Fake World

01/02/2023

25/01/2023

20/08/2022

From his luxury condo by the beach, Kaplan watched the system collapse. An outbreak here, a workers’ strike there. He knew that one man’s desperation is another’s windfall, so he scanned the news, considering his options. All it took was a single airborne pathogen to reveal the precarity of modern life. Grocery shelves were empty, but farmers were pouring out oceans of milk. The masses were buying only what could safely be delivered through the apparent magic of an on-screen click. But it wasn’t magic. On the other end of that click was a fragile labyrinth of factories, warehouses, trucks, trains, planes, cranes, cargo ships, and all along the way, humans: living, breathing, miserable, virus-spewing humans, executing the most boring yet dangerous tasks imaginable, cogs in the commerce machine, risking their lives to get you your Doritos, your d***o.

Some hoarders saw an opportunity to make a quick buck — others were just trying to do the right thing.

16/08/2022

Simon Stålenhag has been on a roll recently. Earlier this year, Amazon adapted his book Tales from the Loop into a series. Last month, he kickstarted a new book called The Labyrinth. Now, he’s making his directorial debut with the music video for “Geronimo,” a single off of Duvchi’s forthcoming album, This Kind of Ocean, for which he also made the cover art.

Stålenhag lends his iconic style to "Geronimo" by Duvchi.

14/08/2022

The Verge is turning 10, and a look back at the last decade’s worth of stories provides not just an encapsulation of what The Verge has covered but also a snapshot of how quickly the tech that informs our lives transforms. And since we’re The Verge, we can’t just look behind us. Celebrating the last 10 years is also about examining what might come next. Micha Huigen is the perfect artist to distill this intersection into a single image because Micha’s images never actually confine themselves to one space. His surreal illustrations function like scenescapes within which we get to explore close-ups of tiny modular worlds and expansive reimagined realities at once. Though he inks and colors digitally, his art maintains an analog quality, filled with halftones that suggest DIY lithography.

"I really liked the challenge of making such a large number of illustrations and linking them together to make one big image."

14/08/2022

That’s just the first 30 seconds of nearly 11 minutes of strange, beautiful, and imaginative worlds all created based on the same original animation. The video was assembled by Clinton Jones, aka pwnisher, who challenged animators to create their own 3D animated scene based on a bare-bones animation he created. The video rounds up his 100 favorite clips.

Every couple seconds we’re transported to another artist’s take.

12/08/2022

In a marsh, they spotted egrets, a glossy ibis, and “some other cool stuff.” Later, they went to the beach, as promised, but Chris just kept thinking about the birds. This moment, in birding lingo, is called the “spark,” when a person sees something that inspires them to be a birder for life. (Nearly everyone I talked to for this story had a spark and volunteered their story whether I asked for it or not.)

What birds might tell us about our ecological crisis and ourselves

10/08/2022

W hen Arianna Huhn experienced complications with her first pregnancy, she signed up for a clinical trial, one that required her to submit family DNA samples for research. Her parents, Gail and George Fogelman, agreed. But shortly after, they asked her to jump on a call with them, alone, without her husband.

On the phone, Huhn noticed that her dad was choked up and unable to speak. Her mother took the lead. “There’s something that we have been hiding from you,” she said. “Your dad is not your genetic father.”

Her bio dad turned out to be her mother’s fertility doctor, so she went to meet him.

11/07/2022

To be perfectly blunt? The Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade has left us f*cking mad as hell. But the good news is we don’t have to just sit back, doomscroll our days away, and wait for a slew of apocalyptic state-level shifts and trigger laws to go into effect. We all have the power—yes, even if it doesn’t really feel like it in this moment—to shake things up and effect change. **cracks knuckles and rolls up sleeves**

A non-intimidating, step-by-step guide to doing something, whether you have time, money, both, or neither.

08/07/2022

The funny thing about the most in-your-face trends of recent seasons is that they're nothing you haven't seen before. Of course, we know that trends are cyclical, that "there's no such thing as a new idea" — still, the most sought-after products for the summer still feels so fresh in our brain, thanks to a Y2K resurgence that's showing no signs of slowing down.

The Y2K comeback is still going strong.