After Rupert Murdoch's resignation, what is next for his media empire? Plus, TikTok and the Italian Mafia.

Anna Lapwood has become one of the world's most famous organists, with the help of social media.

Napoli say they "never meant to offend or mock" Victor Osimhen in a social media post but stop short of publicly apologising to him.

This past Sunday, Keila Shaheen woke up to find that, once again, she was the best-selling author across all of Amazon. To get there, she’d outsold every other book on the platform—including Walter Isaacson’s buzzy biography of Elon Musk and the Fox News host Mark Levin’s screed The Democrat Party Hates America. She’d even beat out Oprah.

At just 24, she is a bona fide publishing juggernaut. And yet few outside of TikTok have even bothered to notice. That’s probably in part because her best-selling book isn’t actually a book at all in the traditional sense. It’s a self-published mental-health guide called The Shadow Work Journal, and its success has been fueled by a steady drumbeat of videos posted on TikTok. Inspired by the writings of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, it offers readers prompts and activities for interrogating the unconscious, repressed part of themselves. By getting to know our “shadow,” the Jungian theory goes, we can better understand ourselves and our behavior.

One exercise invites readers to stare at themselves in a mirror for five to 10 minutes and talk to their reflection, writing down their observations afterward. Another has them make a gratitude list. A page on “wound mapping” asks the reader to circle statements such as “hates being alone” or “struggles to let things go” in order to identify their “inner-child wound.” In one video posted on TikTok, which has more than 50 million views, a reader has circled almost all of the statements: “Realizing I have more issues than I thought,” the caption reads. I got my copy during a long trip and did one of the activities on the plane; it turned out that my shadow was tired of flying and wanted to be home.

Shaheen isn’t a practicing therapist, and her traditional mental-health credentials are limited: She graduated from Texas A&M University in 2020 with bachelor’s degrees in psychology and marketing, and took a training course in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) from Achology’s Academy of Modern Applied Psychology, an online school. (Licensed therapists typically have a master’s degree in counseling, thousands of hours of supervised experience providing therapy, and a passing grade on any number of licensure exams.) Instead, Shaheen’s background is in marketing and brand strategy. She’s done this work for various companies, including TikTok itself, where she was a creative strategist. Her knack for storytelling on social media is evident in the book’s viral success: TikTok users have gone rabid over her journal. Some have raved that the workbook is “cheaper than therapy” and posted dreamy videos of themselves filling it out on a sunny day. Others accused it of being demonic and anti-religious. Still more question its legitimacy as a therapeutic tool.

Shaheen defends the book by contending that it can help people. “I firmly believe everyone deserves access to mental-health resources and the chance to embark on a healing journey,” she told me over email, arguing that tools like the journal “can often inspire individuals to seek therapy,” a route she recommends “if it’s accessible.”

Shadow Work Journal videos have passed 1 billion views in total on the platform, and many of these posts function as direct advertising thanks to TikTok Shop, the platform’s new e-commerce brand. The videos feature links to buy the journal in the app. TikTok Shop also offers affiliate features that allow creators who make videos about products to get a commission for each sale. Many of the journal videos use this feature. One 20-year-old part-time student I emailed told me she’d made about $1,000 off of her video about the book. She had requested a free copy of it through a creator program, and in exchange, TikTok prompted her to post about it.

[Read: TikTok is doing something very un-TikTok]

The rise of the Shadow Work Journal is another reminder of TikTok’s power—to generate conversation, to sell a ton of books, to keep people in an algorithmic loop indefinitely. Though it was first published in the fall of 2021, the journal reached hit status this year, after being listed in TikTok Shop. It has sold 290,000 copies on TikTok alone since April—45 percent of its overall sales, Shaheen says, meaning more than half a million sold in total. As a point of reference, Isaacson’s Elon Musk sold 92,560 copies the old-fashioned way in its first week. Shaheen sent me screenshots of four separate times she’d reached the top slot on Amazon since mid-August, including this past Sunday.  

However much they help spread the word, algorithms alone cannot explain the journal’s popularity. Americans’ struggles with mental health are well documented, particularly among young adults, who tend to spend more time on TikTok than older people. Therapy is expensive, commonly stigmatized, and at times inaccessible—many professionals say they can’t meet patient demand. People are looking for help.

That they’re finding it in an affordable, DIY solution is not surprising; self-help books have always been popular in America. That they’re doing this is also not necessarily bad. “The Shadow Work Journal can give valuable opportunities for reflection and growth,” Corey Basch, a public-health professor at William Paterson University, told me. But she also situated the book in a broader context: an era of free, sometimes questionable medical advice on social media. Basch co-authored a 2022 study that examined posts published under the #mentalhealth hashtag on TikTok. Though some legitimate therapists have found success on the platform, Basch characterized the material she’s come across as “consumer-driven and rife with issues related to credibility.” She cautioned that working through tough topics might lead a reader to “rekindle trauma,” and that experts often advise that such work be done as part of therapy with a supervising professional. The journal does come with a disclaimer: “While anyone can do shadow work, a licensed mental health expert is a good option, especially for individuals who have experienced severe trauma or abuse.”

[Read: What in the world is happening on TikTok Live?]

Shadow work, it should be noted, is a niche practice. Though it has its proponents, psychoanalysis has taken a back seat to more empirical methods. Now Google searches for shadow work are skyrocketing alongside sales of the journal. Connie Zweig, a retired psychotherapist and herself the author of books on shadow work, told me that she was “very surprised” to hear how much the topic had blown up. “It’s exciting because it can open doors for people,” Zweig told me, “but it’s also dangerous if people think this is all they need.” She thought the book had “oversimplified” the Jungian idea of the unconscious, at least based on what she’s seen of it in TikTok videos.

Joshua Terhune, a therapist in Indiana with 300,000 followers on TikTok, also had some critiques. He was curious enough to request a review copy of the journal through TikTok Shop and ended up rating it two and a half stars out of five. When I asked him if Sheehan’s CBT certificate would qualify a person to write a shadow-work journal, he laughed and said, “No, not even close.” In response to the criticism that she’s underqualified, Shaheen told me that she wondered whether critics had looked up her author bio: “If they’re not comfortable purchasing any work from an actual certified therapist, that’s okay. They can look at other options.”

She isn’t a licensed medical professional, CBT certificate or not. But Shaheen is a clear writer and an exceptionally shrewd observer of online trends. She’s struck a nerve. In one TikTok from August with 10 million views, the video’s creator extols the Shadow Work Journal for changing her life. “I wasn’t healing. My relationships weren’t successful. And it wasn’t until my shadow journal that I realized I had a lot of unresolved traumas,” she says. “This helped me call all my POWER back to me.” And yes, she’s eligible for commission.

From now on, people can still see ads when scrolling on their phones, but not directly purchase the products they see on their screen.

We’ve just lived through what Vulture has labeled “Silly Song Summer,” during which onomatopoeias (Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam”), farcical film ballads (Barbie’s “I’m Just Ken,” The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s “Peaches”), and a Eurodance satire (Kyle Gordon a.k.a. D.J. Crazy Times’s “Planet of the Bass”) went viral. Novelty songs—fluky, hummable jokes—are nothing new, but TikTok has accelerated their production, and broadly, the cultural mood is trending toward cheesiness and wit.

The latest and greatest example is “Sitting,” by TJ Mack, an alter ego of the comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez. Be warned that you might not like or understand what this video is, but you won’t be able to get its melody out of your head or forget the natural law it reveals: “Sitting is the opposite of standing / Sitting is the opposite of running around.”

The words are sung in a pseudo–Robert Goulet bellow by some strange man whose face is mostly mouth and eyes. He elongates sitting into a rumble of joy; he adds an m sound to the end of standing; he rolls the r’s of running around. Over the course of the song, the cogency of the lyrics diminishes—sitting is “kinda like a nap / It’s kinda like something else”—but Mack’s enthusiasm, and the proximity of the camera to his giant teeth, doesn’t. We’ve all improvised this kind of nonsense to our pets, except now we, the viewers, are the pets.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Brian Jordan Alvarez (@brianjordanalvarez)

After Alvarez posted “Sitting” to his social-media accounts earlier this month, the internet stood in ovation. Remixers gave the song dance-pop and orchestral treatments. Cover artists rendered it as beautiful folk and cringey musical theater. Even radio stations have given “Sitting” a spin. “Tell me this is not that catchiest song you have ever heard,” one DJ said in her introduction.

[Read: Forget SNL. The best election satire is on TikTok.]

The phenomenon may seem like a random burble of the internet’s id, but Alvarez has been making similarly entrancing—if mostly nonmusical—work for the past few years. He’s an actor previously known for his role on the Will and Grace reboot and for his 2016 web series, The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo. (He was also in this year’s campy smash M3gan.) Pandemic isolation pushed him to try something new: taking selfie videos, and applying filters to his appearance and voice in order to invent a new cast of influencers.

The first such character, born in the early days of social distancing, was a meditation expert preaching about the “pure source energy” that can be tapped into by signing up for her class. Her name was Marnie T, and her chuckles and pauses and references to exotic travels approximated the actual tics of people who think they know the secrets of the universe. This was both funny and legitimately hypnotizing: Marnie locked her extraterrestrial gaze onto the camera with an intensity that all but forbade the viewer to scroll away.

Other surreal yet oddly recognizable characters entered the mix. They included a southern aunt who’s blasé about her fabulous wealth, a naive gay guy swept into a criminal conspiracy one day at brunch, an alien from a capitalist planet whose speeches combine Black Mirror and Office Space. Then there was TJ Mack, a happy-go-lucky TJ Maxx shopper who sings songs about whatever’s on his mind—laser tag, splashing, water, and now sitting. His wife, a woman of Grinch-y glamour, made her own videos, gloating about the high life afforded her by her husband’s music career.

Alvarez’s cinematic universe captures something modern: the weirdness of monologuing to an imagined online audience. But it’s also classic character work, part invention and part imitation. “I love people,” he told Vulture. “And I’m observant. I think … I sort of absorb someone’s energy, and I process it, even if it’s 20 years later.” Speaking with Them, Alvarez said he’d initially hoped to use his skills on Saturday Night Live or traditional sitcoms, but the internet showed him that he could do it on his own. “Imagine having a talent that you feel like nobody cares about,” he said, “and then suddenly you realize, ‘Oh my God, people do care about this. I was right. This is a cool thing to do.’”

Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram are, indeed, eating traditional comedy’s lunch lately when it comes to funny characters. SNL and other late-night outlets have fitfully tried to evolve by hiring social-media-trained talents and targeting some sketches toward the terminally online crowd. But the best format with which to satirize our digitally mediated reality isn’t going to involve multiple cameras or a soundstage. It also isn’t going to be broadcast on TV networks that yearn to re-create the previous century’s monoculture. Our attention spans and tastes keep fracturing, and the ratings for late-night comedy keep declining.

Meanwhile, Alvarez’s characters are part of a growing pantheon of weirdos who live in our phones. Mass-niche audiences also tune in to Psyiconic’s Terri Joe, a demure Christian woman who savagely insults random people on livestreams, and Conner O’Malley, a machismo-poisoned prankster who once smoked 500 cigarettes for 5G. These comics riff on the absurd things the internet has done to our brains and our relationships with strangers. But they also celebrate timeless human tendencies, such as sitting.

Osimhen could sue the club after a video seemingly mocking the player was posted and then deleted from Napoli's TikTok.

Coca-Cola often experiments with new flavors, and they’re usually flavors you can imagine, having tasted them before: vanilla, cherry, lemon. But the latest is called Y3000, a reference to the far-off year 3000, and one that Coca-Cola says was concocted with the help of, in some way, artificial intelligence. It smells like circus-peanut candies and tastes mostly like Coke.

The company says this soda was made to evoke a “positive future,” with a label that has “a futuristic feel,” due to its color palette of silver, violet, magenta, and cyan. The Coca-Cola logo on the Y3000 bottle is made of “fluid dot clusters that merge to represent the human connections of our future planet.” Customers can scan a QR code on the bottle to open a website that uses the AI model Stable Diffusion to turn photos of their surroundings into images with a similar color scheme and sci-fi aesthetics. In these images, the future looks sleek and very pink.

Y3000 is one of many recent Coke offerings promising a “flavor” that does not make a reference to anything like a known terrestrial taste. They have names such as “Ultimate” (Coca-Cola with “the electrifying taste of +XP,” which is a type of point you can accrue in video games) and “Soul Blast” (Coca-Cola that tastes like the Japanese anime Bleach). “Starlight” is “space flavored,” “Byte” tastes like “pixels,” “Move” tastes like “transformation.” “Dreamworld,” which is decorated with an M. C. Escher–like illustration, “taps into Gen Z’s passion for the infinite potential of the mind by exploring what a dream tastes like.” Coca-Cola did not respond to my requests for comment, but its senior director of global strategy, Oana Vlad, does recognize that some people might wonder what these flavors actually taste like. “We’re never really going to answer that question” in a “straightforward” way, she told CNN in June. But “the flavor profile is always, we say, 85 to 90 percent Coke.”

[Read: AI-generated junk is flooding Etsy]

Coke is already an abstraction, some complicated combination of cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla and citrus and secret things. Further abstracting it with “pixel” and “dream” flavors is a brilliant way to get a lot of attention. So is referencing AI—a logical next step after the company dabbled with NFTs. Since the introduction of ChatGPT 10 months ago, the world has become captivated by the technology and the maybe apocalyptic, maybe wonderful future that it promises. AI is suddenly everywhere, even in our cola. It makes no sense! Which is why we have to try it. “Their shenanigans are something that’s always interesting to us,” Sean O’Keefe, a professor of food science and technology at Virginia Tech, told me.

O’Keefe doesn’t drink soda, which he refers to as “flavored, colored sugar water.” But if the soda was designed by AI to taste like the future, what choice does he have? “I don’t buy Coke, but if I see Y3000, I’m gonna try it,” he said. Of course—that’s what I did too. There are a ton of foods and drinks that exist more to be sampled once and photographed for the internet than to be habitually consumed—see the Grimace Shake, which was all over TikTok this summer. Around the same time, my colleague Megan Garber wrote about mustard-flavored Skittles, describing the product as a “pseudo-snack—produced not to be eaten but to be talked about.” These limited-edition Skittles were, she explained from the site of a terrifying-sounding marketing event held in Washington, D.C., “nearly impossible for the average consumer to obtain.”

[Read: The candy you (probably) won’t get to try]

These kinds of products are really spectacles, the artist Allie Wist argues. Wist has a master’s degree in food studies, and much of her art has to do with food. In the description for last year’s Extinct Armoatorium, a plexiglass box filled with the smell of banana, dirt, and fungus, she wrote about the history of artificial banana flavoring, which, she wrote, is based on “the sweeter taste” of the Gros Michel banana, a cultivar that was wiped out in the 1950s by a fungus (although this origin is sometimes contested). Artificial banana is now more real than the banana it’s based on, she suggests, because the real banana doesn’t exist anymore. Wist cited Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 essay “The Precession of Simulacra,” and told me that “the real world is now actually produced through the simulation world of images, videos, and, I’d argue, artificial flavoring and processed foods.” Rainbow bagels, chips with fake smoke flavoring, future-flavored cola—all “represent a lifestyle or an aesthetic fantasy” more than they do eating, she said.

I smelled the AI Coke about 10 times before I tasted it, and felt a creeping sense of recognition. At first it reminded me of bubblegum, although that isn’t a real flavor either. It was a bit more like Juicy Fruit gum, a flavor that O’Keefe described as a combination of pineapple, banana, and citrus—familiar enough to avoid alienating consumers, which is key. “We have to consider capitalism’s role in this,” Wist said. “Capitalism removes any real value of exchange and contains no inherent interest in morality or purpose.” This is why a company that already sells billions of dollars of products a year might continue coming up with “ever more provocative flavors,” as she put it, including one that alludes to a point in the future after which many cities may no longer be habitable.

A few years ago, I went to a postapocalyptic dinner party hosted by the chef Jen Monroe. I had a bunch of nice, jellyfish-forward food and then a rectangle of gelatin. One-half of the gelatin rectangle was pink and strawberry-flavored and delicious. The other half was blue and disgusting. Many people spit it out. “I decided it’s okay to serve food you hate to make a point,” Monroe told me after. “That would be the most sci-fi avenue, where we’ve abandoned food as food altogether.” The dinner party was supposed to take place in 2047. It was sad, but it was also kind of fun. It made me think, At least we can sample something strange at the end of the world.

The warning comes after a BBC investigation into disruption driven by the social media platform's algorithms.

Kylie Minogue says she was shocked to see her latest single, Padam Padam, go viral.