Culture

Two podcasts hosts banter back and forth during the final episode of their series, audibly anxious to share some distressing news with listeners. “We were, uh, informed by the show’s producers that we’re not human,” a male-sounding voice stammers out, mid-existential crisis. The conversation between the bot and his female-sounding cohost only gets more uncomfortable after that—an engaging, albeit misleading, example of Google’s NotebookLM tool, and its experimental AI podcasts.

As the birthplace of prestige TV shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, HBO—and, by extension, Max (aka the streamer formerly known as HBO Max)—is best known for its impressive lineup of original series. The network has also been upping the ante with feature-length content that is the stuff of Oscar dreams. However, because Max is not (yet) a production powerhouse like, say, Netflix, hundreds of great movies come and go each month. So if you see something you want to watch, don’t let it linger in your queue for too long.

In the volatile universe of Industry, all debts must be paid.

No one understands that better than Rishi (Sagar Radia), whose gambling addiction finally caught up with him in Sunday night’s season three finale, “Infinite Largesse.”

[Spoiler alert: The following includes spoilers for Industry’s third season finale.]

Rishi, for the uninitiated, spent much of the past season falling deeper into debt. As the finale concluded, Industry gave him one of the revelation-packed episode’s biggest twists when his bookie, Vinay, showed up and killed Rishi’s wife over £600,000 in unpaid gambling debts. It was the kind of gut-wrenching moment that has made HBO Sunday-night appointment TV—and, according to cocreators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, HBO almost nixed it.

If you’ve been on TikTok at any point in the past six months, chances are you’ve stumbled across them, as I first did during a fairly routine doomscroll one night this summer. For me it started with two videos somewhat incongruously tagged #homeremodeling and #housedesign. One of them featured a CGI man summoning a baby phoenix outside of a tree that he planned to turn into an apartment. Then a robotic AI voice started to narrate how the CGI man, identified as “Little John,” was going to build it. Over the next 90 seconds, Little John transformed the tree into a maniacally space-efficient luxury unit in an AI-generated ballet of flying galvanized square steel, ecofriendly wood veneer, and expansion screws.

Like a lot of us, Carlo Acutis spent an ungodly amount of his life staring at screens. Born in London in 1991, he grew up an only child in a newly connected world. He wore sweatshirts and Nike trainers. He played Halo and taught himself to code. But that’s where the similarities end—because next year, Acutis will officially be named a saint.

As well as the internet, Acutis revered another institution: the Catholic Church. From a young age, he was acutely interested in Eucharistic miracles—extraordinary events which, according to Catholics, see consecrated bread or wine suddenly become the actual body or blood of Christ. “To always be united to Jesus: This is my life plan,” he told his mother after his First Communion.

When word got out that thousands of gamers were already playing Valve’s “secret” shooter Deadlock on Steam back in August, the first reaction from many was: How do I get my hands on this?

Since then, many more players have joined the invite-only playtest, allowing them to get their first look at the project. Valve made the game public on Steam a few weeks ago but hasn’t given the game a release date. “Deadlock is a multiplayer game in early development," Valve wrote on the game’s Steam page.

In Recent years,Netflix and Apple TV+ have been duking it out to have the most prestigious film offerings, but some of the best movies are on Amazon Prime Video. The streamer was one of the first to go around picking up film festival darlings and other lovable favorites, and they’re all still there in the library, so if they flew under your radar the first time, now is the perfect time to catch up.

Nearly every survey of the podcast industry in 2024 agrees on one point: Chat podcasts are king. As video rises in popularity (33 percent of US podcast listeners prefer to consume this way), ad spending increases (estimated to top $4 billion worldwide), and listenership steadily grows at 8 percent year-over-year, it is the chat format—in its combative, enlightening, and sometimes quite unserious splendor—that continually draws people in.

The ecosystem is profuse and unpredictable. There are the mainstays that have become fixtures of culture: The Joe Rogan Experience, Armchair Expert, and The Read. Newer fare like I’ve Had It and ShxtsnGigs (more on that one later) have also found tremendous followings. Other chat-casts, like Club Shay Shay, seem to court controversy with every release. “Katt Williams, please close the portal,” @nuffsaidny recently joked on X, alluding to the comedian’s guest appearance from January when he prophetically proclaimed of 2024: “All lies will be exposed.”

Virginia Woolf Bot wasn’t the only loss. Earlier this month, as Brazil suspended X across the country, fan accounts of all types seemed to blink out of existence. Feeds for Beyoncé, for Taylor Swift, and for Miley Cyrus. Each posted some version of a goodbye post, as everyone from mainstream news outlets to Cardi B lamented the disappearance of what’s broadly known as Brazilian stan Twitter.

“Time to drop the character to say that unfortunately I’m Brazilian,” @botvirginia posted. “I’ve been inactive here for a while but I had plans to change that, apparently I can’t anymore. So maybe this is my swan song.”

Mindlessly scroll throughTikTok long enough and you’re bound to stumble on one: An older person, possibly a boomer, gesturing blithely at something—maybe it’s a B&B, maybe it’s a set of blinds—and unfurling a litany of Gen Z slang. “Northumberland Zoo hits different”; “slay”; “no cap”; “It’s giving literate.” To date, there are nearly 4,000 of these videos, and they’ve been viewed millions of times.

Each view feels like a nail in some sort of linguistic coffin.