Published May 5, 2021 at 10:21 AM PDT
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P.T. Barnum would have loved the Internet. Instead of having to book performance halls or move a circus around, he could have used the web tools of today and the human gullibility of well, always to play big tricks on people.
Without Barnum and his impulses to entertain, we have somewhat more sinister people populating the web. Gabrielle Bluestone, a journalist formerly at Vice, covers the activities of these people in
18:14 We live in an age where scams are the new normal. A charismatic entrepreneur sells thousands of tickets for a festival that never happened. Respected investors pour millions into a start-up centered around fake blood tests. Reviewers and celebrities flock to London’s top-rated restaurant that’s little more than a backyard shed. These unsettling stories of today’s viral grifters have risen to fame and hit the front-page headlines, yet the curious conundrum remains – why do these scams happen?
Drawing from scientific research, marketing campaigns, and exclusive documents and interviews, Vice reporter Gabrielle Bluestone delves into the irresistible hype that fuels our social media ecosystem, whether it’s from the trusted influencers that peddled Fyre or the consumer reviews that sold Juicero. Her new book is Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet and Why We re Following that pulls back the curtain on the manipulation game behind
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It has been nearly a year now since most of us have enjoyed a book in any of the usual places: a coffee shop, on a commute, in an airplane, on a beach. But that hasn t stopped people from reading â in fact, the opposite. Speaking personally, 2020 made me
extra grateful for all the moments I spent with paper and ink, away from yet another screen containing no good news.
Now we seem on the cusp of what is hopefully the beginning of the end, and it becomes possible again to imagine reading books in places like coffee shops or on transcontinental flights. But our to-be-read piles might be starting to look a little shorter after all those months in quarantine.