What Are Dreams For? | Saudi Arabia Once Banned Videogames. Now, It Wants to Export Them. | She Invented Being an Influencer -- And Was Vilified for It

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What Are Dreams For? - The New Yorker

In the late nineteen-nineties, a neuroscientist named Mark Blumberg stood in a lab at the University of Iowa watching a litter of sleeping rats. Blumberg was then on the cusp of forty; the rats were newborns, and jerked and spasmed as they slept. Blumberg knew that the animals were fine. He had often seen his dogs twitch their paws while asleep. People, he knew, also twitch during sleep: our muscles contract to make small, sharp movements, and our closed eyes dart from side to side in a phenomenon known as rapid eye movement, or REM. It’s typically during REM sleep that we have our most vivid dreams.

Neuroscientists have long had an explanation for our somnolent twitches. During REM sleep, they say, our bodies are paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our dreams; the twitches are the movements that slip through the cracks. They’re dream debris—outward hints of an inner drama. Human adults spend only about two hours of each night in REM sleep. But fetuses, by the third trimester, are in REM for around twenty hours a day—researchers using ultrasound can see their eyes flitting to and fro—and their whole bodies seem to twitch. When a mother feels her baby kick, it may be because the baby is in REM sleep. Once born, babies continue to spend an unusual amount of time in REM, often sleeping for sixteen hours a day and dreaming for eight.

Increasingly, these facts struck Blumberg as odd. In adults, dreams are offshoots of waking life: we have experiences, then we dream about them. But a baby in the womb hasn’t had any experiences. Why spend so much time in REM before you have anything to dream about? According to the dominant theory, the rats’ twitching eyes were supposedly looking around at dream scenery. But the rat pups were just days old; their eyelids were still sealed shut, and they’d never seen anything. So why were their eyes—and their whiskers, limbs, and tails—twitching hundreds of thousands of times each day?

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Saudi Arabia Once Banned Videogames. Now, It Wants to Export Them. - WSJ

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—For years, this kingdom’s Islamic clerics waged a war on videogames, banning popular titles such as “Pokémon” for promoting blasphemy, violence and laziness. Now, Saudi Arabia is pouring $40 billion into a bid to become a world leader in a videogame industry beloved by its booming youth population.

The Saudi sovereign-wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, owns multibillion-dollar stakes in the companies involved in producing “Pokémon” and other global hits the Saudi clerics once banned, like “Diablo” and “Red Dead Redemption.” The PIF splashed out almost $5 billion for the California videogame publisher Scopely and increased its stakes in Nintendo and Electronic Arts. And the kingdom is dangling high salaries in front of Westerners to come here and help build a local industry almost from scratch.

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She Invented Being an Influencer -- And Was Vilified for It - Rolling Stone

Almost no figure from the early days of the internet was more misunderstood and maligned than Julia Allison. In the mid-2000s, Allison dominated the online world as one of the first multi-platform content creators. But practically no one recognized her as such, in part because there wasn’t language to talk about what she was doing. Today, she would be referred to as an influencer. Back then, most people, especially the media, resorted to misogyny. Julia was villainized and brutalized by journalists, pundits, and online trolls.

The story of Julia mirrors the story of so many women who played formative roles in online culture. These women forged entirely new career paths, built the now-half a trillion dollar content creator industry from the ground up, toppled traditional notions of fame and power, but they paid a steep price. Their names have been stricken from Silicon Valley corporate narratives, their lives torn apart by online hate, and the media, even today, continues to trivialize them as silly “it girls” — if they’re mentioned at all. I included Allison’s story in my new book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, because there has never been a reckoning or a reexamination of what these women were put through. Julia has never been publicly vindicated. And yet, every last thing she predicted about media and technology came to fruition.

By the time she graduated and moved to New York City in 2004, Allison seemed poised for greater success. She had an undeniable magnetism, and she was unafraid to hustle. Her goal was to parlay her bylines to a writing career in New York City media. She even hoped to land her own TV show. That year, on a list of goals she brought to the city, she had written “become a cult figure.”

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