IM ALWAYS LIKE, More, more, more, more, more, more. Doing it overload," says Charli XCX.
"But this week has been ... a lot." It's a Wednesday morning in late July, less than 72 hours after she offhandedly tweeted "kamala IS brat," accidentally redefining an entire presidential campaign, and Charli has invited me to a Le Labo-scented spa in West Hollywood to decompress. Her assistant booked us a private room for an hour under "Charlotte," the 32-year-old British artist's real name, which pretty much no one remembers anymore. She's dealing with a performance-related neck injury-"It flares up a lot when I'm stressed"-and things have been a bit stressful lately. Charli arrived in her black Porsche 911, wearing knee-high leather boots and big bitchy Khaite sunglasses; she was giving Balenciaga walk of shame, though she insists she didn't go out last night.
"This is a little... intimate, yeah?" she says before stripping down to an itty-bitty cheetah-print bikini and stepping into a sauna so awkwardly small I kind of can't believe it's designed for two people, let alone two strangers. She's barefaced, already sweating, her usual mountain of curly black hair extensions gone. It's 158 degrees.
"You're going to get me in a really vulnerable position. You can ask me something crazy," she says. It's a teasingly seductive invitation, but Charli is not about to expose herself any further.
Although she still refers to herself as an "underdog pop girl," her album Brat has gone so mainstream this summer that this veteran club rat seems anxious about how to both keep it going and stop it from crossing over into cringe in the process. "Sometimes you're the people's princess," she tells me. "And sometimes you're the villain." Ubiquity will run you hard.
Esta historia es de la edición August 26 - September 08, 2024 de New York magazine.
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Esta historia es de la edición August 26 - September 08, 2024 de New York magazine.
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Drowning in Slop - A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage-and it's only going to get worse.
SLOP started seeping into Neil Clarke's life in late 2022. Something strange was happening at Clarkesworld, the magazine. Clarke had founded in 2006 and built into a pillar of the world of speculative fiction. Submissions were increasing rapidly, but “there was something off about them,” he told me recently. He summarized a typical example: “Usually, it begins with the phrase ‘In the year 2250-something’ and then it goes on to say the Earth’s environment is in collapse and there are only three scientists who can save us. Then it describes them in great detail, each one with its own paragraph. And then—they’ve solved it! You know, it skips a major plot element, and the final scene is a celebration out of the ending of Star Wars.” Clarke said he had received “dozens of this story in various incarnations.”
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