Elizabeth Lopatto
The Verge
Oakland, CA, United States
Contact Elizabeth
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Past articles by Elizabeth:
Good morning, here’s some body horror.
Have you ever wondered why celebrities’ teeth all look the same? It’s veneers, and this Cronenberg-esque piece highlights the problems with treating the body as a platform — and the TikTok account of a dentist devoted to calling veneers out. → Read More
A cyberattack has left Las Vegas casinos in the analog era.
Some slot machines are dark. The ATMs don’t work, but people need to pay in cash. Check-ins are manual. Viva Las Vegas! → Read More
Elon Musk paid for our attention, but the price to keep it is getting higher
Elon Musk is threatening to sue the ADL, part of his ongoing quest to stay in the headlines. The question is whether these antics will hit the bottom line of his companies. → Read More
In Hollywood, the nerds are striking — and it looks like the hotties are about to join them.
The actors may join the writers on strike, and Hollywood’s publicists are freaking out. → Read More
“A rising tide of anti-human disgust lifts the gaudy yachts higher, and brings the smell of rot.”
I enjoyed this story about Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav, who is the personification of the boring business bro who doesn’t care if a movie is good as long as it is profitable and predictable. But the phenomenon David Roth identifies here isn’t limited to Zaslav and could apply equally the AI cheerleaders, serving us glurge because these dead-eyed losers have no idea what is worthwhile about… → Read More
Elon Musk is once again ruining Matt Levine’s time off.
This time, by suing Levine’s old law firm while Levine is on vacation without a laptop. I will update the story when Levine’s emergency newsletter drops. → Read More
I have no idea if Ryan Broderick’s read on the inner workings of threads is accurate but I lol’d all the same.
Broderick didn’t follow anyone and bathed in the algorithm instead: → Read More
Should you drink the coffee on an airplane?
On PJ Vogt’s new podcast, Search Engine, he tackles an old question: is the water on airlines safe? In 2002, WSJ reporters discovered that you should probably bring your own bottle onboard. Since then, new regulations have been passed in the US. Has that made things better? Can you drink that coffee? Lots of flight attendants will tell you no. But Vogt calls in a microbiologist to really get… → Read More
Go ahead, check a bag
There are lots of travel guides that advise perfectly packing a carry-on. But you, you glamorous beast? You should check a bag. You deserve it. → Read More
Samuel R. Delany, sci-fi legend, may have had a mini-stroke, but he doesn’t want to discuss his own significance.
Delany, who is seriously one of the greats, is “willing to discuss nearly anything but his own literary significance. Openly sharing the most intimate minutiae of his life—finances, hookup apps, Depends—he recoiled with Victorian modesty whenever I asked why he’d written his books or what they meant to his readers.” The profile is a delight all the same. → Read More
Bait for the middle-aged: Patricia Lockwood on David Foster Wallace.
Sure, yeah, Infinite Jest predicted Instagram filters and Zoom fatigue. But Wallace also anticipated something else: Infinite Jest contains a samizdat video called The Entertainment that is so compelling people who view it never want to do anything else, including eat or sleep. The only thing it got wrong about social media was that The Entertainment wasn’t portable. → Read More
Finally, a real use for AI: making spam callers miserable.
Personally, I think it would be more effective for the government to deal with the proliferation of spam calls that have made most of us stop picking up our phones, but this is fun too: → Read More
Matt Damon’s favorite exchange, Crypto.com, “operates proprietary trading and market making teams.”
In most normal markets, market making and prop trading are done by independent companies. One of the reasons the SEC is mad at Binance is that they allege Binance’s entities may have manipulated crypto markets. Also: → Read More
Do Kwon’s sentenced to four months in jail...
...but for passport shenanigans, not Terra / Luna. He’s been found guilty of forgery by a Montenegro court. The time he’s served since being arrested in March will count toward the sentence. → Read More
“It’s a pretty obvious tell that there’s financial trouble brewing when a company stops paying its bills as they become due.”
A fun update on how badly the Twitter deal is going: → Read More
Binance made a temporary deal with the SEC.
It’s about the restraining order, not the larger case. Last night, a judge approved the deal to make sure that only US employees have access to Binance.US funds: → Read More
Bill Simmons calls Harry and Meghan “fucking grifters.”
So, remember how Duke and Duchess of Sussex were supposed to do some podcasting for Spotify? They did a rumored $20 million deal for... one podcast? Now I, for one, respect the hustle here. (I will also do one podcast for $20 million. Or even $10 million.) Bill Simmons, the head of podcast innovation (?) at Spotify, however, feels differently. → Read More
Jim Cramer, explained.
Our sister pub does a deep dive on Jim Cramer’s whole... thing: → Read More
The SEC is also targeting venture capital in its crypto crackdown.
Remember when we talked about how the SEC has showed up on a horse, guns blazing, to regulate crypto? Here’s a nice report on how they’re also coming for the VC firms that poured money into crypto with a new rule change: a16z could be particularly hard-hit by this change. → Read More
Yes, Tether absolutely held Chinese commercial paper.
Bloomberg has some details on the stablecoin. Highlights include: a “sizeable loan” to the Celsius Network, extensive third party loans, and its banking network which, whew buddy. Tether made loans to parties such as Bitfinex — and lent $5.1 billion at one point, a significant amount of Tether! I wonder how much Tether has cleaned up their act! Perhaps the team will release recent details to —… → Read More