the monitor

Barbenheimer—the one-two punch releases of Barbie and Oppenheimer—will go down in history as an astonishing success. Together, Variety reports, the films made more than $244 million in their opening weekend, the fourth-largest in US…

“Barbenheimer”—the collective celebration around the release of the Barbie and Oppenheimer movies—has collided with the wedding industrial complex. That’s not a joke. According to a Variety story this week, people are planning on taking…

You know it’s bad when the cocreator of The Matrix thinks your artificial intelligence plan stinks. In June, as the Directors Guild of America was about to sign its union contract with Hollywood studios, Lilly Wachowski sent out a series of…

Future generations will know the legend of White Gladis.In late May, as America was struggling with the demise of HBO Max, social media picked up on another story: a group of orcas, possibly orchestrated by one traumatized killer whale, had…

Today is the day the internet feared.Maybe it wasn’t an active fear, not a doomsday everyone knew was coming, but still one that almost seemed inevitable: The magic of Reddit is gone. As of today, June 30, 2023, several mobile apps for…

Like many fans this week, you may have noticed something odd about the opening credits of Secret Invasion, Marvel’s new show. Amidst all the Skrull green, there is something very … Midjourney about the whole thing. If you got that sense,…

Earlier this week, Paul McCartney sent the music-nerd internet ablaze with some news: Artificial intelligence had helped resurrect a bit of John Lennon’s voice for a new Beatles song, more than four decades after his death. The song is set…

Moore, by her own admission, never had a “ho phase.” But she understands why someone would, and she wanted to shift focus from the abstinence messages in the original viral video. (“If I wasn’t married, honey,” she tells me over Zoom, “I…

It’s not a spoiler to say that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse begins with a drum solo. Or, rather, it’s not a spoiler if the details of who’s playing and why are kept secret. For the purposes of this argument, those details aren’t…

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.The date chiseled on the headstone will be May 23, 2023. That’s the day HBO Max—a streaming service with a…