New York Magazine

When the artist Coco Fusco makes work — confrontational performances, videos, photography, writing — she’s not driven by an urge to self-document. She’d rather shine light on the issues that provoke her. Artists of color have long felt pressure to capitalize on the most marginal aspects of their biographies, as white critics (most critics) have remained eager to dismiss those who address race or colonialism in their work as politically correct or identity obsessed. Fusco scoffs at that and rejects the assumption that there’s anything innate about what she makes. “It’s as if I don’t have the capacity to think about my work beyond my own life story,” she tells Madeline Leung Coleman. “That’s a denial of the intellectual labor involved.” In September, she opened her first U.S. survey show at El Museo del Barrio, clarifying the injustices that have compelled her art-making for more than three decades: the denial of dignity to workers and immigrants; the twisted misuses of feminine sexuality; and, in her recent work about Cuba, the state’s abuses of power. Despite this year being a productive, even celebratory year for Fusco, she talks like someone bracing for blowback or spoiling for a fight, especially with the American art world. Her first success was an object lesson: After ‘Two Undiscovered Amerindians’ was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1993, she says, she didn’t get an invitation to produce work in New York for eight years. “The idea that my professional life has been a joyride is so far from the truth,” she says. “I mean, I’m happy. I’m employed. But the response from the Establishment has never been 100 percent ‘We’re on your side.’” Read Leung’s full interview with the artist: https://lnkd.in/e9Da5Mg7

The strange saga of the TikTok ban may soon be coming to an end. “We have a deal on TikTok,” President Trump said on Tuesday. According to the Wall Street Journal, TikTok’s U.S. business would be controlled by an investor consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz under a framework the U.S. and China are finalizing. Existing users in the U.S. would be asked to shift to a new app, which TikTok has built and is testing. TikTok engineers will re-create a set of content-recommendation algorithms for the app, using technology licensed from TikTok’s parent ByteDance. The investors will take an 80 percent stake in the new entity, meeting the 20 percent maximum threshold for Chinese ownership. The entity will also have an “American-dominated board with one member designated by the U.S. government.” It’s the sort of weird, contorted resolution that seems like it wouldn’t really satisfy anyone. In the end, the TikTok ban wasn’t primarily about national security or influence but rather political control, and the demonstration thereof. Trump’s political allies will now have the discretion to set platform policies however they see fit. One of those allies, Larry Ellison, is the father of David Ellison, who recently became CEO of Paramount, and who, with help from family, just launched a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, too, raising the possibility of a politically aligned media and internet conglomerate without precedent, at least in the United States. If the deal goes through — the president signed another extension on Tuesday while details get hashed out — Americans will find themselves in a strange new version of an old situation: Wondering if, and how, TikTok’s close relationship with the dominant political party of its domestic government could affect what they see and post. Read John Herrman’s full column: https://lnkd.in/eQzx5bAm

On Wednesday night, after ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ was pulled from ABC indefinitely for the host’s comments about Charlie Kirk, reports emerged that Nexstar had decided to cut the show from the 32 ABC stations it owns. With the pressure on from Nexstar — and potential retribution coming from President Trump’s FCC — ABC then decided to cut Kimmel’s late-night show entirely. As criticism mounts over the decision to bend to President Trump’s campaign to silence voices critical of Kirk and his administration at large, people are looking at the political motivations of the largest owner of individual news stations in the country. Past campaign contributions show a general rightward lean for the company, whose affiliated donors gave just under $125,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2024. But the primary motivation for any support of Trump’s push to silence critics may emerge from Nexstar’s business model itself. In August, Nexstar announced the $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna, a rival company that owns 64 additional TV stations and the True Crime Network. Announcing the Tegna deal in August, Sook praised the Trump administration for offering “local broadcasters the opportunity to expand reach, level the playing field.” If the deal went through, Nexstar would become the largest provider of local TV in the country. CEO Perry Sook has stated his intention to “move with a sense of urgency” to take advantage of a friendly climate for mergers under Trump’s FCC led by commissioner Brendan Carr. Hours before Kimmel’s suspension was made public, Carr said that Kimmel’s comments were “truly sick” and that there was a “strong case” for the FCC to act against ABC’s parent company Disney. Read more on how the massive media conglomerate may be focused on appeasing President Trump to help future mergers: https://lnkd.in/ecdbGTrr

For the first time since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022, a large trove of its user data has been made available to researchers, who attempted to answer a straightforward — but contentious and heavily obfuscated — question: What are most people doing with ChatGPT most of the time? As of July, “about 70% of ChatGPT consumer queries were unrelated to work,” with nonwork queries increasing faster. Most interesting is the paper’s attempt to categorize what “kind” of output users are looking for: About 49 percent of messages are users asking ChatGPT for guidance, advice, or information (“Asking”); 40 percent are requests to complete tasks that can be plugged into a process (“Doing”); and one percent are messages that have no clear intent (“Expressing”). None of this will be too surprising to anyone who has been using tools like ChatGPT for more than a few months or even to people who are merely aware of how their friends, family, and co-workers seem to be chatbotting. It is, however, slightly out of step with some of the more provocative messaging that companies like OpenAI have at times engaged in or at least indulged. Read columnist John Herrman’s exploration about what the data reveals about how people are using ChatGPT day to day, and how it differs from what we expected: https://lnkd.in/eRAUykU9

Walt Disney-owned ABC has announced it’s pulling new episodes of ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ “indefinitely” following right-wing outrage over comments he made Monday on his show about reaction to the killing of right-wing podcaster and provocateur Charlie Kirk. Disney’s decision follows a move by one of its major affiliate groups, Nextstar, to pre-empt the show in response. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eCwm2mBJ

Today, people use artificial intelligence to write their grocery lists, college term papers, and resumes; it was only a matter of time before it became part of the search for love. People use AI to write their dating profiles and to practice flirting, as conversational aides and dating coaches. Dating apps are integrating AI features that can help users pick the right photos or urge them to expand on a reply or tone down the creepiness. According to a recent survey, 26 percent of single daters (and nearly half of Gen Z daters) reported using AI in their dating process, more than a four-fold increase from a year ago, suggesting this is well on its way to becoming the norm — and just when most single people already thought online dating couldn’t get any worse. There’s been a “real change in people’s willingness to say, ‘I am simply going to delegate my most intimate’” communications, MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle said. “People felt that they couldn’t engage in kind of text conversations as ‘just themselves.’” But turning to ChatGPT for difficult conversations risks establishing a different sort of gap, not just between a person and their words, but between their strong emotional state and the scripted, polite tone they’re using to communicate it. Turkle sees it as “buying us less vulnerability,” but at the expense of the very thing we’re ostensibly seeking. “There’s no intimacy without vulnerability,” she said. At the link in our bio, Anna Louie Sussman reports on how AI dating has arrived as a full-blown force and speaks to people who are using AI to date — and those who refuse to: https://lnkd.in/e3apctnG

The signs of pediatric cannabis poisoning that parents usually notice first are sleepiness and strangeness. Their child is acting off, parents say. Their kid seems slowed, confused. Some of them vomit. Some can’t stay awake, or sit up, or support their own weight when trying to walk. Some kids and teens skip these relatively benign symptoms and sink into psychosis, ranting and screaming and fighting paranoid delusions while parents look helplessly on. In the most terrifying cases, the central nervous system is depressed so profoundly that the child slips into a coma or the automatic process of breathing breaks down, requiring a ventilator. As marijuana has been legalized or decriminalized across the country, there has been a 1,375 percent increase among children under six years old in accidental edible ingestion cases like these. And children evidently find nicotine products just as alluring: Vapes are also often colorful and kid-attracting, and many, especially those that are draw-activated, don’t require much manual dexterity to operate. And what does a canister of nicotine pouches, like Zyn, look like to a kid if not a tin of candy or gum? As the federal government flounders with efforts to make these products less appealing and accessible to kids, two more personal, human questions emerge: Why do such a staggering number of households with young children have these substances within easy reach, and why don’t more parents acknowledge to their kids the truth about what they are—and why they should be avoided? Read about the stigma and embarrassment that seems to be stopping parents from doing all they can to prevent accidental ingestion in their kids: https://shorturl.at/kiIyJ

Over the past few years, independent furniture designers have gravitated toward metal. Aesthetically, it’s more malleable than one might think; it can read as austere and streamlined in a minimalist collection, but it also has the potential to look baroque and extravagant. At this year’s New York offshoot event of Collectible, the Brussels design fair, it leaned more toward the latter with metal enlisted in a return to ornamentation. It’s all part of a renewed interest in Art Deco, a more stylized version of high modernism when it first emerged a century ago. No longer allergic to the decorative, interior designers are increasingly turning to saturated color palettes, geometric patterns, and flourishes of detail that include pictorial and even allegorical representation. Looking to the past is comforting, but it’s also a chance for designers to experiment within the constraints of what’s familiar. Read more about the triumphant return of adornment: https://lnkd.in/eVbd5QCt

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Fifteen years ago, Rob Gronkowski a.k.a. Gronk arrived in the NFL seemingly straight out of central casting — almost the platonic ideal of a football player in the American psyche. He was all muscle and kinetic energy, a fearsome blocker and incredible receiver who was impossible to tackle, a selfless teammate on the field and the ultimate party animal off it. His touchdown celebrations — often a silly dance followed by a ferocious spiking of the football — summed up his spirit as well as anything. Having fun was his goal in life, and he seemed to be better at this, too, than anyone else. Gronkowski lived solely off of his endorsement money during his playing career, and he remains one of the most marketable athletes around, even in retirement. Recently, he spoke with Adam Elder about his rambunctious childhood, life after partying, the need to re-create locker-room vibes in retirement, and much more. Read the full interview: https://lnkd.in/e8hAaTqf