The Super Bowl halftime show was, by nearly all accounts, a big success this year.

The show, produced by Dr. Dre, featured a bevy of stars, including Eminem, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar. For millennials, classic tracks like “Still Dre” and “In Da Club” delivered hardcore nostalgia. It was clear that we were the target audience for the Super Bowl halftime show now, after years of older artists like The Rolling Stones appealed to our parents.

I say lean into the nostalgia and enjoy the whole show, which was posted by the NFL on YouTube.

More from the Super Bowl:

• Jamie-Lynn Sigler electrifies iconic ‘Sopranos’ opener in Chevy Super Bowl ad

• Guy Fieri’s Super Bowl ad is here to take you to Flavortown

• General Motors Super Bowl ad puts the EV in ‘Dr. Evil’

• The Super Bowl halftime show had the internet feeling intense nostalgia

• QR code Super Bowl ad for Coinbase was a kind of brilliant copy of ‘The Office’

After years of waiting and only the smallest crumbs of content to tide us over, we finally have our first trailer for Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Despite being called The Lord of the Rings, this series does not, in fact, tell the story of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. While those novels take place in the Third Age of Middle-earth, The Rings of Power brings us into the Second Age, likely drawing from Tolkien’s Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.

You’ll find no Frodo or Bilbo in The Rings of Power, but you may recognize other characters. Keep an eye out for familiar faces like Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and Elrond (Robert Aramayo). Plus, if the show’s name is anything to go by, we’ll be seeing the forging of the Great Rings — and a certain Dark Lord — at some point soon.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Prime Video Sept. 2.

The Super Bowl LVI halftime show was a nostalgia bomb for Millennials and Gen Xers. The internet was loving it — while also grappling with the fact that we’re old, now.

The show featured a whole bevy of performers associated with Dr. Dre, who produced the show, including Eminem, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar. So of course, when 50 came out and performed “In Da Club,” or Dre did “California Love,” or Eminem did the opening bars of “Forgot About Dre,” people of a certain age were hit over the head with nostalgia for the 2000s. And OH GOD, the nostalgia from the keys on “Still Dre.” We’re boomers now, folks.

The tweets, memes, and reactions rolled in with people both loving the songs and feeling old as hell.

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In general the halftime show was fun and stylish. You got just enough of each performer’s catalogue without having to see, let’s say, Eminem, dig into his more recent work. You got Kendrick at the peak of his powers, Dre leading the show, Snoop Dogg just…being Snoop Dogg.

The reviews overall were solid, since the viewing audience for the NFL these days probably has super strong memories of the music in question.

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Just goes to show you, nostalgia is a powerful tool.

The Sopranos already returned with the 2021 prequel film The Many Saints of Newark. But it made another comeback during the Super Bowl on Sunday.

Chevy ran an ad featuring Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who played Tony Soprano’s daughter Meadow in the classic HBO series, driving an electric Silverado. The spot effectively copied the iconic opening credits scene, where Tony drives from New York to New Jersey, smoking a cigar in a massive SUV. Here’s the ad in full.

The internet immediately flooded with reactions because the internet freaking loves The Sopranos. There was one common joke about Meadow finally learning how to park because of, you know, that final scene.

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There was also some folks really loving the ad because nostalgia is a heck of thing.

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People especially loved the hug at the end, between Sigler and Robert Iler, who player her on-screen brother AJ in the show.

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Sure, the ad was a minute long. But Chevy definitely seemed to predict correctly that Sopranos fans would love to have just 60 seconds of the fictional family.

The Volvo spin-off EV company Polestar aired its first Super Bowl ad Sunday, and it’s blunt.

For 30 seconds, we see the dark outline of the Swedish company’s Polestar 2 electric sedan with a flashing list of things Polestar and its marketing team aren’t willing to do to get people to go electric and buy its $45,000 (and up) car.

The spot is silent save for some ominous background music, and starts out by calling out “epic voice overs” and goes on to not-so-subtly drag Volkswagen, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and basically every over-the-top Super Bowl commercial from Budweiser’s Clydesdales to star-studded Pepsi promos.

It packs a lot of (fair) judgment into the half minute segment, blasting companies for greenwashing, hidden agendas, and empty promises.

But it’s still an ad. No sugar coating.

The early winner for the most effective ad during this year’s Super Bowl might just go to Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange platform. The company ran a remarkably simple ad: It was just a bouncing QR code, just like the classic DVD logo scene from The Office.

The ad practically begged you to scan the QR code on your TV and see where it led. It was so basic, a little thing bouncing around, changing colors. The 60-second spot was just long enough for people at home to think something was broken.

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If you did scan the code, it took you to Coinbase’s site, which was promoting a $15 Bitcoin giveaway for joining the cryptocurrency marketplace. Just The Office scene with the DVD menu, but it only hit the corner of the screen perfectly right at the end. Brilliant.

There’s hardly anything as, let’s say…divisive…online as crypto. But even those skeptical of crypto seemed to admit the commercial was clever. Even if you hated it, the ad did its job. It 100 percent got folks’ attention.

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The ad from Coinbase actually might’ve been too effective. The Coinbase app crashed soon after the company’s spot aired during the big game.

And just a quick public service announcement. In general, please don’t scan random QR codes if they weren’t approved for broadcast during the biggest television event of the year. Getting you to scan a random QR code is actually a pretty common scam.

Woke up this morning, charged your Silverado EV.

HBO’s classic series The Sopranos made an appearance during the Super Bowl along with Chevy’s first electric truck. Nearly frame for frame, Chevy’s 60-second ad matches the opening sequence of the 1999-2006 show with the late James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano in a Chevy Suburban. Except this is the 2022 version.

In the driver’s seat is Jamie-Lynn Sigler, the actor who played gangster Tony’s daughter, Meadow, who sat next to her father in the passenger seat in her most famous scene. Instead of a cigar she has a lollipop; in place of Tony’s gold chains she wears a tennis bracelet; instead of paying a toll she uses her electronic E-ZPass. But most noticeably, instead of a gas guzzler, she’s driving from Manhattan into New Jersey in a dual-motor battery-powered Chevy Silverado with 400 miles of range. The truck will first be available summer 2023.

A few days before the ad aired, Sigler said in a Zoom call that the first thing she noticed when she got into the truck was, “This feels like something from the future.” This EV, with its 17-inch touchscreen, silent ride, and EV-to-EV charging ability, makes a 1999 Suburban feel like a relic from another era. Though there are echoes of the big Chevy vehicles of yore in its dominating size (the truck bed is about 9 feet long), and cabin that seats five comfortably.

Would Meadow be riding in an electric pickup in 2022? Sigler thinks so. “Meadow has always been a socially, environmentally, and all-around conscious person.”

Sigler said she got to actually drive the e-truck during the shoot and felt it represented the “heavily flawed characters” from the show well, who are tough but reliable.

The minute-long spot, directed by show creator David Chase, concludes at a charging station with another familiar Sopranos face. As with the series itself, we’d hate to spoil the surprise ending.

There’s a problem with the way you’re talking about trauma online. Or at least that’s what several critics have suggested, in one way or another, in recent months. 

The objectionable trends they’ve observed include people calling everything — even the slightest of personality quirks — a trauma response; using the language of harm for just about anything, thereby diluting the clinical meaning of the word “trauma“; and mistaking understandable pandemic anguish for trauma when it’s really not. 

In these pieces and others, I’ve been waiting for recognition of what seems obvious: Traumatic experiences are more widespread than most know or are willing to admit, and growing awareness of that fact on social media and elsewhere might be shifting how people talk about it. 

Decades of research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) — a phrase that refers to several types of potentially traumatic mistreatment or exposures, including caregiver neglect and abuse, witnessing violence at home, and growing up in a household with substance misuse — has revealed the extent of early-life and adolescent trauma. In one survey of 114,000 American adults, 61 percent of respondents reported that they’d experienced at least one ACE in their lifetime. One in six reported four or more. 

The many appraisals of trauma talk don’t mention this fact. Nor do they acknowledge that globally, one in three women have experienced physical or sexual violence at least once. Research in the U.S. shows that one in six men are sexually abused or assaulted as children or adults. Critics of trauma talk also fail to fully consider the devastation of experiences like police brutality, racism, and forced migration. In the face of pervasive trauma, these pieces tend to scoff or sneer at people’s interest in the subject or their supposedly misguided use of clinical language, including the word trauma itself. It’s possible to point out that people have developed a casual relationship with the word trauma, much like they’ve adapted “depressed” or “OCD” for their own purposes, without suggesting that fascination with the subject represents a great cultural folly.

A lengthy tour of #TraumaTok, a TikTok hashtag with more than 615 million views, provides disturbing evidence that creators and their followers are indeed trying to process scarring experiences, including those from childhood. These creators recount finding a parent passed out from drug use, enduring repeated sexual abuse, denying a parent’s abuse to Child Protective Services to avoid foster care, and trying to cope with an agonizing physical injury that a parent refuses to take seriously.

The English language doesn’t have enough words for the spectrum of pain these events cause, so it makes sense that trauma prevails as a go-to descriptor. It should be no surprise that the growing number of people publicly coming to terms with past trauma may have prompted others to embrace a term that once felt off-limits but, in fact, accurately describes their experience. Conversations about trauma have lent legitimacy to feelings they previously doubted.

The TikTokers sharing anecdotes of abuse or neglect have their own motivations for filing these stories under #traumatok, ranging from educational to cathartic to, perhaps, clout-seeking. Nevertheless, these candid disclosures are the mentions of trauma that concern me most. The fact that so many of these videos exist and earn such high engagement should arguably be the subject of trauma talk think pieces. Somehow, though, critics ironically suggest that the concept of trauma has been cheapened by the online discourse about it while ignoring or dismissing the extent to which people actually experience trauma. 

The implication is that one’s trauma isn’t legitimate unless it’s of the Big T variety: rape, war, catastrophic injury — the type of exposures that can lead to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The so-called little t traumas, like bereavement, job loss, or bullying, are relatively unthreatening and don’t really count. Yet we know that when the chronic stress of such experiences compounds at once or over time, it can have debilitating effects. This includes symptoms like angry outbursts, trouble sleeping, and hyper-vigilance, which are also common to post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I do think it’s a problem for people to question the validity of people’s stories.”

Never mind that people who experience trauma shouldn’t have to buttress their claim with evidence of such misery to be believed. It’s not self-indulgent or frivolous to describe events that caused deep, persistent emotional or psychological pain as traumatic, even if others think you’ve not earned the right to use that word. 

“I do think it’s a problem for people to question the validity of people’s stories — of whether it’s true or not,” says Dr. Patrice Berry, a psychologist and TikTok creator in Fredericksburg, Virginia. “Trauma can be anything that is too much, too fast, where the person didn’t have the ability to integrate their experience.” 

Berry says that #TraumaTok frequently surfaces stories of severe childhood adversity. Sometimes the creator is open to receiving support following the disclosure. In other cases, the person might simply appear interested in catharsis, but then TikTok’s algorithm catapults the content to the platform’s For You Page, effectively helping it go viral. Berry acknowledges that, in her experience, the algorithm appears to elevate material about pain compared to joy, possibly because users respond to content that invokes emotions like sadness, anger, and fear. “People stop and pay attention,” she says.  

The interest in stories about trauma could be voyeuristic or searching, or most likely a combination of both. Berry senses that people relate to such confessions. She’s also unsurprised by the volume of trauma storytelling on TikTok during the pandemic. It’s not that people are so emotionally affected by the pandemic, although that’s true to a degree. Instead, a crisis paired with unexpected time to reflect leads to fresh revelations about old experiences, including new awareness about family dysfunction that had been previously ignored or suppressed. That just might explain why people are putting books about trauma on the best-seller list — not because they’re confused about what the concept means or have foolishly bought into the idea that everything is trauma. 

Dr. Jessi Gold, a psychiatrist and assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine, actually sees the opposite with her patients, many of whom are college students, university staff and faculty, and high-performing medical professionals. In closed-door therapy, some are hesitant to use the label “trauma,” either because an experience — healthcare workers witnessing horrible deaths during COVID-19, for example — is common among their peer group and therefore accepted, or because they want to protect their privacy as well as the expectation that they’ll be treated equivalently to anyone else. In other words, they don’t to want to create the perception of victimhood, fearing that it could cost them normalcy. Arguably, the criticism of trauma talk perpetuates this dynamic when it focuses obsessively on the supposed misuse of mental health language. 

Gold’s concern about mental health discussions on social media has little to do with shifting vernacular. Instead, she’s concerned that people participating in these conversations might, as a result, see ads about products or services that won’t ultimately help them, or that are predatory in nature. It’s also worrying when exchanges about mental health provide users with dangerous information, including details that could unintentionally encourage disordered eating, self-harm, or suicidal ideation. Otherwise, Gold is hopeful that talking about trauma on social media is revelatory more often than not for users.  

“If you’re at home and you’re wondering whether this thing you experienced that’s been affecting your life for a long time is a valid thing to be affecting your life, seeing lots of people talk about it and using trauma in different ways as a word, I think it’s helpful, if anything,” says Gold. “I obviously would love it to be the kind of thing that brings people in to get care, if they need it.” 

For the most part, the criticism of trauma talk focuses on people’s proclivity for overstating their pain for various reasons, but has strangely omitted the structural factors at play. High quality, culturally competent, and affordable mental health care is notoriously hard to get in the U.S. By comparison, social media is free. Public processing may be unseemly to those who view it as excessive; for others, it’s an improvised support system that meets an urgent need. Berry, the psychologist in Virginia, says many of her followers are eager to learn more about mental health and want to better understand themselves and their life experiences. Unfortunately, her practice is fully booked. Every week, she turns away as many as 10 people seeking care. 

Genuinely understanding and explaining the cultural significance of trauma talk requires grappling with the pervasiveness of all kinds of trauma in people’s lives. It means acknowledging that social media platforms incentivize such disclosures — and that invitation is tempting for numerous reasons, including the fact that therapy is inaccessible for many.  

Some concerns are warranted. It’s true that influencers and marketers might reel users in with seeming mental health expertise, either personal or professional, to make a buck off the attention by peddling their services or ads. It’s also true that some users find viral success when sharing traumatic experiences, thus creating skepticism about their motivations. And of course, we should be wary of pathologizing an annoying instance of behavior. Yet framing the problem of trauma talk as one of naivete, silliness, or self-indulgence misses the bigger picture: People are talking about trauma because it’s rather common, they’ve experienced it, and they want to stop pretending everything is fine. 

“One of the better things about these conversations on social media is that people then ask themselves about their life story and are curious about themselves and want to know what happened…” says Gold. “Inspiration to care about things that happened to you and how those affect what’s going on with you now, I think, is not a bad thing. I don’t know that telling people what words they can use for that is particularly helpful.”

If you want to talk to someone or are experiencing suicidal thoughts, Crisis Text Line provides free, confidential support 24/7. Text CRISIS to 741741 to be connected to a crisis counselor. Contact the NAMI HelpLine at 1-800-950-NAMI, Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 10:00 p.m. ET, or email info@nami.org. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Here is a list of international resources.

The first full trailer for Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has just arrived, and it looks just as chaotic as the title implies. It seems that messing with alternate universe isn’t without consequences.

With Benedict Cumberbatch returning as the titular sorcerer, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness follows on from the interdimensional shenanigans of Loki and Spider-Man: No Way Home. It will also catch up with played by Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff for the first time since WandaVision — and she does not appear to be doing well.

“You break the rules and become a hero. I do it, I become the enemy,” the Scarlet Witch tells Doctor Strange, possibly referring to the events of her miniseries. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

The trailer also gives us our first glimpse at Xochitl Gomez in action as America Chavez, as well as the return of Rachel McAdams, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Benedict Wong.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness portals into theatres May 6.

If flash memory wasn’t already pricey enough before, it may get even more expensive now.

According to data storage manufacturer Western Digital, the company has lost 6.5 billion gigabytes of flash storage due to contamination during production. Converted to other storage units we’re looking at around 6.5 exabytes or 6.5 million terabytes. That’s a lot of flash storage. 

The cause of the contamination is currently unknown. The issue was first discovered late last month at two Japanese manufacturing plants that produce NAND chips run by Western Digital’s partner, Kioxia.

So, how does this affect you?

According to market research company TrendForce, Western Digital makes up about 30 percent of the total flash storage market. The firm says that this contamination can cause the price of NAND, which is the main component in faster and newer solid-state drives (SSDs), to skyrocket by 10 percent.

The timing of this contamination could not be worse for consumers. Supply chain problems combined with other issues, such as cryptocurrency mining, have caused shortages for all kinds of computer components. Along with graphics cards and processors, data storage like hard drives and SSDs have also been hit hard, causing prices for consumer products to rise and the products themselves to be difficult to find.

As of now, it’s not clear if any products that hit the market were affected by contamination or if any recalls will be necessary. In a public statement, Western Digital said its currently working towards resuming production at its facilities.