Frame

I'm really excited to share what we've been working on since last summer: Frame Labs, a learning tool that generates visual, interactive articles on any topic you want to learn about. framelabs.ai Here’s an example below of what the output looks like when you ask it to teach you about Ernest Shackleton's treacherous Endurance expedition to Antarctica. We find Frame Labs great at teaching us about art, science, or history, but we’re excited for you to explore what you want to use it for. Here are some more prompts you can try: - Give me an art historical analysis of Michelangelo’s greatest works. - Teach me about the Siege of Stalingrad. - Describe how stars form. Happy exploring! (PS if the story doesn’t load on the first try, try refreshing the page and inputting the prompt again).

I’m thrilled to announce that Frame won a @TheWebbyAwards Award for Website in News & Politics! In 2024, we launched a new interactive article format that incorporated six years of lessons learned from creating multimedia journalism at Frame. The new article format features multimedia slides with text, images, videos, and graphics that form a story landscape, designed to immerse readers in a memory palace of information. Throughout the story, “Detours” allow readers to dive below the story and explore a tangent, providing context and asides that add depth to the topic. Here are two of my favorite pieces we put out last year: 🔹 The Fight to Save Philadelphia’s Chinatown: How developers' plans to build a sports arena left one of the U.S.' great Chinatowns at a crossroads — beta.frame.media/experimental/c… 🔹 Into the Gap: How the most dangerous jungle in the world became a perilous rite of passage for migrant children — beta.frame.media/experimental/c… Huge congrats to our team, Kelly Kimball, Jeremy Siwik, Tom Barnes, and Aloma Antao, and all our journalist contributors. Thanks as well to the people who have advised us along the way including Katherine Maher, Andrew Budkofsky, Biz Stone, and many more. Our hope with these stories is to provide a sense of digital “place” that helps readers feel present, less distracted, and more receptive to learning and exploring a new topic. I’m excited to announce that for the better part of the last year, we have been incorporating this format into the next iteration of Frame, Frame Labs. You can think of Frame Labs as a more visual version of ChatGPT or Claude, where you can ask any question and receive a multimedia, magazine-style article on the topic. We’re first rolling out Frame Labs to students to help them learn and retain information. Then we’ll be releasing Frame Labs to you all as a general multimedia search engine. Comment with a Frame emoji 🖼️ below to get early access to Frame Labs before our launch in the coming weeks!

Introducing The Endangered Mind: a podcast investigating what’s happening to our inner lives in the age of screens, notifications, and endless feeds. On the show, I have conversations with professors, artists, philosophers, and activists who are thinking about how technology is rewiring our minds — how it’s changing our capacity to be reflective, think deeply, and relate to one another. In the first episode, I speak with D. Graham Burnett. Burnett is a professor of history at Princeton and the co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention, an experimental school exploring how we can reclaim our attention in the age of constant technological stimulation. We discuss how social media companies have commodified our attention, the impact the attention economy has on human faculties such as reflection, creativity, and curiosity, and how the Strother School is creating a movement around attention activism. Listen to the episode now on Spotify (open.spotify.com/episode/0AHnww…) or Apple Podcasts (podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how…), and subscribe for new episodes.

Was great speaking at @WebSummit in Lisbon last week on new forms of digital news and how to redesign social media to sap our souls less, and instead facilitate depth, creativity, and reflection. Here are a few ideas we discussed on the panels: 🤳 Never before in human history have we had so much information, from wildly different contexts, put in front of us so rapidly. Social media creates a state of being where we switch between topics every five seconds or so, without entering deeply into any of them. It short-circuits our ability to really pay attention to something. When we pay attention to something without being rushed to the next topic, curiosity develops, we explore different parts of it, and new ideas form. How can we redesign social media and our phones to allow for that? 🏷 This state of being in our digital lives is affecting our real-life relationships. On our devices and social media, most things become 2-dimensional. We label something in seconds instead of exploring it the way we would a neighborhood in a city we’ve never been before. This digital lack of interest and quick-jerk thinking is starting to manifest in our real-life relationships. I’m noticing we are becoming quicker to label people and less able to hold space and explore different sides of them. We want quick answers, even from our relationships. ⛺ Technology can be used to facilitate human faculties like depth, creativity, exploration, and connection. In our current digital news ecosystem too much of the news we consume is knee-jerk reactions and soundbites. It’s hard to focus on a 1,000-word article. What if we created articles that felt like spaces, with rich visual landscapes filled with text, audio, and video? What if these articles had buttons that allowed you to dive below the story and dive into a rabbit hole, exploring a concept in more detail or learning a random fact about the story you’re reading? That’s what we’re working on at Frame; a software tool that allows any organization or publication to transform text into an article that encourages you to get lost in it, go on an educational adventure, and really pay attention. Here’s an example of what that can look like: bit.ly/3ZdAYSN Lots more to come on @exploreframe and how we can reform our relationship with tech. Stay tuned here! Really wonderful to be in conversation on redesigning social media with @JoshLowenthal, Keegan Lee, @benarroch_joe, @janemartinson, and discussing the future of digital news with @lucyblakiston and @gravache. Thank you @ShaunaKiely_, Antonnette Smith, and the Web Summit team for the invitation! 📷 Photo credit: Willian Prado / Agência HARIO @ClintonShauna31 / Web Summit via Sportsfile

In The Detour this week, managing editor Kelly Kimball dives into: ⚓ Why a mega-herd of sea lions has gathered in San Francisco 🏃Unpacking drama in the Brooklyn half-marathon community 👩‍🌾 Why working with our hands makes us happy And more. Check it out: exploreframe.substack.com/p/theres-beef-…

In The Detour this week, managing editor Kelly Kimball dives into: 🦁 Why Pride Month could be under threat this year 🦞 Did Red Lobster dig its own grave with “endless shrimp”? 🌞 We’re obsessed with “-henges” And more. Check it out: exploreframe.substack.com/p/the-us-issue…

My latest reporting assignment for @exploreframe took me to Philadelphia to meet with the #AAPI community and learn about their fight to preserve Chinatown against the construction of a new arena that would displace residents and small businesses. #aapihm beta.frame.media/experimental/c…

In The Detour this week, we dive into: 🦁 An AI tool to understand animal language 🖼️ New art at The Broad in Los Angeles 🎨 What a french painter reveals about TikTok’s “microfeminism” And more. Check it out: exploreframe.substack.com/p/how-ai-could…

Our latest — Journalist @AllisonJLau reports from Philadelphia to uncover the David-versus-Goliath-esque fight between Chinatown residents and the developer trying to build a new NBA arena in their backyard: beta.frame.media/experimental/c…

In the latest edition of our weekly newsletter, The Detour, managing editor Kelly Kimball dives into: 🥠 An American Chinatown in the shadow of mega-developers 👑 Inside the Miss USA controversy 🗣 The art of "fofoca" And more. Check it out: exploreframe.substack.com/p/the-fight-to…

In The Detour this week, we dive into: 🚃 Why Filipinos are raging over new jeepney laws 🎤 Unpacking Toomaj Salehi’s politically charged rap songs 🛣️ The power of an unplanned adventure And more. Check it out: exploreframe.substack.com/p/the-iranian-…

In The Detour this week, we dive into: 🇦🇷 Argentina’s economy at the brink 📷 A vintage Met Gala photo 🧠 The brain science of collective euphoria And more. Check it out: substack.com/home/post/p-14…

In The Detour this week, we dive into: 🌸 The not-so-rare occurrence of California superblooms — thanks to climate change ☠️ The real-life search for buried treasure 🧠 The commodification of the soul And more. Check it out: exploreframe.substack.com/p/a-search-for…

Frame has been nominated for an award at @TheWebbyAwards for our website in the News & Politics category! Frame was selected as one of the five top sites on the internet for our coverage of news & politics. Thank you for your readership. You can vote for us to earn the People's Voice award, too: vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/…

In the latest issue of The Detour, we dive into: 💻 An anatomy of misinformation amid the Israel-Hamas war 🪙 Crypto’s kingpin gets sentenced — a special guest post by @andrewrchow 🧠 The origins of consciousness And more. Check it out: exploreframe.substack.com/p/digital-warf…

Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants cross one of the world’s most treacherous regions, the Darien Gap. Journalist @michelle_shen10 tells the story of one family’s journey through the jungle: beta.frame.media/experimental/d…

In our latest issue of The Detour: 🚀 Dispatches from NASA HQ 🌳 The frontlines of deforestation law 👁️ Inside the world of people with no mind’s eye And more. Dive in: exploreframe.substack.com/p/what-its-lik…

In the latest edition of The Detour: 🇺🇳 Gaza needs aid, but the infrastructure to administer it is collapsing 🚀 NASA’s next generation of astronauts 🤶 What adolescent rebellion looks like in Amish communities Dive in: exploreframe.substack.com/p/why-deliveri…

Belarusian opposition leader @Tsihanouskaya sat down with @zinyasalfitii for Frame to discuss her rise to political prominence, eventual exile, and her ongoing fight against a dictatorial regime: beta.frame.media/experimental/b…

In our latest issue of The Detour: 🇧🇾 They threw her husband in jail, so she ran for president of Belarus 🐻‍❄️ Find My Friends for polar bears 🧠 The psychological recipe for happiness And more. Check it out: exploreframe.substack.com/p/the-woman-fi…