Alex Burns

India had fewer than 10 billionaires two decades ago, when Mukesh Ambani and his younger brother first appeared on the Forbes billionaire list after their father, company founder Dhirubhai Ambani, died. Now, the country is the world’s third-biggest source of billionaires after China and the U.S.

India’s 200 billionaires have a combined net worth of... See more

The energy given to the act of reading and explaining helps musical moments transition into cultural ones. Take Kendrick and Drake, a feud that escalated from jousting about reputation (on Kendrick’s verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s track Like That , and Drake’s retort Push Ups ) to later trading allegations about domestic abuse (Drake’s Family M... See more

Yes, this is 2024, where life increasingly feels like a huge in-joke that started on the internet. Once upon a time we had subcultures: punks and goths, hippies and emos. Now we have Gen Z’s perceptive trendspotters pinpointing a style or a mood that is sweeping the zeitgeist, coining a label for it — often with the suffix “-core” — and sharing it ... See more

On Monday night, some of the biggest celebrities in the country, dressed in their finest and most outrageous couture, assembled at the steps of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the biggest red carpet event of the year. They entered the museum for a high-profile celebration of fashion — sponsored by TikTok this year — that remained ent... See more

Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

With Barbie , The Super Mario Bros. Movie , and Oppenheimer leading the way, 2023 was the first time in over two decades that the top three box office earners didn’t include a sequel or a remake. (The last time it happened was 2001, courtesy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone , Shrek , and Monsters, Inc .) Granted, adapting an iconic toy bran... See more

Cobra Effect: Attempting to solve a problem makes that problem worse. Comes from an Indian story about a city infested with snakes offering a bounty for every dead cobra, which caused entrepreneurs to start breeding cobras for slaughter.