Talk about having some bite. “Nosferatu” drove a stake through box office expectations, delivering a hauntingly good $21.1 million over the traditional weekend and $40.3 million since debuting on Christmas Day. Those receipts sent box office analysts everywhere reaching for the vampire puns (apologies, apologies) in an effort to explain the bloody fantastic results for […]
Buddy the Elf is back…although not like anyone could imagine. Will Ferrell unexpectedly dressed up as his iconic character from Jon Favreau’s 2003 Christmas comedy “Elf” while attending the Dec. 29 hockey game between the Los Angeles Kings and Philadelphia Flyers. Only this iteration of Buddy was looking quite disheveled with five o’clock shadow and […]
Leading Spanish production house Morena Films is teaming with A Contracorriente Films, one of Spain’s top indie distributors, and “The Beasts” French co-producer Noodle Productions to produce “Fairy Queen” (“Reina de las Hadas,” “Reina de les fades” in Catalan), a feature inspired by “Paris 70” which was shortlisted on Dec. 17 for the 97th Oscars. […]
Hit by last year’s Hollywood’s strikes, total box office in 2024 in Spain dipped 2% compared to 2023, breaking three consecutive years of recovery over 2021-23, Comscore Movies Spain announced Monday. At 71 million admissions, attendance edged down 5% compared to last year. At €477 million ($496.1 million), total box office in Spain was 29% […]
There is rarely time to write about every cool science paper that comes our way; many worthy candidates sadly fall through the cracks over the course of the year. But as 2024 comes to a close, we've gathered ten of our favorite such papers at the intersection of science and culture as a special treat, covering a broad range of topics: from reenacting Bronze Age spear combat and applying network theory to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, to Spider-Man inspired web-slinging tech and a mathematical connection between a turbulent phase transition and your morning cup of coffee. Enjoy!
Reenacting Bronze Age spear combat
An experiment with experienced fighters who spar freely using different styles.
Credit:
Valerio Gentile/CC BY
The European Bronze Age saw the rise of institutionalized warfare, evidenced by the many spearheads and similar weaponry archaeologists have unearthed. But how might these artifacts be used in actual combat? Dutch researchers decided to find out by constructing replicas of Bronze Age shields and spears and using them in realistic combat scenarios. They described their findings in an October paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
There have been a couple of prior experimental studies on bronze spears, but per Valerio Gentile (now at the University of Gottingen) and coauthors, practical research to date has been quite narrow in scope, focusing on throwing weapons against static shields. Coauthors C.J. van Dijk of the National Military Museum in the Netherlands and independent researcher O. Ter Mors each had more than a decade of experience teaching traditional martial arts, specializing in medieval polearms and one-handed weapons. So they were ideal candidates for testing the replica spears and shields.
We’d been chatting for the better part of two hours when Chris Kraft’s eyes suddenly brightened. “Hey,” he said, “Here’s a story I’ll bet you never heard.” Kraft, the man who had written flight rules for NASA at the dawn of US spaceflight and supervised the Apollo program, had invited me to his home south of Houston for one of our periodic talks about space policy and space history. As we sat in recliners upstairs, in a den overlooking the Bay Oaks Country Club, Kraft told me about a time the space shuttle almost got canceled.
It was the late 1970s, when Kraft directed the Johnson Space Center, the home of the space shuttle program. At the time, the winged vehicle had progressed deep into a development phase that started in 1971. Because the program had not received enough money to cover development costs, some aspects of the vehicle (such as its thermal protective tiles) were delayed into future budget cycles. In another budget trick, NASA committed $158 million in fiscal year 1979 funds for work done during the previous fiscal year.
This could not go on, and according to Kraft the situation boiled over during a 1978 meeting in a large conference floor on the 9th floor of Building 1, the Houston center’s headquarters. All the program managers and other center directors gathered there along with NASA’s top leadership. That meeting included Administrator Robert Frosch, a physicist President Carter had appointed a year earlier.
Whether it’s braving the long line at a trendy new restaurant or hanging on just a few minutes longer to see if there’s a post-credits scene after a movie, the decision to persevere or ditch it depends on specific regions of our brains.
Waiting is not always about self-control. Deciding to wait (or not to wait) also involves gauging the value of the potential reward. In an experiment that investigated wait times among people with lesions in the frontal cortex of the brain, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Joe Kable and his research team found that subjects with damage to certain regions of the prefrontal cortex were less likely to wait things out.
“[Our] findings suggest that regions of the frontal cortex make computationally distinct contributions to adaptive persistence,” he and his team said in a study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Michael Moore has joined the production team of “From Ground Zero” — the recently shortlisted Palestinian entry for the 97th Academy Awards’ best international film category — as executive producer. A collection of shorts made by 22 Palestinian filmmakers living through war in present day Gaza, “From Ground Zero” blends animation, documentary and fiction to “capture the […]
Woo Min-ho’s historical drama “Harbin” stormed to the top of the South Korean box office for the weekend of Dec. 27-29. The film, set in 1909, follows Korean independence activists plotting the assassination of Japan’s Prime Minister during their quest for independence. Starring Hyun Bin, Park Jeong-min and Jeon Yeo-been, “Harbin” earned $5.9 million over […]
Beta Fiction Spain, the No. 1 independent distributor in the country this year thanks to a barn-storming €8.0 million ($8.3 million) box office gross from Arantxa Echevarría’s “Undercover,” is set to produce new films from Marcel Barrena and Dani de la Orden, directors of two other big 2024 Spanish breakouts: “El 47” and “A House […]
There’s a stilted, soap opera quality to Hany Khalifa’s “Flight 404,” Egypt’s submission to the Academy Awards. It never quite transcends these visual and narrative trappings, but its tale of a woman escaping her past, en route to her Mecca pilgrimage, is led by a deeply layered performance from Mona Zaki. While the actress brings […]
In 2024, both cutting-edge technology and the companies controlling it grew increasingly powerful, provoking euphoric wonderment and existential dread. Companies like Nvidia and Alphabet soared in value, fueled by expectations that artificial intelligence (AI) will become a cornerstone of modern life. While those grand visions are still far into the future, tech undeniably shaped markets, warfare, elections, climate, and daily life this year.
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Perhaps technology’s biggest impact this year was on the global economy. The so-called Magnificent Seven—the stocks of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—thrived in large part because of the AI boom, propelling the S&P 500 to new highs. Nvidia, which designs the computer chips powering many AI systems, led the way, with its stock nearly tripling in price. These profits spurred an arms race in AI infrastructure, with companies constructing enormous factories and data centers—which in turn drew criticism from environmentalists about their energy consumption. Some market watchers also expressed concern about the increasing dependence of the global economy on a handful of companies, and the potential impacts if they prove unable to fulfill their massive promises. But as of early December, the value of these companies showed no sign of letting up.
Though not with the explosive novelty of ChatGPT’s 2023 breakthrough, generative AI systems advanced over the past 12 months: Google’s DeepMind achieved silver-medal results at a prestigious math competition; Google’s NotebookLM impressed users with its ability to turn written notes into succinct podcasts; ChatGPT passed a Stanford-administered Turing test; Apple integrated new artificial intelligence tools into its newest iPhone. Beyond personal devices, AI played a pivotal role in forecasting hurricanes and powering growing fleets of driverless cars across China and San Francisco.
A more dangerous side of AI, however, also came into view. AI tools, created by companies like Palantir and Clearview, proved central to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza in their ability to identify foreign troops and targets to bomb. AI was integrated into drones, surveillance systems, and cybersecurity. Generative AI also infiltrated 2024’s many elections. South Asian candidates flooded social media with AI-generated content. Russian state actors used deepfaked text, images, audio, and video to spread disinformation in the U.S. and amplify fears around immigration. After President-elect Donald Trump reposted an AI-generated image of Taylor Swift endorsing him on the campaign trail, the pop star responded with an Instagram post about her “fears around AI” and an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris instead.
Swift’s fears were shared by many of her young fans, who are coming of age in a generation that seems to be bearing the brunt of technology’s harms. This year, hand-wringing about the impact of social media on mental health came to a head with Jonathan Haidt’s best seller The Anxious Generation, which drew a direct link between smartphones and a rise in teen depression. (Some scientists have disputed this correlation.) Social media platforms scrambled to address the issue with their own fixes: Instagram, for instance, set new guardrails for teen users.
But many parents, lawmakers, and regulators argued that these platforms weren’t doing enough on their own to protect children, and took action. New Mexico’s attorney general sued Snap Inc., accusing Snapchat of facilitating child sexual exploitation through its algorithm. Dozens of states moved forward with a lawsuit against Meta, accusing it of inducing young children and teenagers into addictive social media use. In July, the U.S. Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which puts the onus on social media companies to prevent harm. Most tech companies are fighting the bill, which has yet to pass the House.
The potential harms around generative AI and children are mostly still unknown. But in February, a teenager died by suicide after becoming obsessed with a Character.AI chatbot modeled after Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen. (The company called the situation “tragic” and told the New York Times that it was adding safety features.) Regulators were also wary of the centralization that comes with tech, arguing that its concentration can lead to health crises, rampant misinformation, and vulnerable points of global failure. They point to the Crowdstrike outage—which grounded airplanes and shut down banks across the world—and the Ticketmaster breach, in which the data of over 500 million users was compromised.
President Joe Biden signed a bill requiring its Chinese owner to sell TikTok or be banned in the U.S. French authorities arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, accusing him of refusing to cooperate in their efforts to stop the spread of child porn, drugs, and money laundering on the platform. Antitrust actions also increased worldwide. In the U.S., Biden officials embarked on several aggressive lawsuits to break up Google’s and Apple’s empires. A U.K. watchdog accused Google of wielding anticompetitive practices to dominate the online ad market. India also proposed an antitrust law, drawing fierce rebukes from tech lobbyists.
But the tech industry may face less pressure next year, thanks in part to the effort of the world’s richest man: Elon Musk, whose net worth ballooned by more than $100 billion over the past year. Musk weathered many battles on many frontiers. Tesla failed to deliver its long-awaited self-driving cars, agitating investors. X was briefly banned in Brazil after a judge accused the platform of allowing disinformation to flourish. In the U.S., watchdogs accused Musk of facilitating hate speech and disinformation on X, and of blatantly using a major public platform to put his finger on the scale for his preferred candidate, Donald Trump. Musk’s companies face at least 20 investigations, from all corners of government.
But Musk scored victories by launching and catching a SpaceX rocket and implanting the first Neuralink chip into a paralyzed patient’s brain. And in the November election, his alliance with Trump paid off. Musk is now a prominent figure in Trump’s transition team, and tipped to head up a new government agency that aims to slash government spending by $2 trillion. And while the owner of Tesla must navigate Trump’s stated opposition to EVs, he is positioned to use his new perch to influence the future of AI. While Musk warns the public about AI’s existential risk, he is also racing to build a more powerful chatbot than ChatGPT, which was built by his rival Sam Altman. Altman’s OpenAI endured many criticisms over safety this year but nevertheless raised a massive $6.6 billion in October.
Is the growing power of tech titans like Musk and Altman good for the world? In 2024, they spent much of their time furiously building while criticizing regulators for standing in their way. Their creations, as well as those of other tech gurus, provided plenty of evidence both of the good that can arise from their projects, and the overwhelming risks and harms.
This story was originally published by theGuardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
The climate crisis caused an additional six weeks of dangerously hot days in 2024 for the average person, supercharging the fatal impact of heat waves around the world.
The effects of human-caused global heating were far worse for some people, an analysis by World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central has shown. Those in the Caribbean and Pacific island states were the hardest hit. Many endured about 150 more days of dangerous heat than they would have done without global heating, almost half the year.
Nearly half the world’s countries endured at least two months of high-risk temperatures. Even in the least affected places, such as the UK, US, and Australia, the carbon pollution from fossil fuel burning has led to an extra three weeks of elevated temperatures.
Worsened heatwaves are the deadliest consequence of the climate emergency. An end to coal, oil, and gas burning was vital to stopping the effects from getting even worse, the scientists said, with 2024 forecast to be the hottest year on record with record-high carbon emissions.
The researchers called for deaths from heatwaves to be reported in real time, with current data being a “very gross underestimate” because of the lack of monitoring. It is possible that uncounted millions of people have died as a result of human-caused global heating in recent decades.
“In most countries there is no reporting on heatwaves at all, which means the numbers we have are always a very gross underestimate.”
“The impacts of fossil fuel warming have never been clearer or more devastating than in 2024 and caused unrelenting suffering,” said Dr Friederike Otto, of Imperial College London and the co-lead of WWA. “The floods in Spain, hurricanes in the US, drought in the Amazon, and floods across Africa are just a few examples. We know exactly what we need to do to stop things from getting worse: stop burning fossil fuels.”
Joseph Giguere, a research technician at Climate Central, said, “Almost everywhere on Earth, daily temperatures hot enough to threaten human health have become more common because of climate change.”
The Guardian revealed in November that the climate crisis had caused dozens of previously impossible heatwaves, as well as making hundreds of other extreme weather events more severe or more likely to happen.
The new analysis identified local “dangerous heat days” by calculating the threshold temperature for the hottest 10 percent of days from 1991-2020. These days are associated with increased health risks.
The researchers then compared the number of days exceeding this threshold in 2024 to those in a scenario without global heating to calculate how many extra hot days were caused by the climate crisis.
They found the average person was exposed to a further 41 days of dangerous heat, highlighting how the climate crisis was exposing millions more people to dangerous temperatures for longer periods of the year.
Indonesia, home to 280 million people, experienced 122 days of additional dangerous heat, as did Singapore and many Central American states.
In the Middle East, people in Saudi Arabia endured 70 additional hot days, in a year when at least 1,300 hajj pilgrims died during extreme heat.
Brazil and Bangladesh endured about 50 extra hot days, while Spain, Norway, and the Balkan countries had an additional month of high temperatures.
Five billion people, almost two-thirds of the global population, experienced raised temperatures made at least twice as likely by global heating on 21 July, one of the hottest days of the year.
Hurricanes were also supercharged by the climate crisis in 2024. Kristina Dahl, the vice president for science at Climate Central, said: “Our analyses have shown that every Atlantic hurricane this year was made stronger by climate change, and that hurricanes Beryl and Milton, which were both category five storms, would not have reached that level were it not for climate change.”
Recent WWA analysis showed that an extraordinary sequence of six typhoons in the Philippines in 30 days, which affected 13 million people, was made more likely and more severe by global heating.
Julie Arrighi, the programs director at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said, “Another devastating year of extreme weather has shown that we are not well prepared for life at [the current level] of warming. In 2025, it’s crucial that every country accelerates efforts to adapt to climate change and that funds are provided by rich nations to help developing countries become more resilient.”
Measures should include better early warning systems, which saved lives, and the reporting of heat deaths, the researchers said.
“In most countries, there is no reporting on heatwaves at all, which means the numbers we have are always a very gross underestimate,” Otto said. “If we can’t communicate convincingly that actually lots of people are dying, it’s much harder to raise awareness that heatwaves are by far the deadliest extreme events, and they are the extreme events where climate change is a real game changer.”
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
A conspiracy theory that airplanes are leaving nefarious “chemtrails” in their wake due to a sinister government plot has been given fresh impetus in the US amid a swirl of concerns and confusion about proposals to geoengineer a response to the climate crisis.
State legislation to ban what some lawmakers call chemtrails has been pushed forward in Tennessee and, most recently, Florida. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has expressed interest in the conspiracy theory on social media and his podcast, is set to be at the heart of Donald Trump’s new administration following his nomination as health secretary.
“We are going to stop this crime,” Kennedy, who is known for his contrarian stances on vaccines and offshore wind farms, wrote about chemtrails on X in August. The former Democrat turned Trump ally said on his podcast last year that it was “kind of frightening to think that somebody may be putting large amounts of bioavailable aluminum into the environment, spraying it in microscopic particulates from airplanes.”
Believers of the chemtrails conspiracy theory contend that the white lines traced in the sky behind aircraft contain toxic chemicals that are released to achieve a devious end, such as mass sterilization or mind control.
“There’s a detachment from facts and rational analysis.”
This theory, which has no evidence to support it, has been put forward at various times since the 1990s despite being repeatedly debunked. Now, scientists are faced with a resurgent focus on chemtrails amid a related, more substantive, debate over whether actual modifications to the Earth’s atmosphere should be made in a desperate attempt to slow global heating.
Interest in chemtrails “bubbles up every once in a while and the hurricanes and weather modification kind of brings it up to the floor again,” said David Fahey, director of the chemical sciences laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in reference to two recent major hurricanes—Helene and Milton—that some figures, including Republicans, claimed were somehow steered by the federal government’s meddling with the weather.
“The misinformation is abundant,” said Fahey, who has spent several decades, on and off, fielding questions about chemtrails. There was no orchestrated weather modification conducted by NOAA, Fahey said, and even experimenting with such a thing would be a “big step for our agency and one that we are not quite prepared to do at the moment, and maybe our agency shouldn’t do it.”
Are chemtrails real?
No. The white plumes seen from the rear of aircraft are more aptly called condensation trails, or contrails. They are essentially condensed water vapor from a plane’s exhaust that, in cold air temperatures at high altitudes, form as ice crystals that look like visible clouds.
A survey of leading atmospheric scientists in 2016 found there was no evidence of a secret spraying program that would form these contrails. This research led to backlash from conspiracy theorists, with Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist who led the study, saying that he received death threats.
“I felt like it was a risk to my personal safety,” he said. “People have bought into this false narrative. We’re now seeing a worrying resurgence of conspiracy theories in general, from chemtrails to vaccines. There’s a detachment from facts and rational analysis.”
In fact, contrails do contribute to a form of “weather modification”—just not the sort envisioned by the conspiracy-minded. The plumes often grow into hazy cirrus clouds that trap heat and add to the greenhouse effect that is warming up the world, mostly via the burning of fossil fuels.
“As with many conspiracy theories, there is some truth to it in that aircraft are releasing particles and affecting the Earth’s climate system,” said Caldeira, who is involved in an effort to get airlines to reduce their contrail output. “But this is because of unintended consequences of the fossil fuel airline system, rather than some nefarious secret reason.”
Are any other weather modifications being conducted?
There is a confusing stew of different processes, or just theories, with different goals that have been variously called weather modification, solar geoengineering, or solar radiation management.
These often get mixed up and mistaken for secret government conspiracies. Cloud seeding, for example, involves dispersing tiny particles intoclouds to spur the formation of ice crystals that trigger rain or snow. Utah routinely does this to increase snowfall rates and authorities there have had to point out that this is not connected to chemtrails.
A separate debate has stirred in recent years as to whether governments, or even wealthy individuals, should intervene to slow dangerous global heating by spraying reflective substances such as sulphur into the stratosphere in order to deflect sunlight from further warming the Earth.
Noaa is setting up a system to monitor the stratosphere that could act as an “early warning” system for such activities. A US startup has offered “credits” for people to buy to help cool the world’s fever but as yet there has been no activity detected on a significant scale that would alter the climate.
“There are some demonstration projects,” said Fahey. “But in terms of large-scale airplanes taking material to the stratosphere, I’m not aware of anything, certainly in our country.”
Can solar engineering help solve the climate crisis?
This year is set to be the hottest ever recorded globally, the latest in a string of hot years that are pushing the average temperature to the point it looks certain to breach the internationally agreed threshold designed to avoid catastrophic heatwaves, droughts, floods, and other worsening climatic disasters.
The failure of governments to stem this crisis has led to calls for more drastic interventions, like solar geoengineering, to curb the global temperature rise. Last year, the White House released a congressionally mandated report on how a research program into solar geoengineering would work.
Such plans are highly controversial, however, with some scientists and environmental groups warning that meddling with the Earth’s thermostat could have unintended consequences such as altering monsoon seasons.
There are also concerns about the lack of global governance around adding substances to our shared atmosphere, the potential for a huge temperature whiplash should the continual addition of sulphur via planes stop for any reason, and the danger that geoengineering would distract from the primary task of cutting planet-heating emissions. Efforts by some researchers to run experiments on solar modification have been met with protests.
As the world continues to heat up, though, the conversation around solar geoengineering, and related conspiracies, is unlikely to abate. “I think it’s increasingly on the agenda of people who are wondering where is our climate going and how might we influence where it’s going,” said Fahey.
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.
There’s a lot that can scare off the newbie fly fisher. First, the gear: the rod and reel, of course, but also the fly line, the leader, the tippet, the waders, the boots, and—above all—the flies, the infinite permutations of size and color and material and hook. Then there’s the cast: a seemingly endless pursuit of the right rhythm, the correct accelerate-to-a-stop, pause, accelerate-to-a-stop that stretches the line out in front of you and lands the fly gently on the water. There’s also learning to read your local streams: Even drifting the right fly at the correct depth won’t matter if nobody’s home. And finally, entomology: You can catch trout without knowing the life cycles and behaviors of mayflies and caddisflies and stoneflies, but you’ll land far more if you know which hatch to match and how.
Randy Betz Jr. understands this. He knows you’re confused and frustrated and more than a little intimidated, but he just wants you to net some fish and have a good time on the water. So, in his @flyfishdelawhere videos on TikTok (421,000 followers) and Instagram (91,000), the 45-year-old owner of a spinal implant company from Wilmington, Delaware, is the fishing buddy you never knew you needed, happy to offer some tips and cheer you on, and, more than anything, make fly fishing more friendly and less daunting.
“If you want to learn to fly fish, this page is a great page to at least get started,” Betz told me earlier this month. “It’s a great page for someone who says: ‘I wanna get into fly fishing. I don’t know the basics. I don’t know what I should use. I don’t know how to even approach a stream or what rigs to use or what flies to use.’”
Satisfyingly, he caught a trout, and then another, and then another, rainbows and brookies and brownies and tigers all brought to his net for snapshots before being gently released back into the water.
The first time I saw one of Betz’s Reels, I was deep in a frenzy brought on by my tween son’s almost overnight obsession with largemouth bass. I had never fished growing up, save for the one time as a kid when some guy’s back cast hooked my thumb, but suddenly I was sneaking off to a nearby pond with my spinning gear every chance I got. My Insta Explore page was full of dudes catching bass, pike, and muskies on all manner of lures and soft plastics. Fly fishing—long my father-in-law’s main hobby—was way off my radar.
And yet, Betz instantly, erm, reeled me in. There he was streamside, narrating a GoPro-filmed video about why trout like the tailouts of pools and telling you before he cast his exact setup, in case you wanted to try the whole thing at your own river. He flipped over rocks to scope out the bug life, and he talked through the different challenges of streamers, nymphs, and dry flies in a way that made sense…and made it seem kind of fun? And then, satisfyingly, he caught a trout, and then another, and then another, rainbows and brookies and brownies and tigers all brought to his net for snapshots before being gently released back into the water.
So before I knew it, I was fly fishing almost every week during the winter in frigid water, snow piled up on the banks. I got caught in trees and on the bottom and lost countless flies and accidentally snapped my rod (multiple times, actually) but kept going out there as the seasons changed and the action heated up.
It wasn’t exactly A River Runs Through It. But as I toured central Connecticut’s streams and rivers—filled with a mix of stocked trout and some holdovers and wild fish, too—I became a bit of a walking cliché: communing with nature, learning on the water, the whole bit.
“You know, anyone that can take something away from one of my videos and use it to catch fish? There you go, that’s the reason I do it.”
I read books and studiously followed the fly shop’s twice-weekly river report and bought more gear and started watching an enormous amount of online fly-fishing content: everything from the grandfatherly ruminations of Orvis OG Tom Rosenbauer to the broseph stylings of @funky_fly_guy to the masterful competence of Troutbitten’s Domenick Swentosky and the clever casting lessons of @troutpsychology. But I kept coming back to Betz. Anytime I got skunked, anytime I was puzzled by new water conditions, I’d scroll through his posts and find something useful, and oddly comforting.
Betz, who first picked up a fly rod with his grandfather and later honed his craft as an undergrad at Penn State, says he fishes five to six times a week, often between work appointments and rarely more than two hours at a time. That can yield weeks worth of content—and provoke a flood of comments from followers who just caught their first trout on the fly and wanted to thank him. “You know, anyone that can take something away from one of my videos and use it to catch fish? There you go, that’s the reason I do it,” he told me.
I’ve now been out on the water dozens of times this year, and I’ve caught and released dozens of fish. I’m not good (that’s years, maybe decades, away?), but I’m also no longer bad. Thanks to Randy Betz Jr. and my other fly-fishing influencer-instructors, I’ve got an actual chance out there—just in time to fool some stocked Atlantic salmon this winter.
My cellphone’s apps serve as my alarm clock, meteorologist, GPS, and e-reader. FaceTime is the portal to my nieces who live 500 miles away. Chase Mobile is the reason I seldom deposit checks at a physical bank. Hinge has provided me with an overabundance of dating horror stories and—after copious swiping—an incredible partner.
Let me declare at the onset, these apps are useful—even pretty good! This screed is not about them.
My grievance focuses on every company in the world believing its products either should or must be accessed through a standalone app. Want to buy a single Major League Baseball ticket on your smartphone? Add that app to your already chaotic home screen! Need to charge your electric-powered rental car? Hah! Don’t think that only one app will do. Each of the various charging companies uses a different app.
My app annoyance blossomed into sheer disdain after a recent trip through a McDonald’s drive-thru for a medium Diet Coke and a small order of fries—a passingindulgence before RFK Jr. tries to pry them from my salty fingertips. “Will you be using the McDonald’s app for your purchase?” the innocent associate asked on her headset. “No,” I thought to myself, “I’m using the drive-thru for my purchase.” Like a normal person, I used my credit card for the routine transaction. My order tasted just as good—maybe even better—than it would have had I taken the additional step of involving technology.
Some of the tens of millions of McDonald’s app users will tell you that the app is useful; by downloading it, they can reap the rewards of 50-cent double cheeseburgers and the occasional free Happy Meal. Here’s where I become the resident buzzkill and remind you, reader, that if a corporation is offering you a product for free, it’s because it appreciates the fact that you are the product. When you download an app and enter your email address, phone number, and physical location, you are effectively gift-wrapping your personal information and handing it over to corporate megalords for exploitation. At best, they’ll use your purchase history and contact information to market to you even more strategically and relentlessly. At worst, they’ll sell it or lose it in a hack.
This theft of our information—and our phone storage space—is not just potentially ruinous, it’s alsoexclusionary. About 10 percent of Americans don’t own smartphones, according to the Pew Research Center. Perhaps they can’t afford one or don’t know how to use the technology. I’d wager that the average unhoused person or grandma on a fixed income needs the app-exclusive coupons more than the upper-middle-class teen with the latest iPhone model. Instead, these folks are charged a premium for ordering burgers the old-fashioned way. In at least some McDonald’s locations, customers may not even be able to see a full menu without downloading the app.
The everything-has-an-app culture is exasperating to me and apparently to many others. People wrote to me complaining about apps connected to their ovens, coffee-mug warmers, laundry machines, grocery stores, and even toothbrushes. I’m not a frequent Reddit user but found even more excessive-app gripes there. And amid the grievances, still another piece of evidence for how out of control this all is: On the third webpage I tapped, a prompt popped up, blocked a third of my phone screen, and suggested I download the Reddit app to keep reading. Lord, give me strength. Or maybe a meditation app.
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