social media

The argument that we have the power to deal with the dangers of social media on our own can come across as cruelly individualistic tech-apologia.Photo Illustration by Victor Moussa / Shutterstock The power of platforms like Facebook and Google has escaped the control of the optimistic technocrats at their helm. And it is wreaking havoc in […]

Have you ever been walking in a dark alley and seen something that you thought was a crouching person, but it turned out to be a garbage bag or something similarly innocuous? Me too. Have you ever seen a person crouching in a dark alley and mistaken it for a garbage bag? Me neither. Why […]

The phone rang; a woman answered. Our awkward opening was brief. “This is my first time,” I said. “I’m not sure how this is supposed to go.” She said she’d be happy to listen. I’d just pressed a button in an app on my phone. The app’s red screen was cheerful, outdoorsy—there were smiling, hip […]

You may have noticed it by now: the—I guess I’ll call it an impulse—to anthropomorphize “2016.” It began gradually. First, we objectified it, likening it to a disturbing film, a force of nature, broken hardware. As Slate put it: In trying to wrap our heads around 2016’s all-reason-and-logic–defying onslaught of tragedy and absurdity, we objectified […]

Everybody has that one story they tell. That one incredibly unlikely thing that, had it not happened to them, they might not even believe. They found the only other person on a deserted mountain in China, and it was a long-lost friend from high school. They escaped being struck by lightning only because they dropped […]

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