could have people online saying, ‘I’m going to stop watching this stuff.’” Right now, it’s the cultural norms that are shifting most quickly: This moment has given rise to a number of accounts that call out public filming, like Joey Swoll, with his 7.7 million TikTok followers (his was one of the accounts that drew attention to Clark’s case). YouTubers like Kurtis Conner, meanwhile, have made videos calling for the end of filming strangers. But there’s hypocrisy at play here too. Swoll’s account ostensibly exists to maintain a certain ideal of gym culture, but the majority of his content is dedicated to shaming (usually) women’s behavior — even influencers who are innocuously filming themselves without involving anyone else. Some of the instances he calls out are indeed objectively horrible, like the woman who pretended to take a video of herself in order to mock the man exercising behind her, but others are more cringeworthy than anything else, like the girl who did a TikTok dance in front of someone using a bench press. @thejoeyswoll He is NOT staring at you or even looking at you! This gym needs to kick you out NOW! #gymtok #gym #fyp ♬ Funny video "Carmen Prelude" Arranging weakness(836530) - yo suzuki(akisai) Swoll also seems to have a special interest in objecting to women who claim that certain men at gyms make them feel uncomfortable, and then film the alleged “creep.” These examples aren’t always black-and-white: The evidence of the alleged harassment or creepy behavior isn’t always clear from the videos, but never does Swoll allow for any interrogation or curiosity about what might have occurred off-camera. Instead, he’s positioned himself as the head vigilante of the digital Wild West, shaming surreptitious gym recorders by bringing greater attention to them — ironically, the very same thing the women appear to be doing with the “creeps” they film. The fact that both Swoll and Influencers in the Wild tend to have millions more followers than the people they’re criticizing also adds another layer: When is calling out those who film strangers creating a barrage of attention on bystanders who never wished to be dragged into the public eye in the first place? (Swoll did not respond to a request for comment.) The thirst for voyeurism content — whether you’re watching a stranger unknowingly get filmed or watching someone scold a stranger for doing the filming — means that accounts who engage in it have a higher likelihood of going viral and scoring lucrative brand deals. Influencers in the Wild, for instance, has its own merch and board game, while Joey Swoll regularly promotes his brand of low-calorie sauces. Knowing that the demand for “panopticontent” is so high leads creators to produce more of it — often by using TikTok’s stitch or duet feature, which allows them to milk as much clout as they can from a single trending topic or video — whether or not they realize it’s ethically murky. Faced with questions like, “Is it worth it to pull my phone out right now?” or “Am I a shitty person if I film someone without their knowledge?” Silver recommends resorting to the golden rule. We’re already being recorded all the time — by security cameras, by our phones, which track not only our location but every keystroke we make online, and by other people’s cameras — but we’re the ones who decide whether or not to post our own videos online. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram could theoretically step in to demonetize accounts that make money from non-consensual voyeurism, but this is almost an unimaginable scenario, in part because it feels impossible to enforce. Until then, it’s up to audiences to shift cultural norms around what’s acceptable behavior online and what isn’t, but given the astonishing popularity of these videos, that doesn’t seem all that likely. After the incident at Target, Clark’s first thought was that he wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen to anyone else. “Working in retail, you get used to people harassing you. I’m not seen as a person anymore, I’m seen as an object,” he tells me. Increasingly, this is how people on social media view each other: as NPCs, disposable, as background actors with no desires or interests of their own. While TikTok has allowed Clark to respond publicly and have thousands of people rallying behind him, it’s also responsible for helping to create the problem in the first place. “There’s a lack of decency, and I think it may be the allure of getting famous and going viral. People think that justifies the means, but it definitely does not.”

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