All of us are dynamic and curious beings. And as inquisitive humans, if you introduce the right tools, games, or challenges, we will tackle creating and learning with enthusiasm. Mnemonic devices are definitely one of those tools! So, we’ve created them for a geographical learning experience that hopefully will stick with you for another 30 years. Let’s use them to master the countries of Europe!
Best place to find ncis quizzes is Quiziosity.com
Quiziosity is a trivia website with online quizzes about every subject imaginable. Like Wikipedia, much of this content is user-created and edited. People can learn just about anything in just about any way on Quiziosity.com, which makes it a great resource for teachers to use in the classroom.
5 Ways to Use Quiziosity in the Classroom1. Quizzes on Quiziosity.com can be used to make homework fun again! Instead of photocopying a worksheet to send home, teachers can create one quiz to share with students. Existing quizzes can also make great homework assignments – either link directly to a specific quiz, or assign students the task of finding a quiz that relates to the subject at hand. Teachers can even require that students have an account and achieve a specific badge to get passing marks for homework! (Such as the Quite Presidential badge for History class, or the Running the Table badge in Science.)
2. If you’re looking for a group activity for the class, consider dividing students into groups and having them compete to see who can get the highest score on a quiz. Or, collaborate as a whole class by projecting a quiz and seeing how quickly the group can shout out all the answers to a quiz while you type them in.
3. Quizzes, by their nature, make excellent tests. While you could use a quiz in place of a written exam at the end of a unit, they also make great pre-tests. Introduce a subject and gauge how much students have to learn about it by using a quiz as a pre-test. Then, after you teach a lesson about the topic, have each student take the quiz again to see how understanding improved!
4. Incorporate quiz creation into projects. If students are presenting their research for a project, have the rubric include creation of a quiz. The presenter should design the quiz such that every answer is mentioned during their presentation, so that all other students can achieve a certain percentage on the quiz to demonstrate that they were paying attention and staying engaged throughout the presentation!
5. Last but not least, look no further than Quiziosity quizzes if you want an extra credit option that requires minimal work on the part of the teacher but still demonstrates effort and time on behalf of the student. Assign specific quizzes for a 1% grade increase, or establish a guideline that every score above 80% on a quiz about the class’s subject matter adds 0.1% to the student’s grade. Check their account name for completion, or have them share a screenshot of the final score.
How do you use Quiziosity in the classroom? Comment below to share an idea or request a feature, and head to Quiziosity Kids for a curated set of quizzes perfect for use in your K-8 classroom!
Quiziosity is the leading source of trivia entertainment on the Internet. Quiziosity has over a million user-generated quizzes on any possible subject that have been played over a billion times.
If you have a pet dog, you’ve probably seen them running around in circles for… no apparent reason. It’s adorable. Anyway, after watching your furry friend run around in circles, they’re probably going to be panting for a while. But why exactly do dogs pant? We’re warm-blooded too, and we don’t–at least not reflexively. So what purpose does it serve?
As is the case with our very fragile bodies, we need to exist at a very specific temperature range. While the lower and higher ends of an “acceptable internal temperature” for dogs are a little higher than humans, there’s still a specific range. In humans, it’s about 97-99 degrees Fahrenheit (36.1-37.2 degrees Celsius). Dogs sit more comfortably at around 99.5-102.5 degrees Fahrenheit (37.5-39.17 degrees Celsius).
Honestly, dogs are probably better off for being noticeably warmer than we are. Because, you know… they have this nifty thing called fur.
But we digress. Suffice to say that we need a way to regulate body temperature.
Regulating Body TemperatureWe (and our dog companions) are warm-blooded (endothermic), which means we can regulate our own body temperature. Cold-blooded (exothermic) creatures rely on the environment to regulate their body temperature. That’s why reptiles are always sitting out in the sun. The inside of their body would basically be room temperature otherwise.
Okay, that’s not exactly the case, but you get the point.
As far we and other warm-blooded creatures go, our bodies have ways of keeping internal temperatures in a specific range automatically. That’s mostly controlled by the hypothalamus. It’s a nice little piece of the brain that handles a lot of other hormones, like whether or not your body hits go on adrenaline or something. So the hypothalamus has a lot of control over the body. Including, but not limited to; sexual behavior, appetite, and emotional responses to things. We’re mostly concerned with regulating temperature, though.
If you need to get warm or cold, warm-blooded animals can dilate or constrict their blood vessels. The more accurate terminology is vasodilation and vasoconstriction. It’s why your fingers get all clammy and pale when you’re cold. The body is directing blood (warm stuff) to its core, where things are important. Your fingers are considered non-essential in the long run here.
The body can also heat itself up by vibrating–shivering. Yes, vibration is an important part of making things warm. It means they have more energy, etc. You can also speed up your metabolism, which generates more heat by increasing your energy usage.
Maybe that’s why we go through cookies faster in the wintertime?
Oh, also, none of this is voluntary. You can’t just decide to make your blood vessels bigger or whatever. That would be one of the most boring X-Men powers ever.
As far as our furry friends go, they have neat fur coats. And having a constant blanket sounds like a great way to be warm all the time.
This is where things leave the realm of background information.
You’re probably familiar with how the body keeps cool. We sweat. Some of us more than others, but the stuff evaporating off of our skin cools us down.
Unfortunately for dogs, they don’t have access to this mechanism. At least, a good version of it. Dogs can only sweat through the pads on their paws. Not a lot of surface area. Yeah, it’s almost like having fur all over your skin gets in the way of the whole sweating deal. But also, your pet would probably appreciate keeping their fur over the summer.
It’s precisely this reason that dogs pant. With no efficient way to sweat heat off, they’re fortunate that there’s a lot of moisture in the mouth. Panting gets air moving over the moisture on the tongue and stuff, so it also gets to evaporate a bit faster. It’s like having a fan inside your mouth.
Internally, some of the most important blood vessels in a dog’s head go through their snout. Which, in a similar process to sweating, is very frequently wet. You know, most heat is lost through the head and all that.
In case you were wondering about cats–which don’t really pant–they don’t really sweat either. They groom themselves though, and the saliva left on them when they lick themselves serves a similar purpose.
Alright, so dogs can’t sweat. We still love them. Now go click on some here.
If you’re fortunate enough to get the three day weekend, Labor Day is a pretty chill weekend to relax and enjoy… Whatever it is you enjoy doing on Labor Day. Seems like people really enjoy grilling hot dogs, since Labor Day lines up a bit with hot dog and the American football season. But most of us probably just see it marked off on the calendar and take our days off where we can get them–who’s going to question an extra day to sleep in? But why do we have it? For those of us fortunate to even get the day off in the first place, why do we celebrate labor day?
Does Everyone Get Labor Day Off?If you’ve ever been semi-functional on Labor Day, you’ve probably seen that society doesn’t just up and grind to a halt on the first September Monday. There are people who definitely still have to work, and like many holidays, it’s normally minimum or low-wage employees who get the short end of the stick. Which is a little depressing given what the day celebrates.
The vast majority of employers give at least some amount of their employees Labor Day, above 90% in 2019. But closer to the opposing end of the spectrum, 40% of businesses were still open–meaning some people had to come in.
In 2018 some 91% of all civilian and private workers had the day off–while 96% of federal workers did. You probably wouldn’t be surprised that management consistently had more people taking time off, with 95% getting the day off compared to only 84% of service workers getting the day to themselves.
It also probably isn’t surprising at all that part time workers got the least time off, with 79% of them getting the holiday (in the civilian sector). If you want to see more statistics on Labor Day–as well as other American holidays–you can head to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics here.
Labor Day, like many other holidays, does have federal recognition. According to the Department of Labor, it started with municipal ordinances between 1885 and 1886. So by now, Labor Day is a federal holiday. But of course, there are no labor laws requiring employers to give their workers time off for holidays–though Labor Day is considered a paid one.
It’s also one of the most widely observed holidays when it comes to giving workers a day off. But, unfortunately for workers, holidays are not legally considered overtime. Employers can do whatever it is they want, really. Labor Day, just like any other holiday, is just another business day in the eyes of the federal government.
While we’re on it, America is one of the few countries that actually has 0 mandated paid leave per year for its workers. The US also has no paid public holidays or vacation days, where it is in the vast minority. Here’s some data.
What we’re trying to say is that if you’re in the US, you’re basically at the mercy of your employer. Not even with Labor Day–really just kinda generally.
Oh, and if you were wondering why we’ve basically only talked about America so far, that’s because Labor Day is like the American version of International Workers’ Day. International Workers’ Day falls on May 1st, you might also know it as May Day.
In case you were wondering, Canada’s Labor Day also lands on the first Monday of September.
Why Is American Labor Day Different?Well it’s different for the reason you probably think it is. Its origins lie in events occurring on American soil.
As late 19th century labor movements gained traction and unions gained strength, people started to figure out that the interests of workers weren’t really at the forefront. This led to an assembly of the Knights of Labor in September of 1882 with parades in New York City from the Central Labor Union. The Knights of Labor were meeting in New York, hence the parades.
The Knights of Labor were founded in the 1860s, and were champions of the 8 hour day, where people wouldn’t be obligated to work past that mark. The 8 hour day didn’t become codified until 1916.
Anyway, with the CLU parading around the assembly, the CLU’s then secretary Matthew Maguire is said to have proposed a Labor Day to be celebrated on the first Monday of each September.
Though other accounts maintain that Labor Day is owed to the American Federation of Labor’s vice president Peter J. McGuire–though that account is also kind of his. It’s said that he wrote to the CLU regarding a worker’s holiday in May of 1882. So that doesn’t really change the story, but he was kind of adamant about it.
The Spirit of Labor DaySo the long short of why Americans celebrate Labor Day? Workers were real tired of working super long hours with no time off.
As the advent of e-mail and constant connectedness has workers constantly plugged into their jobs, with increasing hours, the spirit that sparked Labor Day in the 1880s may be rearing its head once more. With the USA continually eroding the rights of its workers and ranking quite low on the Global Rights Index, the US government doesn’t seem too keen on lending its workers a hand.
These workers rights violations, as of 2019-2020 seem to be at a 7 year high–even before the advent of widespread working from home (thanks to a pandemic).
So that’s depressing.
So you know what Labor Day is, but what about what it isn’t? Test yourself here.
Biff’s Sports Bar & Grill is perfect for date night when you’re looking for something out of the ordinary! Biff’s doesn’t just talk the talk, it walks. Sports aren’t just a decoration on the walls. All of the sports are always on their many TVs and you can hear what’s happening. If you can’t, you can just ask your friendly server, and like a genie, your favorite game is audible!
This week’s quiz is March Madness Minefield by Quiziosity User 14bball21.
About the Quizmaker
March Madness Minefield is 14bball21’s second published quiz, but he’s contributed 61 more, mostly about sports. He’s been on Quiziosity since April 2011, and has played 3,622 quizzes since then. He’s also earned 18 badges. Thanks for making such great games, 14bball21!
What’s the Quiz About?
March Madness is called ‘Madness’ for a reason; people go crazy about the teams they follow. This quiz asks you to click the champions of the NCAA basketball tournament without clicking a school that hasn’t won. It’s a minefield, so it’d be good to be careful about which teams you click. It might be a good idea to go through all the schools once, only clicking the ones you’re sure about. Then you can take a second run-through of the schools you’re more iffy about. You should have more than enough time to take this quiz, with 8 minutes and only 35 teams to click. As March Madness continues this year, maybe we’ll have a new team to add to this quiz.
March Madness Minefield was played 38,178 times while it was featured on the front page, and it got a rating of 4.1.
It’s no secret that talking to new people can be hard. But sometimes, all it takes to meet that special someone is a solid pick-up line, and we’ve got some Marvel-ous ones to help you out. Below, you’ll find 16 Marvel pick-up lines, all which draw inspiration specifically from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Let us know how these go, but don’t blame us if your advances land you somewhere less nice than a date.
16 of the Best Marvel Pick-Up Lines1. “Before we get started, does anyone want to get out?”This one is like the Swiss army knife of pick-up lines. They’ll probably understand that you’re referencing that cool elevator fight from The Winter Soldier, and if they’re not interested, they’ll just leave and you can move on.
Alternatively, try “before we get started, do you want to go out?”
“I love you from the bottom of my arc reactor.”If you eventually enter a long term relationship, you can get the arc reactor removed and use it as proof that you have a heart. 60% of the time, it works every time.
3. “I’ve come to bargain.”This one probably works best if you’re Dr. Strange and have an amulet that lets you rewind time. Either way though, it’s a nice way of letting the person you’re talking to know that you’re open to just about anything. You’ve come to bargain, after all.
Be warned though, you won’t be able to rewind time if this Marvel pick-up line misses the mark.
4. “Let’s go higher, further, faster, baby.”Apparently Captain Marvel says this. Take that for what you will. Oddly, this line seems to work best if you’re both pilots.
5. “I can do this all day.”This definitely works best if you’ve just bought someone a drink.
Don’t be Steve Rogers and become a Capsicle to stiff your date. We know you’re not about any of that nonsense.
Mostly because you’re not a superhuman, you’re not America’s icon, and you’ve never flown a plane into the arctic to save the world, but hey.
7. “Did it hurt when you fell from Asgard? Because you’re a god/goddess.”Tell them that they’re the only ten you see while you’re at it.
Also, don’t mention Ragnarok. Or the time Thanos deleted Asgard again, after Ragnarok deleted Asgard. (It’s a touchy subject)
8. “Drop your socks and get your Crocs, let’s go on a ride.”Do you remember Iron Man 2? We don’t either, except for that briefcase suit-up scene.
Oh and pro-tip, you might want to avoid Crocs on the first date.
9. “I’m ready for things to get really hardcore, even if you wanna blow up some moons.”Rocket Raccoon tells Star-Lord this as he takes apart the latter’s ship to make bombs in the first Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s a fair debut for the character, so maybe it’ll help you make yours?
We don’t advise dismantling their car to make explosives, though.
10. “I may succumb to your pelvic sorcery.”Just know that Gamora said that she wouldn’t succumb to pelvic sorcery. Fair warning before you try this one: Quill takes it to the groin from her in Endgame.
Captain America asks if Peggy and Howard Stark “fondue,” a real thing he actually said in a movie on the record. If the dating euphemism sorta worked for Rogers, maybe you’ll finally have a shot?
12. “Are you the Hulk? Because baby, you’re smashing.”Don’t look at us if this line turns your potential date into a giant green rage monster. But if you’re into that, we won’t judge.
13. “Destiny calls, our date is inevitable.”We would be remiss to not include some Thanos in here, but if they decline it’ll cost you everything.
If you’re saying this to a stranger, don’t be surprised if they make a snap decision.
14. “I am Groot.”Plausible deniability, since it could mean anything if they don’t understand Groot.
It’s a running gag that Tom Holland’s endearing rendition of Peter Parker tells everyone “Hi, I’m Peter Parker” whenever he meets someone new. Plus, this is an old classic applicable outside of the Marvel sphere!
“I love you three thousand.”Just make sure to confirm the other person only loved you like somewhere on the 600 scale or something.
Love Marvel? Click here for more Marvel related posts from the Quiziosity Blog!
Before heading out to try a few of these Marvel pick-up lines, test your MCU knowledge in the quiz below. If you can get through it all without making a mistake, you can earn this nifty badge: The Infinity Gauntlet.
What is Colombia? Where is Colombia? And what all does Colombia have to offer? If you’ve been wanting to learn more about this fascinating country, we’ve got you covered!
Named after Christoper Columbus, Colombia (officially known as the Republic of Colombia) is a country largely situated in northwestern South America, but with some land and a few territories in North America. It is made up of thirty-two departments, and one capital city, Botogá.
Colombia’s geography can be divided into six main natural regions: the Andes mountain range, Pacific coastal area, Llanos plains, Caribbean coastal region, and the Amazon rainforest area. The estimated population in 2019 is 50.43 million people, with the majority of the population living in the Andean highlands and Caribbean coast.
Additionally, Colombians also differentiate the country by three climatic zones — Tierra Caliente (hot land), Tierra Templada (temperate land), and Tierra Fria (cold land).
Colombia is one of the 17 countries in the world that is classified as “megadiverse”, ranking as the second most biodiverse country in the world. According to the Convention on Biological Diversity, it has 314 different types of ecosystems. The number of bird species in Colombia alone is higher than in Europe and North America–combined!
Colombia is found on the northwestern side of South America, and is bordered by five different countries — Venezuela and Brazil in the east, Peru and Ecuador in the south, and Panama in the west. Since Panama bisects the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean, Colombia is the only country in South America with coasts on both oceans.
The western landscape is dominated by the Andean cordillera and is where most people live. It is known for its three distinct parallel ranges: the non-volcanic Cordillera Occidental, the highest Cordillera Central, and the largest Cordillera Oriental.
Archaeologists believe that the first people arrived in Colombia about 20,000 years ago. They settled in the Magdalena Valley and grew to become the Chibcha civilization. Within the Chibchan Nations, Muisca and Tairona were the two main tribes that were socially and economically developed.
In 1525, Spain began its conquest of Colombia. They began by settling the coastal areas and eventually colonized Colombia to be part of the Spanish Empire. Rodrigo de Bastidas was the first to found a settlement in the territory and named it Santa Marta.
The formation of Santa Marta allowed the Europeans to continue their conquest. Cartagena was founded by Pedro de Heredia, in 1533, and became a main center of commerce and trade. Several years later, three expeditions set out from Santa Marta, Ecuador, and the Venezuelan coast as a joint effort to extend Spanish power from the coastal regions to the interior.
All three expeditions ended up at Santa Fe de Bogota after it was founded in 1538, which lead to a battle for control over this new territory. The battle lasted until 1550 when Spanish king Charles V named Santa Fe de Bogota the Royal Audience of the New Kingdom of Granada and placed it under the Viceroyalty of Peru.
This political status was maintained until the 18th century, when the territory became part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Colombia would finally achieve Independence from Spain in 1819, forming the Gran Colombia Federation that would last until 1830. Afterwards, Colombia and Panama would emerge as the Republic of New Granada. In 1886, the Republic of Colombia was declared. Panama would secede in 1903, giving Colombia its present-day borders.
For decades, Colombia was a nation ravaged by violent conflicts between armed Guerrilla groups and drug cartels. This turmoil often overshadowed the rich resources and culture of Colombia, which has seen influences from Indigenous, Spanish, and African origins. Fortunately, the country has been making much progress in regards to safety and security.
Colombia is now becoming the top Latin American economic center, with a free market economy and friendly relations with many countries around the world. The United States is currently their largest trading partner. The main exports of Colombia include coffee, tropical fruits, flowers, oil, coal, gold, nickel, textiles, and clothing.
With such diverse cultures, unique landscapes, and biodiversity, Colombia is quickly rising its ranks as a popular tourist destination — especially for nature enthusiasts who want to experience a megadiverse country!
If you enjoyed this article, we think you’ll like these other ones from the Quiziosity blog too!
When people talk about the Founding Fathers, they are referring to the historical figures that worked vigilantly to promote the American Revolution against British colonialism. These men would go on to help form the earliest government of the United States. It should be noted that the term “Founding Fathers” was coined by Warren G. Harding in 1916. Prior to that, they were simply called the “Fathers.”
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Oh what fun it is to earn three badges each Tuesday!
Hakeem Badgelajuwon: Houston, we have a problem — if we don’t earn this badge. Play NFL Starting QBs (Houston Texans), Opening Day Lineups: Astros, and Houston Rockets All-Time Leaders.
A Small Order: It’s not the size of the meal; it’s how it makes you feel. Get 100% on Smallest-to-Largest Volumes Minefield, 10 Smallest Asian Countries in Order, 10 Smallest African Countries in Order, and European Microstates: Smallest to Largest.
Dashing Through December: You’ll want to sing some carols extra quickly for this one. During the month of December, play 25 Published Blitz quizzes, 25 Editor Picked Blitz quizzes, 25 Curator Picked Blitz quizzes, 25 Blitz Showdowns, 25 Blitz Challenges, and 25 Blitz quizzes you haven’t played before.
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On May 20th, 2019, an important change took place. Not only was it the official 144th birthday of the Metre Convention, but it was the day where four the International System of Units (SI units) were redefined, signifying the first major change to the system since 1960.
The International System of UnitsThe International System of Units (SI) is used as the modern form of the internationally recognized system of measurement, otherwise known as the metric system. It consists of seven units of measurement and is built on the following seven units – the second, meter, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela. These are all based on the set constants of nature that can be observed and measured.
How can you be sure the units are reliable? That depends on two things. First, reliability depends heavily on the units’ precise measurement of standards for the various physical constants of nature. Secondly, as more units continue to be found the definition of those constants must change as well, as the system should continue to evolve as better measurement technologies become available.
Can you name the base units for the International System of Units (SI)? Take this quiz and find out.
The Redefined SI Units SystemIn May 2019, a total of four of the seven base SI units were redefined – the ampere, Kelvin, mole, and kilogram. Rather than redefining the values of the units themselves, the system improved by setting exact numerical values for the constants these base units are associated with. These new values were then measured by a series of experiments that followed.
The Ampere (A) has been redefined to a more simple definition – and for good reason! The previous definition was unnecessarily wordy and difficult to understand. Now, amperes (A) have been redefined to measure electrical current or define electrical charge at 1.602176634×10−19 coulombs.
The Kelvin (K) also went through a significant change. This base unit measures temperature and is defined as a change in energy of 1.3806505×10−23 joules, otherwise known as the Boltzmann constant. The Boltzmann constant is based on energy and time and is now used to measure Kelvins. Previously, the Kelvin was defined in terms of the triple point of water.
Previously, the mole was linked to the number of atoms in 0.012 kg of carbon-12. Now, it measures the amount, or the number of units or entities of a substance, using Avogadro’s constant. One mole is equal to Avogadro’s constant, or 6.02214076×1023 entities.
What used to be defined as the mass of the International Prototype of the Kilogram is now related to the Planck constant. The kilogram (kg) measures a photon’s equivalent mass of energy, given its frequency. The Planck constant is 6.62607015×10−34 kg⋅m2⋅s−1. It has taken decades to redefine the kilogram because the Planck constant is so small and difficult to accurately measure.
While the first four units were redefined more dramatically with changes in the values of their constants, the remaining three also underwent minor changes.
The second (s) measures units of time and although the new definition is very similar to the previous, it has been more clearly defined as new conditions have been set in place. It’s now defined in terms of the fixed interval of Caesium frequencies and the frequency of the Caesium-133 atom expressed in Hertz.
The only change to the meter (m) is the added complexity to its definition. What used to be just a measure of length traveled by light per second is the definition of the second, which is now measured in terms of Caesium frequencies.
Last but not least, the candela (cd) definition remains relatively the same, except for the added parts to the definition of the second and meter. The candela is defined as the luminous intensity in a specific direction, broadcasted by a source. The new definition, however, states that a candela is defined “by taking the fixed numerical value of the luminous efficacy of monochromatic radiation of frequency 540×1012 Hz,Kcd, to be 683 when expressed in the unit lm W−1, which is equal to cd sr W−1, or cd sr kg−1m−2s3, where the kilogram, metre and second are defined in terms of h, c and ∆νCs”.
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Music is insistent on the collective. What truly gives any particular song staying power is how it’s regarded among the masses. Sure, we carry songs with us as we go about our day, shuffling through them on Spotify or assembling playlists on Soundcloud for personal pleasure. We like to tell ourselves that they exist in a vacuum, that sometimes these aural trinkets are just for us. Intimacy certainly affords your favorite songs a particular fire, but, ultimately, it is the spirit of collaboration—in creation (among artist, producer, and engineer), in conversation (friends debating a song’s “classic” status)—that reminds us why we listen.
That can be hard to keep in mind at a time like this. The world is in a nasty flux. Borders have closed. Curfews and quarantines have been implemented. Governments are telling citizens to practice social distancing and only leave the house for essentials. Communities are being forced into isolation. It’s not easy. As people are being pressured to detach from daily interaction, to wall off from those around us, it’s hard to remember we’re not alone, even as those feelings stubbornly creep in.
That was the inspiration behind this season’s list. I was especially keen on finding songs with cross-border appeal: in Lisbon, in Montreal, in Tehran, and out in Oakland. I wanted to be reminded of what connects us. These seven tracks feed off that sort of cultural pollination. They borrow from disparate regions; they re-establish shared modes of being. Best of all, they remind us that we’re in this together.
“Waking Up Down” is a blizzard of icy 808 kicks, an elemental blend that could only be born of Korean-American multihyphenate Kathy “Yaeji” Lee. The song is the lead single from her upcoming mixtape, What We Drew 우리가 그려왔던, and contains some familiar tentpoles: breathy synths, a punchy dancefloor soundbed, a heavy influence of jungle/drum-n-bass, and all of it ornamented with Yaeji’s blissful whisper-sing. The mixtape, her label noted, is “about the simple parts of self-actualization and growing up and community.” On the single, Yaeji cracks that search wide open, laying it plain in a song about anxiety and adulthood. The hook becomes a check-list of sorts: “I got waking up down/ I got cooking down/ I got making a list and checking down/ I got hydrating down/ I got listening down/ I got you and me and we’re also down.” The song is about the small victories in life, and all the more potent because of it.
Nathan Jenkins is a Lisbon-based producer who creates under the name Bullion. He released a transportive, five-song EP at the end of February that tests emotional range: There’s a startling lightheartedness and an even more startling depth to it. Overall, its relaxed direction gives it a full-body feel. The songs have a familiar fragrance; these are atmospheres you know. It’s paradisiacal, reflective pop meant for easy living. It’s downtempo and periodically melancholy but not overly sorrowful. The title track, co-written by Suzanne Kraft, is its most majestic offering.
“Everybody get everything from each other,” Lil Uzi Vert told me four years ago. “Nobody really makes up nothing. You just see it, you like it, and you do it. And if you do it the best, that’s all that matters.” Since that time, Uzi has become a vessel for a generation preoccupied with oversharing and genre fusion. His original statement holds true on “Prices,” a song from his sophomore studio album Eternal Atake. Thematically, it finds the Philadelphia rager in atypically high spirits, swaggering across the track, which shares DNA with Travis Scott’s monster hit “Way Back” (a song that borrowed from Kanye West’s mega-smash “Power”). “I just went up in my price,” he repeats on the airy hook. Uzi is once again able to make the mutation entirely his own, establishing himself as the craftiest of millennial tastemakers.
Montreal hybrid Chiiild are a bit of everything: soul, psychedelic pop, folk, traditional R&B. The band resists one-dimensional storytelling; they’re moody and mysterious. “Pirouette” doesn’t so much as reinvent the love ballad as it colors outside the lines. It’s about love that makes you woozy in the best way; about love that, in the moment, seems endless. The end effect is a real accounting of a young relationship that feels like a rollercoaster: a seesaw of sentiment followed by the whipping rush of joy-dread.
Family is central to how Iranian-American producer Nick AM creates music. “Take It Back,” featured on his four-song EP, fluently blends the magnetism of New York’s house scene with the sleek currents and sounds of Persian influence. Through music, Nick AM said, he wants to “flip the lens” of how his home country is perceived. “I wrote this single for my ppl,” he tweeted not long ago, “anyone experiencing oppression. Don’t give up.” Consider it equal parts calling card and dance floor anthem.
Kamaiyah makes music you cruise to. That’s been her creative MO since her head-turning debut, 2016’s A Good Night in the Ghetto, which featured the boastful, bass-thick “How Does It Feel” (one of the best songs of the 2010s). She’d later team up with YG and Drake on “Why You Always Hatin?,” proving that she could hang with two of the decade’s most formidable talents. On “Mood Swings,” a g-funk cut from her February album, I Got It Made, the Oakland rapper reasserts her dominance, serving up a plate of Bay Area realism. The final 50-second sweep is its most savory: a radiant rainshower of synths and electric keys.
On the elegiac, low-spirited “Fair Chance,” bassist Thundercat pays tribute to his friend and frequent collaborator, Mac Miller, the rapper who died in 2018 from an accidental overdose. It’s a vulnerable piece of work—withdrawn but immodestly sweet and rich in feeling. “You’re not around/ So hard to get over it/ Tried to get under it/ Stuck in between,” Thundercat sings in an echoing falsetto. The song, produced by TDE’s Sounwave, has a haunting symmetry to it: What you hear is also what you see. The soft plinking keys. The dreamlike bass. The slow-building melody. Together they create a picture of being submerged underwater; that’s the image I kept returning to at least. It might be the most accurate distillation of death, and what it means to lose someone close: to experience loss is a lot like being suffocated. Fortunately, the song's tonal themes are vastly different from what it intends. “Fair Chance” is meant as a lifeline, a reminder that the metallic bond of friendship can't be broken, even in tragedy.
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Editor’s note: As this story—the cover of our September issue—went to press, TikTok's fate remained uncertain. We've updated the story with the latest news.
Everything will change in six days, when George Floyd stops breathing under the knee of a white police officer. But for now, it is May 19, an ordinary day during a global pandemic, and Brianna Blackmon is just waking up in her bedroom in Columbia, South Carolina, where she lives with her boyfriend and their blue-nose pit bull, DJ.
Blackmon showers, carefully applies powder-blue eyeshadow in the bathroom mirror, and marbles her lips with a muted sparkle gloss. The shirt she picks out is a simple crop top, on which the phrase “More Self-Love” is printed. Blackmon is a 23-year-old musician who performs under the name BJ From the Burbs. After she finishes her morning routine, she walks into her home office to record a new freestyle. The space doubles as a makeshift studio, and today's session will be extra special. Once there, comfortably situated on the couch, Blackmon opens the TikTok app on her phone and taps Record.
The night before, Blackmon got word about Blackout Day, a demonstration of solidarity among Black users on TikTok who claim the platform is unfairly censoring them. To show unity, all creators were asked to switch their avatars to an image of a Black Power fist. She wants this freestyle to be her contribution. By the sixth take, Blackmon lands on a version she's happy with and uploads it to her 176,000 followers. Over a slow-building trap beat, she rides the bubbling momentum. “Black creators on this app have had enough,” she raps. “So we switched our pictures, put our fists up just to say what's up.” Before long, the 53-second freestyle is doing numbers, making rounds on other users' personal feeds—the algorithmically driven For You pages. The praise floods in.
“Go awf,” comments @vixxienewell.
“YESS!!!” says @taylorcassidyj, one of the app's more visible Black creators.
“I have chills mama,” says @seiricean.
Adds @d_damodel: “Ayeeee ok 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥.”
Blackmon uploads three more videos throughout the day. In one, she urges followers to donate “to the collection plate in my bio” (aka her CashApp). None of them performs quite as well as the initial freestyle, but she's satisfied and considers the day a win.
When Blackmon opens TikTok again the following morning—“to check my views,” she says—she realizes something has gone wrong. Her freestyle post is still there, but it's now silent. The audio has been completely removed. In her three months on the app, it's a first. “You know how you get an instinct where you're like, ‘That's not right’?” Blackmon tells me in June, when we talk by phone. “That one did not sit well with my spirit.”
TikTok often mutes posts for violating its community guidelines, but Blackmon isn't told which guideline she violated. As is typical in these cases, she's given no explanation or notice of any kind. She reflects back on the video—no cursing, no hate speech, nothing too controversial. When she looks for a way to appeal the decision, she can't find one. She's left only with a suspicion, a taste of something bitter. “It's not just me,” Blackmon says. “They are picking on certain types of creators.”
The following day, sans makeup, Blackmon uploads another video, done in one off-the-cuff take. “Isn't this funny—TikTok doesn't silence Black creators?” she says in a mocking tone. “Then why did they take my sound down from my video, from my pro-Black rap that went viral yesterday? I wonder.” It was almost too absurd. Blackmon made a video protesting censorship—and was censored. Is this what it meant to be Black and unapologetic on TikTok?
TikTok has an irresistible draw. In my casual use, I often find myself spellbound by its gonzo humor and mini-blockbusters, full of conceptual daring. The app's directive, it seems, is to optimize happiness. But something lurks beneath the gloss. As TikTok has grown to more than 800 million users, it has begun to mirror the larger world: the quirks, passions, and prejudices of the people who have started to populate and influence the form. I'd heard stories like Blackmon's, bits and pieces of discouragement and grievance, but I wanted to understand it fully. So I started reaching out to TikTokers in all parts of the country, some veterans of the app, others new to it, to learn about their experiences, to see what was going on.
Over a period of two months, I heard from 29 Black creators who shared stories about muted posts, in-app harassment, and incidents of racism. They said the problems on the app are deeper and more widespread than simple isolated incidents. “Ever since I joined I've felt like the app is against me,” one told me. Another added, “It's disgusting how much they have allowed to go unchecked.” Together, their experiences belie the perception of TikTok as an app of joy and creativity, revealing instead a place tangled up in an ancient pain—a site of blurred visions and youthful ignorances, where flattery quickly turns into mockery, mockery into theft, and theft into something altogether more disturbing.
Before she made it big on TikTok, Blackmon had built modest followings on other platforms. On YouTube, she posted videos about her life in a series she called STORYTIME. She talked about getting married at 19 (she's since divorced) and the time she tried (and failed, hilariously) to work as a stripper. Building an audience on Instagram proved harder. “You have to be on vacation,” Blackmon says, “or doing something extravagant,” which she wasn't. She didn't feel as if she could be herself.
Another app Blackmon checked out, but only as a spectator, was Vine. Launched in 2013, Vine was TikTok before TikTok. With a remarkably simple premise—upload six-second videos that would loop infinitely—Vine appealed to a dopamine-crazed culture that desired virality in short, repetitive bursts.
But the real allure of the app could be traced, in large part, to the ingenuity of the Black creators who made much of its most irresistible content. Bought by Twitter in 2012, Vine became the dominant engine of Black culture on the internet from around 2014 to 2016. It rivaled Twitter in its capacity to incubate trends, hyping Southern dance crazes such as the Nae Nae and career-boosting comedians like King Bach. “I was there for the short comedy,” Blackmon says. Arguably Vine's biggest impact was how it mainstreamed Black slang. In one of the most recognized Vines during that period, 16-year-old Kayla Newman—best known by her alias, Peaches Monroee—delights in her own fabulousness. “On fleek” was born, and The Culture adjusted accordingly.
The app eventually went bust. Its success led competitors, like Instagram, to create their own video features. And unlike YouTube, Vine never figured out a way to share revenue with users; a deal to pay top creators to produce content fell through in 2015. Big names departed the platform, and revenues dwindled. In 2017, Twitter shut down Vine, and it was mourned largely by millennials and Gen Zers who'd made a home on the platform.
Around that time, ByteDance, a Beijing-based tech company at the forefront of Chinese social media, was launching an app called Douyin. In the early days, it was used to create homemade music videos, but users quickly turned it into a marketplace for all sorts of short-form content. By 2018, ByteDance had released the app outside China, acquired the lip-sync app Musical.ly, and renamed the international version TikTok. Vine supercharged—videos were now capped at 15 seconds, and later 60—TikTok also offered a suite of editing tools, from filters to green-screen special effects, that gave creators near-limitless possibilities.
In the beginning, TikTok's embrace of wackiness and absence of anything even marginally serious was its prime attraction, and its most marketable one. Twitter was preoccupied with millennial bickering; the election of Donald Trump turned Facebook into a political echo chamber; Instagram felt plastic; gamers ran Twitch. On TikTok, kids just wanted to have fun. It was a place for dance challenges and wellness how-tos, movie reviews and the kind of existence-pondering comedy sketches BoJack Horseman might post were he on the app (or real). The platform elevated creativity and experimentation above all else; its algorithm, as Blackmon puts it, is generous. Though personalized based on user activity, For You feeds retain a light randomness—according to TikTok, the algorithm tries to avoid duplicating content or privileging accounts with large followings. As Blackmon says, “it's one of the only places where you can have no following, no content, and you post one thing and it gets a million views in a day.”
Blackmon signed up for TikTok in February, about a month before the Covid-19 stay-at-home orders started coming down. Like a diary, many of her early videos chronicle daily mundanities—cooking a buffalo chicken wrap, talking about natural hair, declaring a newfound love for iced coffee. “I don't know what Caucasian woman got into me, but iced coffee—bitch!” Blackmon says, raising the glass into the video frame. “Well call me Karen, OK,” she jokes, invoking the meme for privileged white womanhood. With more than half a million views, it was her first viral hit; she'd been on the app less than a month. A week later, she struck gold again. A video of Blackmon dancing with a stranger in the restroom mirror at a club racked up 615,000 views.
TikTok, it turned out, was reminiscent of Vine in more ways than one. The common denominator of many of its viral moments is an unspoken partiality to Black cultural expression. It works like an accelerant. Chart-topping rap songs, from the likes of Drake and K Camp and Megan Thee Stallion, provide the soundtrack to weekly dance challenges. Lil Nas X is the app's first breakout artist, and its most recognized pedagogue around self-improvement, Tabitha Brown, is a Black mother and vegan from North Carolina. When, at the end of 2019, a random voicemail of a Black woman colorfully referring to her coworker Rachel as a “big, fat, white, nasty-smelling, fat bitch” began to circulate, the woman's hostility and perceived sassiness became a costume for everyone to put on and make their own. The collective fascination again proved the point. As Blackmon puts it, “Be clear: Without Black culture, TikTok wouldn't even be a thing.”
Other creators, the majority of them white, have figured that out, too. In fact, they've come to learn that the quickest route to success on TikTok is right through the bountiful fields of Black expression.
In a video uploaded to TikTok last December, a white teen saunters through an airport terminal, roller suitcase in hand. As he passes the check-in counter for Spirit—the notoriously awful low-cost airline—a look of mild irritation crosses his face. He glances left, then right. “Whew chile, the ghetto,” he says, elongating the o in ghetto. Only it's not the young man's voice we hear. It's that of reality diva NeNe Leakes, whose audio was pulled, edited, and resynchronized for the eight-second clip.
Chris Guarino, the guy with the suitcase, is an 18-year-old college student in South Florida. He joined TikTok “as a joke,” according to his bio, and his posts are generally preoccupied with goofball antics. Typical fare: In a video from last year, he mocks his dog Coco for having a “little potato booty.” On a good day, Guarino is lucky to get 1,000 eyes on a post. That is, until December, when he uploaded the Spirit airline parody. It became his biggest hit, exceeding half a million views.
Videos like Guarino's are among a disturbing and ongoing form of content production that suggests a twisted love of Black culture through caricature. It's been called digital blackface, and Blackmon started seeing examples of it almost immediately after she joined TikTok, mostly being posted by young white women and white gay men. “I have never seen so many teenagers who are this race-obsessed,” she says. “My Blackness is not a show, it's not something you just turn on.” Another user, 19-year-old Mia Brier, calls it “low-key racism”—you might have to sit with it for a moment before the extent of the ugliness becomes clear. (Guarino did not respond to messages seeking comment and before press time deleted his TikTok account.)
Minstrelsy thrives on TikTok, but the phenomenon goes back a long way. The earliest American iterations emerged in the 1840s as a form of entertainment and endured for more than a century. White people would darken their skin with burnt cork, greasepaint, or shoe polish and perform in variety shows. The musical acts, comedy sketches, and dances relied on stock characters, like Sambo and Zip Coon, to parade Blackness as laughably uneducated or as a target of humiliation. By the 1950s, the shows fell out of favor, but as Lauren Michele Jackson, the academic and author of White Negroes, put it, “the tenets of minstrel performance remain alive today in television, movies, music, and, in its most advanced iteration, on the internet.”
“My Blackness is not a show.”
Brianna Blackmon
The very tools that have made TikTok into one of the most efficient, visible cultural products of the era—easy to use, hypercustomizable—make instances of digital blackface uniquely personal. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, where instances of digital blackface are either text-based (abusing Black vernacular) or image-based (trotting out memes or GIFs of Black celebrities), TikTok is a video-first platform, and on it, creators embody Blackness with an auteur-driven virtuosity—taking on Black rhythms, gestures, affect, slang. The most effective videos come down to one factor: how well a creator grabs hold of our attention. That is to say, how deftly they make what we watch theirs. Blackness is a proven attention getter. Its adoption is racism, custom-fit.
One highly visible avatar of the trend is the Hot Cheeto Girl, a meme that plays on the image of a loud and defiant low-income youth. The hashtag has over 160 million views and is one of the app's more slippery instances of cultural distortion. For Whitney Roberts, a 35-year-old writer and podcast host in Philly, trends like the Hot Cheeto Girl have a troubling history that exemplify just one way already marginalized people are subtly debased on the app. “There were little white girls slicking their edges and drawing their eyebrows all weird,” Roberts says. “They would wrap tape around their fingers to be their fake nails. They'd put hoops on. When you call them out, it's, ‘Anyone of any race can be a Hot Cheeto Girl.’ No sweetheart, we know what you're doing. We know that the Hot Cheeto Girl is just a derivative of the ghetto girl, the hood rat, the Shanaynay that people used to call Black and Latinx women.” (TikTok has said it does not allow blackface, but how broadly it interprets blackface is an open question. Impersonations for the purposes of “parody” or “commentary” are permitted.)
The TikTok challenge is another fraught avenue for remixing racial stereotypes. Even if you follow TikTok only from a distance, you've likely heard about challenges. Usually started by a creator or influencer, a challenge spans all sorts of silliness. They include things like seeing which creator can best choreograph a dance (#Renegade) and who can swap clothes with their partner in the funniest way (#FlipTheSwitch). They spread from the original post outward, each creator attempting to put their own spin on it. The result has engendered a lively, sometimes strange culture of competition within the TikTok community.
Sometime on April 14, Carter Ricket uploaded the first iteration of what would become known as the #HowsMyForm challenge. In the opening frame, 17-year-old Ricket sets the bait with a raunchy caption: “Best S3X positions for guys with 9–12-inchers.” The challenge is meant to capitalize on a racial stereotype, which is soon made explicit. As rapper 645AR's song “Yoga” plays in the background, a new caption appears, insisting: “Ok, now that all the black guys are here can you help me with my waves!” The video garnered over 423,000 views and birthed one monstrous iteration after the next.
Almost every #HowsMyForm video played on degrading stereotypes of some kind—Middle Eastern people as terrorists, Mexicans as border-hopping illegal immigrants, poor white people as inbred hicks—and the majority of these videos use a three-act structure. The opening frame begins with a creator staring or lip-syncing into the camera as a “how to” statement pops on-screen (such as: “How to make the best fried chicken”); the next frame is followed by a greeting (such as: “Now that all the black people are here”); the stunt culminates in the third frame and typically ends on the very question—How's my form?—from which the challenge draws its name. Some of the most insidious satirize slavery. When viewers reach the final seconds of TikToker @Kalebcram's video, he freezes in place, bending forward as he pretends to pick cotton. “Hows my form,” the caption reads.
TikTok offers creators countless ways to customize their actions for the amusement and delight of scrollers. @Kalebcram chose to adorn his bent-over posture with a Photoshopped cotton plant and a meme of Martin Luther King Jr., just in case you didn't get the joke.
Racial mockery is not, I have to assume, the sole aim of these posts. What non-Black creators ultimately desire is what most TikTok creators desire—virality, clout, followers. To be seen and memed. One white TikToker I spoke with, Morgan Eckroth, a 21-year-old barista in Corvallis, Oregon, fears that many of her fellow creators don't understand the larger consequences of what they're doing. “Virality often occurs through shocking behavior,” says Eckroth, whose fame is mostly rooted in videos about making coffee in a small town. “Whether it's acting provocatively, bullying, or using racial slurs and stereotypes, a lot of users see that their questionable behavior gets a reaction, and that just encourages them.”
Maybe so, though offending white creators I reached out to were often either nonresponsive or defensive on the subject of digital blackface, suggesting at least a vague awareness that there was something demeaning in their behavior. One creator I attempted to speak with was Micala, or @Bluntshawty360 (she has since changed her handle), who is known for voicing controversial opinions about the different ways white people take on Black culture. When I reached her by direct message in July, she was hesitant to chat, suspicious that I might “twist” her words and present them out of context. Some of the things she has said on TikTok include:
“It's 2020 and Black bitches still get mad when a white bitch tries to act like them or look like them. Can't y'all just embrace that shit?”
“Y'all don't even realize, if it wasn't for a certain amount of white people, y'all would still be slaves.”
“I understand racism is still alive, but the shit goes both ways on why it's still alive.”
“The N-word is only a racist word if you use it in a racist way.”
Not long ago, a Change.org petition was started to remove Micala from TikTok; as of late July, some 880 people had signed it. The animosity has built up to such a degree that a TikTok page was created with the sole intent of drawing attention to her casual bigotry. Micala and I ended up exchanging a few messages, and at one point she seemed genuinely interested in talking with me, but communication eventually went cold.
She may have been unwilling to explain her actions, but one of her videos, from May, does serve as a kind of self-justification. “At the end of the day, clout is still clout—whether it's good clout or bad clout,” she says, waving a finger in and out of the frame. “Because through the good clout you're always going to have haters, and if you got bad clout you're always going to have supporters. So either way you win.”
On TikTok, creators embody Blackness with an auteur-driven virtuosity, taking on Black rhythms, gestures, affect, slang.
Wearing a mask has long been part of the social internet. The web has operated like a Party City costume shop since dotcom-era chat rooms made cool the idea of inhabiting made-up identities and hiding behind usernames. These personas could be intensely liberating, allowing people to explore hidden ideas or sexualities, or simply enjoy a carnivalesque permissiveness to say or do something outrageous. It's all just a joke. For clout. For show.
But the mask of Blackness cannot be worn without consequences. It can't be worn as a joke without reaching into some deep cultural and historical ugliness, without opening a wound of abuse and humiliation.
As the web expanded, the masks came to audiovisual life—and the pain only deepened. In the early 2010s, Sweet Brown and Charles Ramsey offered live-witness accounts of real-life horrors on the nightly news, only to have their words refashioned and auto-tuned into internet fodder. Everybody has seen “Ain't nobody got time for that!” or “Dead giveaway!” filtered through social media, the suffering of real people taking on cruel shapes, remade into shareable emblems of mockery and humor. When this happens, Blackness—or what is perceived as Black identity—thrives outside of context. It's diluted and remixed to a dizzying degree. Black people lose control over how their humanity is presented.
In 2013, the writer Aisha Harris suggested that blackface's mainstream allure was about “a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see Black people perform.” Toni Morrison took it a step further, likening the centuries-old practice to a “kind of public pornography.” The comedian Paul Mooney drove the point home: “The Black man in America is the most copied man on this planet,” Mooney said. “Everybody wanna be a nigga but nobody wanna be a nigga.”
For some, being Black in the public square has meant inhabiting a deformed identity, of having your Blackness misshapen. Call it the slow gentrification of Black humanity. Call it underhanded cultural theft. Call it the shameless leveraging of anti-Blackness. The incidents are infinite and varied. It happens in small exhales. It happens in echoing thunderclaps.
TikTok's Community guidelines profess a mission “to inspire creativity and bring joy.” But many Black users, who think they're fulfilling just that goal, often find themselves muted, censored, or worse.
Earlier this year, a TikToker named Precious Bissah began calling attention to specific grievances. She felt that non-Black people shouldn't say the N-word, so she spoke out. She felt that racism had no place on the app, so she spoke out. Her beliefs seemed to square with the kind of environment TikTok wants to foster: one free of hate. Bissah ended up having her account taken from her without explanation; she believes she was reported by people who took issue with what she had to say. “Basically they were mad that I was pro-Black,” she told me over email. Perhaps Bissah was somehow seen to run afoul of TikTok's rule against “hateful ideologies.” Often, pro-Black rhetoric—Bissah's page is all about uplifting Black girls and women—is misunderstood as anti-white.
Bissah, like many Black users, had a so-called backup account at the ready, for just this eventuality. In a video posted to this new account, Bissah talked about what drove her to join the app in the first place. “I wanted to uplift people who look like me,” she said. “Growing up I was never comfortable in my skin. I wanted to bleach my skin. I was not comfortable with being who I am.” TikTok presented her with an opportunity to reach young women just like herself, “to let them know that they're beautiful. I don't understand why that is against community guidelines.” Bissah appealed the decision to remove her original account, and seven weeks later TikTok restored it.
Other Black users share similar experiences. On Blackout Day, a 16-year-old named Iman, who goes by @theemuse on TikTok, posted a video in which she duets a fellow user “who said she could go and buy Black people.” (A “duet” is when two videos are spliced side by side and play simultaneously.) TikTok, which insists speech that “dehumanizes” protected groups is never tolerated, removed Iman's video but left the original one untouched. When I asked TikTok to respond to Iman's case, as well as Bissah's and many others, the company declined to comment.
“It's definitely discouraging,” says Matthew Hope, who is 18 and lives just outside Atlanta. He started the hashtag #BlackCreatorsFedUp. “Black creators have called me and told me that they don't want to post anymore.” I heard a version of this from so many of them that their stories began to bleed into and out of one another, painting a troubling portrait of the various and complex ways that Black creators face harassment. Here are several more:
Jamia Morales (@mia_mor.18): “The bigger I get, the more I realize—I can always be myself but I can't always be as outspoken. They call me a nigger—with the e-r—they call me a monkey, they call me an uneducated Black person.”
Aiyana Katori (@aiyanakatori): “I see people duetting other Black creators' stuff only to tell them to go back where they came from or comment on their ‘nigger appearance.’”
Whitney Roberts (@antiblackfishclub): “People were leaving monkey emoji in my comments over a video where I was talking about clothes, something frivolous and funny. In another video I was just talking about 4c hair, about a different grade of hair, and why people shouldn't necessarily diminish it. That got taken down. But there are whole blackface videos that won't get taken down.”
Avalon Rose (@kisses.avalonrose): “I've seen videos saying all Black people are thugs and rapists.”
Jawanza Tucker (@rekcut_): “I made a TikTok doing sign language, and then I got reported—it's such bullshit.” (People may have reported the sign language as “gang signs.”)
Matthew Hope (@fuxkma.ttt): “It's clear that people are freely allowed to express their radical beliefs or political ideologies—just not Black people.”
Hadeal Abdelatti (@hadealspeaks): “I have seen people say ‘You are subhuman’ and ‘If Black people get equality then where will I get my pets?’”
Sudani R. (@theesudani): “I and several other Black girls were harassed by this white man claiming to be ‘Afro-sexual.’ He would duet videos of young Black girls sexualizing us and being disgusting. TikTok did absolutely nothing until a white TikToker made up a conspiracy about him murdering a Black woman and he was mass reported. If he was targeting and harassing young white girls he wouldn't have had his page up for as long as he did.”
Mia Brier (@garfieldsfatbussyy): “It takes a lot for Black people to get justice in this world. It takes us going crazy.”
When everything changed on May 25—when a police officer knelt on a man's neck as he struggled to breathe, and this country woke up to at least some understanding of systemic racism—nothing much changed for Black creators on TikTok. They remained vulnerable to hate, sometimes overwhelming hate. The company, meanwhile, expressed a desire to course-correct. Protesters in the millions were pouring out onto the streets, and in early June, TikTok took a series of steps to acknowledge just how badly it had failed its Black creator community. That, in fact, there might be a race problem after all.
In an attempt to open the channels of communication, TikTok promised to “repair that trust” and “actively promote and protect” diversity across the platform. In a letter released two weeks after Blackout Day, the company partially owned up to the uneven treatment of its Black creators, apologizing to anyone who has “felt unsafe, unsupported, or suppressed,” the letter said. “We welcome the voices of the Black community wholeheartedly.” Not once, however, were the specific concerns of Black creators—being muted for nonoffensive speech, getting harassed by perpetrators who face little or no consequences, the very existence of digital blackface—addressed in the letter. One creator described the company's response to me as “a poetically structured PR stunt.”
TikTok continues to make announcements. It has formed a “creator diversity collective” to regularly meet with executive leadership, established a fund to generate revenue for users, and hired an AI policy analyst whose research focuses on racial bias in algorithms. The company has promised it will check in with Black creators again in early fall to get feedback. “When I think of the most inspiring, creative voices on our platform, Black creators are a huge part of that,” Kudzi Chikumbu, the director of TikTok's creator community, tells me. “We know we have work to do.”
It's not the only thing they're working on. As relations between Washington and Beijing have deteriorated, a number of US lawmakers have fretted over TikTok's potential ties to the Chinese government. In July, as part of his reelection campaign, President Trump began running ads on Facebook and Instagram proclaiming, “TikTok is spying on you.” (Security experts say the company's data collection seems to be in line with other social media apps.) Then Trump announced his intention to ban the app outright, though it appears likelier that Microsoft or another American company will spare TikTok such a fate by acquiring it. TikTok has already been outlawed in India, one of the company's most influential markets.
Of course, none of this changes the feelings and experiences of users, the actual people who use the app and offer up their data for manipulation. If the concern is their safety and security—and it should be—perhaps that concern should extend to their daily encounters with racism. Because in America, racism is the very air we breathe. If we can breathe at all.
For as long as I can remember, I've been drawn to images that affirm Black life. I didn't always know why, but I did recognize a temptation in them, and a danger. I searched for them everywhere—in videogames and movies, on TV shows like Martin, in the issues of Vibe and XXL I'd thumb through during weekend grocery runs with my mom. They spoke to me. I wanted to understand. I listened.
But it wasn't until college, where I spent hours a day clicking through Facebook, feeling connected to a world and the people who made it for what felt like the very first time, that I finally began to articulate what part of me had known since boyhood: that images make us true. From my laptop screen I gazed out into a kind of Black Universe. Here were Black people doing what we do: playing spades at a barbecue; hanging out with family members back home, caught mid-laugh. We posed for the camera every chance we got because we understood, though we never spoke it, that we'd exist here—somewhere—forever. There was air in our lungs, fire in our bones.
As a Black man, my relationship to images is fraught. Fraught in the sense that, if images speak our humanness into being, if they tell us how we are made visible to ourselves and to others, it is also a language that is often used against us: as surveillance, as documentation, through grainy smartphone cameras as figures of unwant. This is America, after all, where Black humanity has barely been recognized.
TikTok may very well be the future of the image. Never have moving pictures felt as urgent, mesmerizing, and immediate as they do on the app. At their best, their most useful, these images flicker across our screens with an infectious kineticism. These images bring us joy. Especially now, they bring us relief, they bring us wonder.
And they're built, by design, on a kind of appropriation—the original lip-syncing app required users to mime existing audio. TikTok hinges on how imaginatively users can build upon something that's already out there; it becomes all about the transformation. What sours this creative repackaging, mutates the joy into hatefulness, is when the content is estranged from its original context. The way someone or something can so quickly and easily be warped, diluted, recast as something other. The way one's culture can be stolen and made monstrous, made meaningless. “TikTok all but eradicates traditional norms about cultural ownership,” the critic Jon Caramanica has written. If you spend a long enough time on the app, as I did over the past few months in lockdown reporting this story, you begin to see it as a prism through which to better understand yourself and the world around you—what draws you in, what makes you laugh, what repels you. There were moments when, scrolling through TikTok, I began to look upon myself not as I am but as blurred projections of a fractured self.
The world of technology has always understood its function as radical and utopian. It has been less inclined to acknowledge how dismissive it can be of margins and the people who arise from those spaces; how, when unattended, it can quicken erasure. TikTok is Generation Z. It is both the most exciting cultural product of this time and also at grave risk of alienating the very people it needs to succeed. Radiating in these videos are forms of Blackness that are profoundly resilient and, thus, profoundly beautiful. In this urgency from creators to speak loudly and unceasingly is an even more incandescent image of Blackness, one that says I won't be contained, I won't be made insignificant.
Although TikTok eventually restored the audio on her Blackout Day freestyle, Blackmon is trying to avoid further controversy. These days, she mostly posts spur-of-the-moment content, including occasional food commentary, or what she calls her “Real B*tch Reviews.” (She's a fan of bagels and warns against buying Morningstar chicken nuggets or using mustard as a dipping sauce for carrots.) Yet she still feels watched. When she texts me out of the blue in mid-July, it's to inform me that another post of hers, a joke about hair, has just been muted.
I keep returning to something she told me in our very first conversation. We were talking about how certain TikTokers act in real life, when they've turned off the camera. Maybe they're nice kids. Maybe they're not overtly racist. So what then? “When people do those things on the app to get clout, to get views, to get fame, but then they're a completely different person off the app,” Blackmon said, “that is where the problem lies.”
JASON PARHAM(@nonlinearnotes) wrote about the subscription site OnlyFans in issue 27.09.
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Not many primetime comedy shows can boast Ted Danson, moral philosophy lessons, and actual, honest-to-badness demons. Over its four seasons, The Good Place made us laugh, cry, and confront how terrible we all actually are. Its writers proved that a twist ending in the first season can be executed perfectly and then followed up on in an even more thought-provoking way.
So, whether your next trivia night covers all topics or focuses entirely on The Good Place, consider taking some inspiration from our favorite afterlife aficionados. Here are 20 trivia team names straight from the Good Place—although you may want to check to make sure that none snuck in from the Bad Place in disguise. Those demons can be squirrelly.
20 The Good Place Trivia Team NamesYou could also go by the name “The Shirtballs,” for short. Just make sure not to say this one too quickly or you may land yourself in a spot of bother.
Time in the afterlife moves in a “Jeremy Bearimy,” where the dot over the “i” is Tuesdays, July, and sometimes never. Simple, right?
Iconic and, unfortunately, timely.
Also known as Team Cockroach.
This saying is a foolproof way to excuse all of your negative-point actions. Buy weed from your boyfriend’s nephew? Secretly befriend his ex-girlfriend and let things get so out of hand that now you’re her bridesmaid? “Pobody’s nerfect!”
With this team name, you can join the ranks of Tahani’s other “good friends,” such as Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Sting, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and a host of royals.
Chidi: “I know you’re deflecting by making jokes about how hot you are.”Eleanor: “It’s not a joke! I’m a legit snack!”
Whether you’re a demon trying to get rid of your personal assistant’s new boyfriend or just a trivia team looking to scrap, all benches are welcome to use this name.
Trevor the demon may be terrible (on purpose), but he admittedly came up with a decent trivia team name.
It’s just a hole where Jason can relax and hang back with his buds.
Michael said that the worst possible use of free will was going to pick up friends at the airport, but we think it’s probably having the opportunity to play some Good Place trivia and then not playing said Good Place trivia.
Jason’s dance crew, Dance Dance Resolution: We Resolve to Dance, was made up of 60 people, but we don’t think your trivia host will allow quite as many members on your team.
This team name was brought to you by Chidi’s breakdown and existential crisis.
“Congratulations, Chidi, you filibustered recess.”
That’s IHOP as in the “Interdimensional Hole of Pancakes,” in case there was any confusion.
This name doubles as the perfect comeback to any insult from another team.
Like peanut butter and jelly, Oreos and milk, and Romeo and Juliet, history will never forget the iconic duo of Donkey Doug and Pillboi.
Janet is not a girl, not a robot… but definitely a trivia master.
We didn’t want to leave this list without a reference to the Medium Place and its sole occupant, the very medium Mindy St. Claire. As befits the realm, we went with the most medium team name possible.
This team name works especially well if all of your members are named Derek and/or if one of you happens to own a set of wind chimes.
Did you like these The Good Place trivia team names? Find more team name inspiration here.
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About 72 minutes into the annual iPhone launch event, Apple senior vice president of marketing Phil Schiller invited Sri Santhanam to come onstage and talk about the brand-new A13 Bionic chip found inside all three of the new phones. The slight and shy Santhanam, Apple's vice president of silicon engineering, then spoke for four minutes. In many ways, they were the four most important minutes of the entire event. Not that anyone noticed—the audience was seduced by the shiny new iPhones, the three-camera system, the magical Night Mode, the impressive video capabilities and, more importantly, the boost in battery power.
By the time Santhanam was done talking, all I could think of were the numbers. Apple’s new chip contains 8.5 billion transistors. Also, there are six CPU cores: Two high-performance cores running at 2.66 GHz (called Lightning), and four efficiency cores (called Thunder). It has a quad-core graphics processor, an LTE modem, an Apple-designed image processor, and an octa-core neural engine for machine intelligence functions that can run over five trillion operations per second.
This new chip is smarter, faster, and beefier, and yet it somehow manages to consume less power than its predecessor. It’s about 30 percent more efficient than last year’s A12 chip, one of the factors that contributes to the extra five hours per day of battery life in the new iPhones.
The launch of the iPhone 11 Pro and its siblings only reaffirms that Apple's real advantage over its competitors comes from owning the entire vertical stack: the software, the system hardware, and the chip design. You can see the benefits of these gains in the iPhone’s feature set, from its augmented reality capabilities to its computational photography modes like Deep Fusion and Night Mode.
"One of the biggest examples of the benefits of the performance increase this year is the text to speech," Schiller said when we sat down to talk about A13 Bionic and its capabilities. "We've enhanced our iOS 13 text-to-speech capabilities such that there is much more natural language processing, and that's all done with machine learning and the neural engine."
Apple has come a long way from the launch of the original iPhone in 2007. That first handset was slow and unable to perform even the most basic tasks like copying and pasting text. It had terrible battery life. Its camera would make a supermodel look like the Bride of Frankenstein. Multitasking was almost nonexistent in the original iPhone, which was powered by a chip that ran at 412 MHz. The handset was pieced together from components that included a chip used in Samsung DVD players. It was hard to imagine that such a device could one day upend the entire idea of phones, computing, and communication.
It quickly became apparent to Apple that it would need to build the entire stack—soup to nuts—if it wanted to stay ahead of its competitors, especially those in the Android ecosystem. Apple’s decision to design and build its own silicon was made sometime in 2008. At the time, the company had a mere 40 engineers working on integrating chips from an assortment of vendors. Then, in April of 2008, Apple bought a chip startup called P.A. Semi for $287 million. That increased the total number of chip engineers to about 150 and brought home expertise on what matters most on a phone: power efficiency. The fruits of this group’s labor were first revealed to the world in the iPad 4 and the iPhone 4. Those devices were powered by a processor named A4, which was a modified version of a chip design from ARM Holdings. The A4’s primary focus was to make the Retina displays shine.
Over the years, the Apple chips have enabled features that cause the majority of oohs and aahs at its famous events. Siri, video calling, fingerprint- and image-based identification, the camera’s many powers—all the result of the silicon progress made by Apple. At the 2017 launch of the iPhone X, I wrote on my blog, "FaceID is a perfect illustration of Apple's not-so-secret ‘secret sauce’—a perfect symbiosis of silicon, physical hardware, software, and designing for delight. Their ability to turn complex technologies into a magical moment is predicated on this harmonious marriage of needs." This is Steve Jobs' real legacy for the company he cofounded.
Johny Srouji runs Apple's sprawling chip operation along with other hardware technologies. Many believe that a big chunk of the company’s annual research-and-development budget is earmarked for Srouji’s team. "Steve came to the conclusion that the only way for Apple to really differentiate and deliver something truly unique and truly great, you have to own your own silicon," Srouji told Bloomberg Businessweek a few years ago. The company is said to have a few hundred members in its chip operation, but press Apple executives for specifics, and they clam up fast.
Apple's chip advantage didn't go unnoticed in the industry. Using merchant silicon wasn't enough to catch up with Apple, which kept hammering its chip advantage, one phone and one tablet at a time. Huawei and Samsung—the latter being a frenemy of Apple from the very beginning—are two companies that quickly realized that the future of mobile technology was going to require custom silicon that allowed them to stay ahead of their Android rivals and better compete with Apple.
These companies, along with Qualcomm, are in a silicon arms race, constantly shuffling slots on the leaderboard. The last-generation A12 Bionic chip owned a slight edge over Apple’s rivals when it was announced, and then this year, Apple took the occasion of its iPhone 11 launch event to reinforce its lead.
Linley Gwennap, the founder of the research consultancy The Linley Group and publisher of the influential Microprocessor Report newsletter, is widely regarded as one of the foremost processor experts. Gwennap has spent most of his life dedicated to processors and chips, and is not as easily impressed by marketing speak. Sure, Apple has an advantage, he says, and it wins on benchmarks. But the edge isn't that much.
When talking about the previous-generation A12 Bionic in an interview, Gwennap points out that while Apple leads the single-CPU race, the others are relatively competitive with them.
"I don't see them as far ahead," he says. "I would expect Samsung, Qualcomm, and Huawei will up their game."
So have they stepped up their game since last-year’s A12? Exactly how does the new six-core A13 Bionic stack up against the latest chips from Apple’s three big rivals? Let’s look at the numbers.
Samsung's newest processor, the Exynos 9825, has eight cores arranged in three clusters: two high-performance custom Mongoose cores running at 2.73 GHz, another two Cortex A75 cores running at 2.4 GHZ, and four efficiency-focused Cortex A55 cores running at 1.9 GHz. There is a Mali GPU and Samsung's neural processing unit, along with LTE and memory capabilities.
Huawei's chip, called the Kirin 990 5G, follows a similar tri-cluster, eight-core (also known as octa-core) approach. There are two high performance Cortex A76 cores running at 2.86 GHz, another two A76 two-cores running at 2.35 GHz, and four efficiency-focused Cortex A55 cores running at an even slower 1.95 GHz. Rounding out the chip is a 16-core GPU and a Da Vinci neural engine with three cores. Huawei's chip contains a whopping 10.3 billion transistors.
Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 855 Plus is very much like the Kirin 990 and Exynos. It uses custom Kryo 485 Gold cores with one powerful cluster clocked at 2.96 GHz, another three Kyro 485 Gold cores running at a clock speed of 2.42 GHz, and four efficiency-focused Kryo 485 Silver cores running at 1.78 GHz. It includes an Adreno GPU and Qualcomm's Hexagon 690 AI engine.
Those chips have some faster components and more of them, so you may think those chips perform better than Apple’s. But the reality is that we hardly use the entire capacity of the chips that come in our mobile devices. One or two high-performance cores are enough for most of what we throw at our phones. Apple's six-core design might seem lagging compared to the eight-core processors from the competitors, but really, the two big processors on its chip easily outperform its rivals’ designs. Apple’s processors consume power more efficiently, and that gives them a distinct advantage over competitors. For instance, Samsung's Mongoose chips need to be used judiciously, lest they cause the device containing them to overheat. Even the newly designed custom efficiency cores in A13 also best their competitors.
"Although Apple's cores aren't the biggest, they continue to lead in mobile performance," noted Gwennap earlier this year in The Microprocessor Report. And at the time he wrote that, he was talking about the A12 chip. The A13 performs about 20 percent better.
So the takeaway here is that specs and benchmarks don't take into account Apple's real advantages—tight integration into the device and the company's development strategy for squeezing more runtime out of its batteries while boosting the performance of key apps.
So, how does a phone company illustrate these technical gains in a way that resonates with customers? The chip-speak doesn't matter. What matters is having the best camera, the fastest phone, and—oh yes—the biggest battery. The longer we get to use Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube, the more willing we’ll be to spend money on these premium phones. Apple’s new iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max check the battery box. The phones will enjoy an additional four and five hours of battery life, respectively. How do they do that?
The answer to that question clearly illustrates the inherent advantage of Apple owning the whole stack. To learn about how that vertical integration manifests itself in a chip like the A13 Bionic, I sat down with Schiller and Anand Shimpi, who in a past life was an influential semiconductor- and systems-focused journalist who founded the website AnandTech. Shimpi is now part of Apple’s Platform Architecture team.
The new A13 outpaces last year’s A12 handsomely, with a 20 percent performance gain across all of its main components: the six CPU cores, its graphics processor, and the neural engine. For an already high-performing chip to see such a significant boost is sort of like watching Usain Bolt beat himself in a sprint.
"We talk about performance a lot publicly,” Shimpi says, “but the reality is, we view it as performance per watt. We look at it as energy efficiency, and if you build an efficient design, you also happen to build a performant design."
Shimpi and Schiller both were forceful about this maniacal focus on power efficiency and performance. For instance, the CPU team will study how applications are being used on iOS and then use the data to optimize future CPU designs. That way, when the next version of the device comes out, it will be better at doing the things that most people do on their iPhones.
"For applications that don't need the additional performance, you can run at the performance of last year's and just do it at a much lower power," Shimpi says.
This strategy isn’t just for CPUs. The same performance-per-watt rules apply to machine learning functions and graphics processing. For example, if a developer working on the iPhone's camera software sees a lot of utilization of the GPU, then she can work with a GPU architect to figure out a better way of doing things. This leads to a more efficient design for future graphics chips.
So what happens inside the A13 Bionic when it goes to work? The general concept involves assignments, delegation, and hand-offs. For low-energy tasks—say opening and reading email—the iPhone will use the more efficient cores. But for more intense tasks like loading complex web pages, the high-performance cores take charge. For some routine and well established machine-learning work, the neural engine can hum along by itself. But for newer, more cutting-edge machine-learning models, the CPU and its specialized machine-learning accelerators lend a helping hand.
Apple’s secret, though, lies in the way all of these various parts of the chip work together in a way that conserves battery power. In a typical smartphone chip, parts of the chip are turned on to do particular tasks. Think of it as turning on the power for an entire neighborhood for them to eat dinner and watch Game of Thrones, then turning the power off, then switching on the power for another neighborhood that wants to play videogames.
With the A13, think of doing the same on-and-off approach, but on a single home basis. Fewer electrons go to waste.
"Machine learning is running during all of that, whether it's managing your battery life or optimizing performance," Schiller said. "There wasn't machine learning running 10 years ago. Now, it's always running, doing stuff."
In the end, the progression of this technology is dictated by simple things we humans want from our phones—intense games that run as smoothly on a mobile handset as a console, or a camera that takes beautiful and clean photos in the middle of the dimly lit night. As we tap and swipe, Apple’s engineers are paying attention, retooling their designs, and working on a chip for next year that will entice us to upgrade all over again.
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