Alex Rainert

For people coming of age after 2010, it’s easy to assume Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are just what being social on the internet looks like. It’s a reasonable assumption as those products (especially Facebook and later everything else they picked up along the way) have become so ubiquitous, and their businesses massive. People treat them like water or electricity - a necessary utility to maintain social connections - to friends, schoolmates, local parents, and others. While many companies ha

Like many, I came into this year with the wholly unoriginal goal of majorly resetting my relationship to “content.” Last May I came off 7 years working at the New York Times, where most of my waking life was intertwined with what was and continues to be an overwhelming period of news. That professional reality was paired with a deeply entrenched addiction to the pull-to-refresh slot machine of new information honed through 16+ years of heavy Twitter usage. It was clear these habits weren’t playi

This mashup trailer for the doc is 💯 It premieres tonight on NBC at 8 p.m. ET on Monday, Jan. 27.

Consensus reality—our broad, shared understanding of what is real and true—has shattered, and we’re experiencing a Cambrian explosion of subjective, bespoke realities. A deluge of content, sorted by incentivized algorithms and shared instantaneously between aligned believers, has enabled us to immerse ourselves in environments tailored to our own beliefs and populated with our own preferred facts. On the eve of the second Trump administration, I just finished reading Renée DiResta’s Invisible R

One of my favorite 2024 listens is 99% Invisible’s Power Broker Breakdown - a podcast series that functions as a distributed book club celebrating the book’s 50th anniversary. Hosts Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan break the 1200+ page book into 12 episodes that they released each month throughout the year. The format was great and I wonder what other book-host combos would benefit from it.  Each episode is about 2.5 hours long. While I don’t usually listen to podcasts that long, they broke it up w