Soon, Rachel and her match were speaking daily, their conversations running the gamut from the ridiculous (favourite memes, ketchup v mayonnaise) to the sublime (expectations in love, childhood traumas). Often they’d have late-night exchanges that left her staring at her phone long after she should have been asleep. “They were like things that you read in self-help books – really personal conversations about who we are and what we want for our lives,” she says.
Which is why the man who greeted her inside the pub – polite, pleasant but oddly flat – felt like a stranger. Gone was the quickfire wit and playful rhythm she’d come to expect from their exchanges. Over pints he stumbled through small talk, checked his phone a little too often, and seemed to wilt under the pressure of her questions. “I felt like I was sitting opposite someone I’d never even spoken to,” she says. “I tried to have the same sort of conversation as we’d been having online, but it was like, ‘Knock, knock, is anyone home?’ – like he knew basically nothing about me. That’s when I suspected he’d been using AI.”
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The rise of chatfishing
ChatGPT and its contemporaries are becoming dating tools, or at worse, crutches to mask social conversational deficiencies, aka chatfishing. Soon, Rachel and her match were speaking daily, their conversations running the gamut from the ridiculous (favourite memes, ketchup v mayonnaise) to the sublime (expectations in love, childhood traumas). Often they’d have late-night exchanges that left…
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Mexico City’s zombie walk
Every year, Mexico City hosts a zombie walk. Quite festive with a lot of different interpretations.
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Sam Adams has a new beer that’s so strong it’s illegal in 15 states
Sam Adams has a new beer that’s so strong it’s illegal in 15 states. Utopias — the white whale of the brewer’s lineup — is back for 2025 and it’s stronger than ever. Released every other year, the 2025 Utopias clocks in with a jaw-dropping 30% ABV, higher than most liqueurs and as much as…
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Settlers of Catan movie
Netflix purchased screen rights to Settlers of Catan. Hmmmm. Netflix has won the rights to the Asmodee board game and plans an array of projects — scripted and unscripted, live-action and animated. The streamer describes the TV and film projects as set in “a place where settlers must navigate bountiful and varied landscapes, shifting alliances…
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Sea otters stealing surfboards
A very real alliteration: sea otters stealing surfboards. On Wednesday, Isabella Orduna was catching some waves at Steamer Lane, a popular surf spot off Santa Cruz, Calif., when she felt a small nip on her foot. Startled, Ms. Orduna, a 21-year-old college student, rolled into the water. The moment she surfaced, she saw a “big,…
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AI is gonna drink your milkshake
Not only are AI data centers hungry for electricity, they are thirsty for water. So much that towns and cities are experiencing water shortages. Nearly 60 percent of the 1,244 largest data centers in the world were outside the United States as of the end of June, according to an analysis by Synergy Research Group,…
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Tactical frivolity
The current administration deemed protesters violent and menacing. You know what isn’t? A person in an inflatable chicken costume, a protest tactic called tactical frivolity. This humorous form of protest, known as tactical frivolity, shows the absurdity of the charge that all the protesters are armed militants. In contravention of the Trump administration’s claims that…
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Sleep is a spectrum
We’ve known that sleep has cycles, but more research is showing that how we sleep is more nuanced and may exist as a spectrum. It’s still largely mysterious how the brain manages to move between these states safely and efficiently. But studies targeting transitions both into and out of sleep are starting to unravel the…
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Being social alone on the rise
In the UK, there is a rise in people going to social events solo. “If I go to an event with someone else, I can very much spend the night doing their night, as they would want it,” says Anaïs Espinosa, a 26-year-old from London. “When I’m alone, I get to do whatever I want…
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80-year-old grandmother becomes oldest woman to finish the Ironman World Championship
80-year-old grandmother becomes oldest woman to finish the Ironman World Championship Grabow, who lives in Mountain Lakes, N.J., plunged into the ocean water of Kailua Bay on Saturday morning. She swam 2.4 miles and then hopped on her bike to cycle 112 miles on a highway twisting through lava fields and notorious coastal crosswinds. She…