Here is my annual critical ranking of the Super Bowl commercials. This is the pregame edition, with all the available national ads that I could track down; the list will be updated after Sunday’s game. The trends so far? Nothing controversial, as you would expect, but also — and perhaps for associated reasons — very…
An email obtained by The Times shows that one committee leader, Representative Sharon Wylie, a supporter of the industry, shared a draft of the bill with a cannabis lobbyist. “Thank you for being open to the compromise approach,” she wrote. In an interview, Ms. Wylie said that “the jury’s still out” on the potential harms…
It began as a scoop in a weekly tabloid: the allegation that a middle-aged former boy-band star turned top television host had paid hush money to a woman for unspecified wrongdoing. Other articles followed, asserting that it was a case of sexual assault, and stirring a wave of public outrage not only toward the ex-singer…
For months, Instagram has watched and waited to see what would happen to rival TikTok under a new federal law that would ban the app in the United States. On Sunday, the day that law took effect, Instagram pounced. The social media app, which is owned by Meta, announced a new app called Edits, a…
In mid-2023, TikTok had just eluded an effort in Congress to ban the video app, the latest Houdini-like escape for the young tech company. For several years, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, lawmakers and officials had trained their sights on the app, saying its Chinese ownership posed a national security risk. Inside TikTok, a…
Oliviero Toscani, an Italian photographer who used images of an AIDS patient and death row inmates to break the boundaries of fashion imagery as the creative mastermind of Benetton’s advertising campaigns, died on Monday. He was 82. His death was announced by his family on Instagram. They did not say where he died or cite…
The impending disappearance of TikTok, one of the most popular social media apps in the United States, has sent marketers, agencies and creators racing to embrace alternatives — even if they’re not entirely convinced that TikTok will in fact exit the United States this month. Marketers are shifting dollars to Instagram and amending their contracts…