“There’s a speed to how TikTok facilitates conversations and trends, and its algorithm is unnervingly good at picking up on a user’s interests and showing them what they want to see,” writes The Atlantic‘s Kate Lindsay. “You could use the app for just five minutes and come away with a new song to listen to, a new recipe to try for dinner, and a new piece of kitchenware already being packed up and shipped to you.”

But the app definitely isn’t a universal good, and it’s shifting in concept, turning into what feels like a shopping platform, akin to Instagram’s pivot to e-commerce. “It went from a plaything for regular people—the dancing tweens, the animal antics—to a stage for brands and creators, and continues to make moves that push itself further from its original premise,” argues Lindsay. That shift aside, there are plenty of indicators that the app may have already been on track to lose popularity even if the government had never intervened: new user growth is plateauing, and the old people—those in their 30s and 40s, compared to the app’s Zoomer mainstays—are crashing the party.

Still, what happens in the long run remains to be seen. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has been given nine months to broker a deal with an American buyer—a deadline that may be extended by the president by 90 days if need be.

Masks and keffiyehs: Whenever you look at videos of the pro-Palestine/anti-Israel activists on college campuses, something conspicuous sticks out almost every time: it’s 2024, and these 20-year-olds are nearly universally masked.

My hunch, shared by many others, is just that it’s a performative way to signal belonging to the left. Maybe there’s some amount of gatekeeping on the left by long-COVID cuckoos who remain insistent that masking is what morally pure and righteous people do. But also, masks are surely being worn as a means of protecting one’s identity from being found out, to both literally hide from surveillance and also to ham up the danger element, as if their plight is akin to Hongkongers protesting the Chinese Communist Party or some other authoritarian regime that might disappear the disfavored.

“The semiotics that used to be associated with anarchists, whose masks stood out at rallies, are now popular with activists participating in non-violent civil disobedience,” writes David Weigel at Semafor in a deep-dive into how masks have endured.