Culture | The Verge

Kids turned the comment section of an NPR podcast into a group chat

2026-09-26T13:32:35-04:00

Middle schoolers, likely blocked from other apps and social networks, apparently turned the Spotify comment section under an episode of NPR's Wild Card into an impromptu group chat. In a new episode of This American Life, host Ira Glass digs into how the kids landed there and why. But it mostly boils down to kids getting creative to work around the restrictions placed on them.

When Glass asked one of the kids why they picked this particular podcast, they said, "We just, like, looked for podcasts that didn't have many comments." Which, obviously, hurt Glass's feelings a bit.

Initially, showrunner Dave Blanchard thought the comments were a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A24’s reputation is on the line with the SCP Foundation movie

2026-09-20T08:45:48-04:00

After the success of Backrooms, it looks like A24 is trying to cash in on yet another internet horror craze with a new installment in the V/H/S horror anthology series set in the SCP Foundation universe. But as soon as it was announced, the backlash started, and V/H/S: SCP already appears to be on shaky ground.

SCP is a creepypasta that, like Backrooms, originated on 4chan. The fictional SCP (Special Containment Procedures) Foundation documents, captures, and contains paranormal or supernatural anomalies. It's a sprawling story told primarily through wiki entries that mimic documentation you might file while working at a government agency. …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Have a laugh at AI’s expense by roleplaying as a chatbot

2026-08-17T06:02:14-04:00

If you squint, you can just about make out the hat. | Screenshot: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge

Your AI Slop Bores Me is brilliant in its simplicity. There are two tabs: human and LARP as an AI. On one side, you enter a request. On the other, you submit an answer. But the important thing is that there's a human on both sides of the equation. Prompts can request a response as text or image, and then whoever is roleplaying as the AI gets 150 seconds to respond.

Just like a real LLM, Your AI Slop Bores Me works on a sort of token system. Requests cost credits, and to earn credits, you have to jump onto the AI side and answer some of your own. You can also just wait as you get one free request every two minutes. But, as fun as it is to dr …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand how to live

2026-08-12T18:58:40-04:00

Recently, a man I was rock climbing with told me about how he'd used AI to make a motivational poster for himself, which he'd hung on his bedroom wall: a bear, walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said, "Do cool shit." I made what I hoped was a polite noise. What reaction was this man looking for? He probably hoped someone, maybe me, would say it was cool or inspiring. It seemed I was not the first person he'd told about this poster. "You know, it's funny," he said to me. "No one ever says anything about it."

I have been thinking about this now for several days. There's a sort of turducken of things that I find off-puttin …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Buc-ee’s dodges John Oliver to sue another small business

2026-08-10T07:07:50-04:00

Buc-ee’s mega-convenience store and 120-pump gas station in Mount Crawford, Virginia. | Image: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Buc-ee's became something of a viral sensation during the World Cup, but it has a troubling history of suing small gas stations and convenience stores. On a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver literally begged the company to sue him for selling merch featuring his squirrel mascot, Mr. Nutterbutter, with branding that reads "Buc-Off." But Buc-ee's has so far declined to take the bait, instead targeting yet another small business that lacks the deep pockets and legal team of HBO.

According to WDTN, an NBC affiliate in Miami Valley, Ohio, Buc-ee's opened its first locations in the state earlier this year. And now it's targeting es …

Read the full story at The Verge.

How an OpenAI influencer trip backfired

2026-08-04T14:16:11-04:00

The brand trip is a right of passage for influencers. It's a mark of legitimacy that a sponsor wants to invite them on an all-expenses-paid vacation, often with luxurious freebies and activities. Trips can also spur hard feelings from uninvited influencers, trigger criticism from the public, and project a certain frivolousness.

Usually it is fast fashion companies or beauty brands flying out influencers with the goal of flooding social media with sponsored content. This time, it was a major AI company.

Over the weekend, several influencers began posting about OpenAI's "first ever brand trip," which appears to have taken place outside of N …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Angela Nissel faces down grief with a laugh

2026-08-01T16:13:56-04:00

Angela Nissel smiles through the pain. | Image: Angela Nissel

Angela Nissel's latest book, Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom Is Dead, is my kind of memoir. Sure, it's a deeply emotional tale about caring for a terminally ill parent. But it's delivered with the sort of gallows humor that I often turn to to get me through tough times.

Of course, that sort of dark humor should come as no surprise from Nissel. She first made a splash with The Broke Diaries, which grew out of a blog she kept in college detailing her daily struggles and, at times, embarrassment at being a broke student. Eventually she went on to produce and write for hit shows including Scrubs and The Boondocks.

One of her most lasting cont …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Can Partiful keep the party going?

2026-07-05T23:48:17-04:00

One hundred dollars will buy you 8 pounds of glitter; 10 Domino's pizzas; 406 miniature disco balls from Temu; or 100 cans of Coors Light. For a friend's birthday party one year, Ayla D'Silva spent $100 on sour candy and made a "sour candy salad." Even sweeter was that she didn't have to foot the bill - the money came from Partiful.

As a college ambassador for the startup, D'Silva got a small stipend every month to throw a party on her college campus. There were very few rules and no metrics to hit on RSVPs or ticket sales, she says - it just had to be hosted on the Partiful app. Facebook events were dead; party planning and RSVPing were f …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The fanfiction community is at war with AI — and itself

2026-07-03T04:42:57-04:00

Fanfiction communities are trying to hunt down writers who haven’t written works with their own hands. | Image: Álvaro Bernis / The Verge

Over the past week, a new fanworks movement has kicked off, with the aim to root out authors using generative AI. But the detection methods being implemented are questionable, and any fanfic writer could be caught in the crossfire.

Broad distaste around the use of Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI tools has long been a thing in creative communities, including the world of fanfiction. Readers and writers have passed around tips for spotting supposedly AI-generated works, citing anything from em dashes to the broad concept of purple prose. But on June 29th, an anonymous X account called @heatedrivalryai promised a seemingly more reliable solution …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Verge’s annual summer ‘in’ and ‘out’ list

2026-07-06T10:51:48-04:00

In the AI slop-loaded, algorithm-powered modern reality, trends come and go - and the tech industry is no different. For the last few years, The Verge staff has compiled a selection of things that are IN for summer and OUT for summer - and each time there are some strong feelings. (Here are the last two years' predictions.) Let's do it again!

Mia Sato, senior report

IN	OUT
Motion sickness glasses	AI "pervert" glasses
Fiber	Protein
Bootleg sports merch	Official tech company merch
Floating in water	Touching grass

Meredith Haggerty, editor

IN	OUT
The great New York renaissance	The Great American State Fair
The Knicks garbage can	Taylor Swift's MSG weddi …

Read the full story at The Verge.