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A kindergarten class dispersed by war. A taut investigation into two men’s disappearance. A portrait of the legendary Harry Belafonte. Memories of a traditional cooking lesson. And everything that goes into the restaurant of the moment. These are our favorite reads of the week, chosen from all of our editors’ picks.
Elissa Nadworny, Claire Harbage | NPR | April 12, 2023 | 4,700 words
This piece takes war down to the micro level, the story of a conflict told not through politics or death tolls but through the fate of one class of kindergarten children. It makes for a blisteringly relatable read. Elissa Nadworny and Claire Harbage have carried out meticulous reporting, meeting several children and their families from a classroom in Kharkiv with “bright yellow and green walls and long, gauzy curtains.” (Such attentive details are sprinkled throughout.) Some children remain in Ukraine, but more than half have fled around the world, separated by thousands of miles. Some are struggling with new languages. Some can’t sleep. Some are still scared. They all miss each other. Beautiful photographs and snippets from their group chats help to bring their new realities to life. A small war story but a powerful one: These few children represent so many. —CW
What happened to Felipe Santos and Terrance Williams, two men who went missing three months apart in Immokalee, an agricultural town near Naples, Florida? As you discover in this gripping, well-researched investigation by Thomas Lake, the evidence points to Steven Calkins, the Collier County deputy suspected to be the last person to see both men. Lake and the CNN reporting team bring inconsistencies and telling details to light, and build minute-to-minute timelines of the days these men disappeared, using interview transcripts, dispatch logs, phone records, and other documents. Calkins declined interview requests, but comments from people around him, including former colleagues, reveal suspicion and a loss of trust in the former officer. Still, the cases remain unsolved, and you wonder: Where is the justice for these men, for their families, for this small town? —CLR
Like Harry Belafonte himself, there is much to love about Jeff Sharlet’s profile of the legendary singer, actor, and activist who died this week at the age of 96. The writing is vivid, the quotes astonishing, every anecdote riveting. Like the one where Belafonte recruits Sidney Poitier to go with him to hand-deliver $50,000 to civil rights organizers in Mississippi, amid a storm of violence and threats of it. (“They might think twice about killing two big n****rs,” Belafonte tells Poitier.) A truck presumably driven by Klansmen meets them at the Greenwood airstrip and follows them into town, ramming the back of the car that’s carrying them. When Belafonte arrives at a dance hall where supporters are waiting, he sings a version of his most famous tune, “Banana Boat (Day-o),” and defiantly dumps a bag full of dollars onto a table. What a story — to put it lightly, holy crap. But the moment that got me most in this gorgeous piece is when Sharlet sits in an archive, headphones on his ears, watching a tape of “Tonight with Belafonte,” an iconic 1959 TV revue. “I felt like I was watching a different past, one in which the revolution had been televised,” Sharlet writes. “Goddamn. As if that was what TV was for. A signal. This, I thought, this.” I have the same feeling about Belafonte’s existence. It showed what living could be for. This, I’m still thinking. This. —SD
Jasmin Attia | Literary Hub | March 27, 2023 | 2,014 words
Jasmin Attia’s beautiful Lit Hub essay puts you, the reader, in the kitchen as she and her mother make waraa eynab (stuffed grape leaves). This is a story that captures all your senses: You can smell the sumac, feel the smooth grape leaves, and hear the perfect traditional soup bubbling gently on the stove, a meal that binds her Egyptian heritage with her birth in America. One of the most difficult jobs a writer must do is convey lived experience so that those who lack it can begin to understand. “But my hands must still learn what the right amount of meat feels like between my fingers. There is no recipe in my family, nothing written down, no measurements. Measurements are for the inept. This is my mother’s mantra. We, the proud women of the family, we feel and smell and taste and touch and create. We know when it is good because we know when it is good,” she writes. This small but wonderful taste of Attia’s writing left me hungry for a second helping. —KS
Most writing about food focuses on the output. Some of it focuses on the people. A bit of it focuses on technique. But not enough of it teases out the synesthesia of a night in a restaurant: the adrenaline, the prep, the community, the taste. The vibe of eating, as much as I hate to use that word. Brett Martin’s piece shrugs off those limitations on its way to being the most visceral look inside a restaurant since The Bear. Nominally a profile of punk-drummer-turned-chef Brooks Headley and his vegetarian burger joint, it manages to capture the twin high-wire acts of executing and eating inside New York City’s restaurant of the moment. Martin veers from evocative tasting notes (“[s]omething about the feathery sheets of tofu skin, layered on a squishy hero roll with broccoli rabe and a spiced chickpea paste that evokes Vietnamese pate, flips the same feral switch in my chest as does eating, say, andouillette, the most offaly of French sausages”) to capturing Headley at full speed on a packed Thursday night (“[o]ften, he’ll bustle in one direction, only to pull up short as though he’s forgotten what he was doing, and then run off in another”) to some shrewd commentary on the punk ethos and food gentrification. It feels, in the very best way, like you’re a drone being piloted through Superiority Burger during a dinner rush. Whether it makes you hungry is beside the point; it’s a feast of its own. —PR
Audience Award
It’s time for the piece our readers loved most this week — and the oversized trophy goes to:
Jeff Weiss | The Ringer | April 20, 2023 | 4,237 words
I’ll get this out of the way: I’m not a fan of Frank Ocean, nor am I really familiar with his music. Ocean’s return to the stage wasn’t some long-awaited moment for me as it was for many festival-goers on the final night of Coachella’s first weekend. But that didn’t matter one bit as I dived into Jeff Weiss’ fantastic dispatch from the desert, in which he transports the reader to the festival as the crowd waits for the singer’s headlining performance. Ocean puts on a shaky, underwhelming, and chaotic show, which Weiss masterfully describes. But what makes this piece so good is the perfect encapsulation of the collective experience that is Coachella, and — for someone like me, who experienced its earliest iterations in 1999 and the early 2000s — it’s an insightful read not just on this specific performance, but a look at how the festival has evolved over the years, and a deep, thoughtful critique on the music industry, performance and artistry, and our culture today. —CLR
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As with many ‘90s and ‘00s kids, I have fond memories of pulling up addictinggames.com (which is still around!) on the school computer between classes and during study hall — until the staff figured out how to block it. That video game tug-of-war between intrepid students and disgruntled teachers has continued unabated, and now my own first grader is learning the tricks of the trade. This surprisingly congenial article details the new generation of game developers, teachers, and students now engaged in that same struggle.
Kids have been trying to play video games on school computers for as long as computers have cropped up in schools, but decades ago, they jumped through those hoops in a dedicated computer lab, or secretly downloaded homemade games to their TI-83 calculators while pretending to crunch equations. But these days, computers are deeply intertwined into education, and many school age children have regular access to a computer, usually a Chromebook or iPad, as early as 1st grade, when kids are only six or seven years old.
What exists now is an escalating game of whack-a-mole between students, teachers, and IT departments, as kids hopeful to do anything but school work try to find a way to play games.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2023/04/27/inside-the-chaotic-world-of-kids-trying-to-play-video-games-on-school-laptops/
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On a November night in 2018, I went to a show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the kind of show that fans like me enjoy telling other fans they were there for, years after the fact. Three songwriters in their 20s — Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, and Julien Baker — performed on one bill. It was the first date of their tour together, and the first time any of them had played that historic venue; it was also the debut of a collab — a girl group — that they’d come to call, with clever irony, boygenius. I like to think the three women remember that night as some kind of watershed; after all, who wouldn’t file their first Ryman gig away with reverence?
I was there, by myself, a little thunderstruck on a pew in the balcony stage right, in my solitude. I can’t quite own this night as an origin story of my own late-coming catapult to creative heights, art begetting art, Fuck yeah! But I did feel brighter inside that night — my own heart, own mind, reflected in the songs I heard performed. Such a long, strange time it’d been, full of becoming-a-mother, since I’d gone to a show alone. I was 45 and, for the first time in a long time, face to face again with my old self — a girl who went to rock shows alone and loved it.
Yet when I thought about the show, and how it made me think about my own attempts at art, there lurked the old sidekick of negative comparison, the voice of deeply received ideas about professional trajectory and age: What were you doing in your 20s? You sure weren’t followed by fans, touring the world, selling art made from your sadness. (Never mind that I don’t play music. Art and commerce is art and commerce.)
Too late, too late, the haint muttered.
Three years later, I’m sitting across from my daughter at a coffee shop. I look up from work emails to see her with her earbuds in, squinting at her laptop. I ask her what she’s up to.
“Listening to music, and researching the music I’m listening to.” I ask her what she’s listening to, and she speaks in a rush. “Phoebe Bridgers. I’m listening to Punisher all the way through because I’ve actually never done that although I know all the songs. I have an idea. I’ll tell you about it later. This would be a good day for a walk. Look outside.”
I follow her gaze. The sky is a soft white-gray, the kind of sky she and I both like, not too much heat. We prefer it cloudy. Too much bright sunlight hurts her green eyes, while for me it can trigger despair for the burning world she’ll inherit. She’s right, it’s a good day for a walk. We toss our latte cups and head out.
She and I talk about all kinds of things on our walks; often, we talk about music. She writes songs, plays guitar and piano. Has, at 13, a journal full of songs. Wants to start a band, says her favorite instrument is her voice. I enjoy the soft anticipation of what she might create next and how she will create differently, year to year, as she grows. What and who will influence her next? Who will she leave behind, pick up, come back to? Who and what will stay with her the rest of her life? We amble around the neighborhood, and she asks for permission to paint Phoebe Bridgers’ lyrics on her bedroom door. I think about it for a minute, say sure.
Then I remind her that I played “Motion Sickness” for her back in ’18. Shortly after I went to that show at the Ryman. I remember cueing up Stranger in the Alps in the car and saying, Check this out, I think you might like it. Her prompt rebuttal: She was only 10 back then. And I know she’s won this one. It’s true she had to find her own way, just as I did so many times. Neil Young, say. His records lined up in my parents’ cabinet, played on their turntable on Sunday mornings, decades before I went to college and met a guy who turned me on to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
I enjoy the soft anticipation of what she might create next and how she will create differently, year to year, as she grows. What and who will influence her next? Who will she leave behind, pick up, come back to? Who and what will stay with her the rest of her life?
So yeah, I won’t harp on being first to the Phoebe party. But just a playful reminder or two seems within my rights as a Cool Mom — which is a thing some friends have called me on occasion, and while it’s a thing I don’t exactly feel (I mean, is there a person on earth who has actually felt cool?), that hasn’t stopped me from wagging this status in front of my kid from time to time. Which is itself a very uncool thing to do, and makes me feel evermore like Just Plain Mom, aggressively so. Not that I mind. It’s a role I can step into when inside, on balance, I don’t feel very Momish at all.
Much of the time, I feel like a girl. A curious girl of 48 who, today, is walking the neighborhood streets with a girl of 13, and listening to what this girl has to say. She happens to be my kid, this person I made, a living being that gave my life a whole new significance. She will grow up and leave me and yet never leave me; she will be mine forever, a being I shaped.
2.
I wore headphones everywhere I went. I was in my 20s and constantly soundtracked my life. Long before I met my husband, before we became a family, going to shows and listening to music was what I did for fun more than anything else, the way some people devour movies or sports. It was hard for me to get close to people back then, which was maybe a function of the anxiety I didn’t know how to name. I didn’t have a lot of girlfriends, and the ones I had didn’t love the bands I loved. Was that why I had so few? The music, the art that spoke to me, was too important. And that art, often, made feeling alienated seem like a calling, a stance I could happily take. The pilot light of my identity, not a problem to be solved. So I went to shows by myself, alone in a crowd of people feeding off the same vibes from the players onstage.
Where was I? The Empty Bottle. The Cat’s Cradle. The Masquerade. The Mercy Lounge. The Local 506. Some of these clubs no longer exist. It was Chicago’s Lounge Ax, RIP, where I saw Cat Power on her Moon Pix tour, which to me will always feel like a form of strange currency, but if you don’t know or care who Cat Power is or what Lounge Ax was, what matters is that it was just me and the music in a tight crowd, standing room only, me with my coat folded over my arm and a beer in my hand, watching Chan Marshall at the piano, backed by the guys from the Dirty Three on violin and guitar and drums. Those songs were the apex of mood and shadow and longing, each instrument wandering, searching in the dark, doing their own thing and somehow staying in reach of each other. The songs felt loose, improvised, messy, perfect. Marshall’s voice so smoky and resolute, occasionally desperate. I went home and listened to “Metal Heart” again and again while outside the window, above my street, the El trundled past on the Blue Line, throwing sparks from the tracks.
So many shows. I don’t have many memories of the countless bands I watched perform. Lately I’ve been wondering if I was happy going to all those shows alone, or if I’d just done a bang-up job of convincing myself that I was. But I never felt lonely, and to this day I think of my taste for solitude as a strength. Did I not understand, back then, the forms that loneliness can take? You can convince yourself of so much; it is a superpower most of us share.
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The shows have mostly drifted away, leaving not a whole lot washed up. I don’t have a killer T-shirt collection or a box of ticket stubs. There were hardly ever tickets for the kind of shows I went to back then, just a stamp or a black mark Sharpied on your hand, like the big black X the door guy drew on both of my daughter’s hands, marking her underage, when I took her to see Lucy Dacus on tour for Home Video. It made me happy to see a club still doing that — marking hands with Xs that linger the next day and the next.
I’d taken T to a few shows before, but it was her first time in a bona fide rock club, the kind of place that’s standing room only, and she looked around with fresh eyes, admiring the way the mirror balls cast dreamy dots over everything, the dim room crisscrossed by beams of purple light. I wondered if she would leave at the end of the night more fiercely determined to make music.
I bought a Coke for her and a beer for me and asked the bartender to snap our picture. We found a space in the growing crowd and, while we waited for Dacus to come out, watched images from her childhood flash on a screen above the stage. The images formed a narrative loop we watched five or six times. Singer as baby, as toddler, as singing and dancing kid. Family members and friends with her here and there. The singer as young adult in a yellow beanie, beside a van. The singer with a guitar, on stage.
When the singer appeared in the flesh at last, in a blue off-the-shoulder gown, she began the show with the track “First Time,” just as T predicted she would. In that song and others from the album, she looks back with preternaturally measured sight at the formative experiences of youth, lifted up to us in a serene alto.
The songs she shared that night, and on her records, channel adolescence in a way that makes them accessible, if meaningful in different ways, to listeners across the generational spectrum — say, a Gen X mom and her Gen Z kid. Dacus, single and in her 20s, seems as preoccupied with the bewildering effects of the passage of time as I am in the throes of middle-age parenting. In her songs she meets the people of her present and the ghosts of her past with steel draped in silk, a red lip, and a metal riff. She gives teenage experience prominence in a way that feels fresh, never stooping to mock or dismiss or caricature. She observes, with tenderness and acceptance, the mistakes and fumbles of young people learning how to be in the world.
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I particularly love the song “Going Going Gone,” where we meet a boy named Daniel, the narrator’s high school crush. They sit together on a bench, “watching the day end hand in hand”; ten years later he’s “grabbing asses, spilling beers.” Then Dacus comes in for the killer. Ten years more and he’ll have a daughter; “she’ll grow up and he can’t stop her.”
She’ll grow up and he can’t stop her. My breath catches when I hear that line. Sometimes my eyes well up. I want to high-five Dacus for this genius turn, for her ability to go in one verse from Daniel’s youthful swagger and misdeeds to Daniel’s helplessness in the face of what parenthood will do to a person. I want to high-five her most of all for recognizing Daniel’s imaginary daughter as the free, empowered one, the one who can’t be stopped.
Until, perhaps, she has a daughter of her own? In some ways, Dacus sights a specifically father-daughter relationship, or even a male-female relationship born of the patriarchy: the stinging vulnerability that comes with not being able to control a woman, maybe one who is your flesh and blood. In another way, it’s any parent’s fate.
T and I have been listening to these songs over and over, and other ones. Young women artists, mostly. Lorde’s Solar Power has gotten a workout, and while I’ll never be the Swiftie T is, folklore and evermore easily won my affection. After we watched Miss Americana I found a new hero in Taylor, felt a whole new surge of rage for the way smart, ambitious young women have long gotten the shaft — been diminished, declawed, branded as bitches if they don’t act the part of nice girls.
The young women T and I fill our ears with these days are also willing to express doubt and indecision, a blankness, a numbness, that is often the body’s response to a world that feels overwhelming, a world that asks too much and offers too much and too little at the same time.
Then there’s Phoebe, my daughter’s other main songwriter crush of 2021. Her weary, wink-wink humor suits me, too. The narrator of “Kyoto,” on tour far from home, thinks of her estranged dad and half-forgives him for being — to borrow a phrase from Dacus — a dumpster dad. But she’s also thinking about other dudes who’ve let her down. She sees the destructive behavior of the men in her life and raises it with an upbeat, poppy melody that is the very sound of her growing up and chasing her dreams despite it all. “I want to kill you / if you don’t beat me to it,” she sings — a painfully familiar feeling for anyone who’s fallen in with a certain breed of sad, self-destructive young men. But it’s not all about the breakups and the bad behavior for her, either. Dacus and Bridgers both sing of the sanctity of their inner selves, about protecting what’s theirs and theirs alone. Lorde, too, refuses to pick up the phone if it’s the label, would rather lose herself in nature as long as she needs to.
The young women T and I fill our ears with these days are also willing to express doubt and indecision, a blankness, a numbness, that is often the body’s response to a world that feels overwhelming, a world that asks too much and offers too much and too little at the same time. I can hardly feel anything I hardly feel anything at all, Bridgers sings in “Motion Sickness,” off 2017’s Stranger in the Alps. In a song on Punisher, she writes, I feel something when I see you now, suggesting a passage into a healthier relationship. Dacus ends several songs on Home Video in a lilt that suggests a non-ending, as if the song could go on but she’s unsure whether to let it or not, but is comfortable enough in that unsureness — it is right for the terrain the lyrics mine. The future is a benevolent black hole are the last words of “Cartwheel.” There’s Dacus’ low-key optimism nudging up against an absolute lack of faith in anything but the truth that there’s so much we cannot know, and that bad things are going to keep happening, but maybe-just-maybe we’ll be all right.
Maybe it’s not strange at all that my 13-year-old and I are listening to the same artists, having the same, or at least similar, emotional responses. But I did not experience anything like this with my mother; nor did I know how to play guitar or to think of myself, possibly, as a singer, too. And the songs themselves seem a far, far cry from the ones on the airwaves and CDs of my youth, which were largely about wanting someone romantically, or about despairing that they didn’t want you back, or about an angry aversion to being wanted at all. Or else they got super abstract and weird. Or they took on the world with an air of disdain and disaffected irony. In the ’80s and ’90s, if young women were singing about not being sure of anything, I didn’t hear their words over and over and over in my ears, I didn’t write their words on my bedroom door. I was not imagining a future for myself onstage. I was deeply attracted to a few female artists for their dark energy, their moody ferocity — PJ Harvey singing “You’re not rid of me,” Kirstin Hersh singing “I hate my way,” Courtney Love singing “I made my bed I’ll die in it” — but I couldn’t see myself clearly in them or their words; even when angry or sad, they bore a certainty, a fuck-all confidence I did not possess. I don’t recall them singing anything that sounded like I don’t know or I don’t know what I feel or I feel nothing because I’m scared to let myself feel at all.
The world may be on fire in so many ways. And I may shudder to imagine the future T will navigate as she grows up. But right this minute I’ll take what I can get, which is that we’re living in a golden age of young women speaking their truths through song. Pop stars being badasses, as ever, but expressing doubt, and doing it without the flagellating self-destruction that might have come with an early iteration. They are unafraid, well-versed in looking boldly at the men around them, not only as objects of attraction or the cause of personal pain. They stare back, determined to control or reframe the narrative. And they’re funny. I swear I’m not angry / that’s just my face, Bridgers sings, which I suppose sounds as sweet to a 13-year-old of the present as it does to a girl of the ’80s and ’90s who was constantly told by men to smile. Every time I hear her sing that, I actually want to smile.
A benevolent black hole — has there ever been a better phrase to capture the anxiety felt by a young person who nevertheless knows she is loved? I recently asked T what she thought Dacus meant by that phrase. “The future will bring good things,” she said in response, “but it’s going to suck you up without your permission.”
3.
Another coffee shop afternoon, more chai lattes and work emails and headphones. I’m observing T again. I am scared — of feeling like she’s everything, of losing myself in her, and of losing her, of not holding her close enough. Women like me, who feel the art monsters forever kicking in their bellies, we’re always trying so hard not to let this happen, not to lose ourselves in our children. It is (invisible) work to find the balance. And it is work, for me, to not dwell on what I haven’t done, to lose what time I have left in regret over time squandered. Why wasn’t I making more art back then, in all the solitude of my 20s, not just going to shows? Why didn’t the urge burn more brightly? Why do the flames leap when I am otherwise committed, trying to savor each moment of my constantly evolving relationship with my child?
She looks up at me. “What?”
“What?”
“You’re looking at me.”
“And?”
She is looking into her phone again. The camera, this time. “I have the best eyebrows,” she says. “Look at them.”
The inner strength with which she navigates our bewildering world — is it real? Will it persist? “I feel like I’m the best version of myself right now,” she tells me one night as we’re sitting at the dinner table, candles lit; me with my journal, her finishing her math homework. The confidence she presents often startles me, and even though I know what she shows is never the whole picture, I allow myself to swell with wonder. There might be a lesson for me here. She gets frustrated when I’m self-critical, and I try hard not to be, although sometimes I give into the urge, just to see how she’ll react.
This move feels, in fact, like a reckless teenage impulse: to do the thing you know will set someone off. The girl I was, alive and kicking. And rocking out. I never stopped. I don’t know what to make of the fact that I can hear a verse or a line and think, Yes! Yes that’s so sharp, that’s the exquisite truth, and later T will quote that same verse to me as an example of a lyric that is hitting her just right. It may simply be that I am perpetually a girl, but also that girls possess more wisdom than anyone wants to give them credit for.
One morning on the way to school, T points to her mask and said, We’ll be wearing these forever. I say no and she says yes. We talk about climate-change anxiety. It’s a totally normal mental state for Gen Z kids like her, she said, matter-of-factly. I think about the Phoebe Bridgers concert I’d taken her to just a few weeks earlier. Music festival Bonnaroo, where Bridgers had been scheduled to perform, was dealt a blow by Hurricane Ida’s downpour — the festival site badly flooded — and Bridgers, along with two other ’Roo artists, ended up playing a venue in town instead. I snapped up two tickets as soon as I heard. In other words, Bonnaroo’s climate-change-fueled loss was our gain.
Will that concert go down as a highlight of T’s youth, of her life in music — or is it me who will harbor the most acute memories? I wonder what details will stick for her, many years from now. Will she remember that Bridgers closed the show, as she predicted, with the apocalypse anthem “I Know the End,” which I tend to refer to as “The End Is Near,” which drives T nuts, and which in turn cracks me up? Or that we showed our vax cards to get in? That the merch included a T-shirt that read Phoebe& / Phoebe& / Phoebe& / Phoebe, in a cheeky twist on the Beatles tee motif? That Bridgers and her bandmates all wore skeleton suits? That there was no encore, but we were okay with that, because it was late and we had to walk back across the river, through downtown, where there were drunks on the streets and in the pedal taverns, and the constant roar of the tourist throng was downright spooky? That during the show the air smelled sweetly of pot, and that, all around us, young women were singing along?
4.
A year and a half whooshes by. T is almost 15, I’m almost 50, all of it feels like an impossible dream, far too fast. In the same week that Nashville becomes the site of the latest mass shooting in the United States, boygenius triumphantly returns — not to the Ryman, but with the drop of their first full-length record, titled the record. On the album, its title a wink-wink nod to the many questions these artists have fielded about when such a project might see the light of day, Baker and Bridgers and Dacus share songwriting credits equally on all 12 songs; they celebrate their friendship and the stories they’ve created together. The record is full of “the kind of rhapsodic romanticism that flows out of the early days of close female friendship, when you are not sure if you are in love with the other person or just in love with the fact that you finally have someone to talk to,” Rachel Syme writes in The New Yorker. “To listen to their music is to partake, vicariously, in the joy of their impassioned entanglement. …That their future is unwritten … is part of what makes the band feel so thrilling and, for the moment at least, so urgent.”
T and I buy the record the day it comes out, as soon as she gets home from school. We listen together, obsessively, for weeks; we sing along, loud, in the car. We speculate on the inspiration for songs, we squeal at the artists’ Instagram feeds, we echo our favorite lines and debate the meaning of cryptic ones. Both of us are in love with the chant-like repetition and shifting harmonies on “Not Strong Enough.” Both of us think it’s funny how “Satanist” sounds like a Weezer jam. We listen to Lucy sing, “When you don’t know who you are, you fuck around and find out.” Time and time again, we sing along with Phoebe: “I don’t know why I am / the way I am,” and I think, Yes, that’s the truth.
We listen on the morning drive to school, looking forward already to the summer day, a little over a month from now, when boygenius will return to Nashville and play a show in Centennial Park. The two of us are there. We can’t wait, we can’t wait. What song will they open with? What will be the encore? I don’t have any other girlfriends who are into boygenius the way I am — that’s the truth. But I do have this music-loving kid of mine.
She gets out of the car, says I love you, and I feel confident she’ll walk in the building and have a decent day. Just normal, boring school. No lockdown drills, no tornado ripping up the building’s roof like one did in middle school, no firearms found on campus. Just high school with its dramas and dreams in chrysalis. And when I pick her up from school she will be smiling and carefree, or she will be irritable and tired, with her whole life ahead of her. And I am glad to see her either way, and still my heart sings a sharp note, another infinitesimal splinter.
Susannah Felts is cofounder and codirector of The Porch, a nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2014 and based in Nashville, Tennessee. She is a columnist for BookPage and writes the Substack newsletter FIELD TRIP, and her work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, Guernica, Literary Hub, Joyland, StorySouth, Oxford American, and elsewhere.
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Odessa, a Ukrainian diner in the heart of New York’s East Village, was a legendary institution for 35 years. Then it closed. Now the space is home to a vegetarian burger joint deemed “the buzziest restaurant in America” by GQ. (Cue “Circle of Life.”) Does Superiority Burger merit such breathless? Who cares? The real draw is Brett Martin’s elbows-on-the-table profile of the restaurant; if the food is anywhere near as viscerally enjoyable as the story, it’s well worth the superlatives.
Though Headley arrives early in the morning to do prep work and develop new dishes, and has lately been in charge of cooking the daily family meal for staff, he spends little time in the kitchen during service. Instead, he’s in constant motion on the floor, wearing his paper hat, black hoodie, dark green pants, and clogs. He checks in on tables, runs out burgers, and rushes to clear plates as quickly as they are done, a touch he says is borrowed from Roll-N-Roaster, the venerable Sheepshead Bay roast-beef restaurant. If there’s been one complaint these first weeks, he says, it’s that service is too fast. Often, he’ll bustle in one direction, only to pull up short as though he’s forgotten what he was doing, and then run off in another. In fact, he’s monitoring music volumes, which vary wildly from song to song and spot to spot, in part because he insisted on replicating Odessa’s vintage ceiling speakers instead of installing a modern sound system. For each dinner service, he creates a fourteen-hour playlist, which he then DJs in real time from his phone, adjusting to the shifting energy of the room. (If the mark of a truly great restaurant soundtrack is regularly defeating Shazam, Headley’s playlist achieves it tonight, by my count, in five songs.) On most nights he clocks over 35,000 steps according to the device on his wrist, without venturing beyond the short walk to his apartment and the restaurant floor.
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In a piece that took eight months to report, Elissa Nadowrny and Claire Harbage trace what happened to one group of Ukrainian kindergarten children, scattered after war ravaged their country. It’s understated and moving, with some poignant photography to boot. These children “represent millions of children from Ukraine who have left and who have stayed.”
Of the 27 students in that green and yellow kindergarten class, ultimately, more than half would leave the country — driving south through Moldova or west into Poland. For some, it was easier. They had relatives abroad, preexisting plans to emigrate, or a destination in mind. For others, it was much harder: weeks or months living in refugee camps in Poland and Germany; constantly moving from one country to another in search of housing, jobs and stability.
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In 1980, in one of the most horrific events in the history of modern South Korea, at least 165 civilians were killed during a pro-democracy uprising in Gwangju. Max Kim tells the story of Choi Byung-moon, one of the 3,000 special-forces soldiers who were deployed to crush the demonstrations, and zooms in on an incident involving an attack on a minibus, which killed all but three people on board. Two of those three survivors were later executed; the fate of the third person, a girl who Choi encountered among the dead, is unknown to him for decades. A low-ranking soldier at the time, Choi believed he was simply doing his duty, but later began to “feel burdened by a deepening sense of complicity,” writes Kim, “both as a cog in a larger machine of killing and later as a silent witness.”
But in 2020, Choi received a phone call that challenged everything he remembered from that day. The girl, he learns, is alive. Or is she? As the truth unravels, Kim weaves a moving story of regret, the unreliability of memory, and the freedom from closure.
On a frigid day in December 2020, Huh and his team met with Choi at a chicken restaurant in Incheon, a port city west of Seoul. Over shots of soju, Choi began to tell them, at first a little cautiously, what he’d seen in Gwangju, eventually turning the topic to an incident that sounded familiar to Huh. “He told us that he’d saved a young girl and handed her off, but that she had probably been taken to a military camp and executed,” recalled Huh. “He had believed this version of events his entire life.”
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You know someone’s the best chess player in the world — and possibly ever — when they don’t even both to defend their world title for the fifth time. Magnus Carlsen has long been a phenomenon on the 64 squares, and David Hill does a (grand)masterful job tying together the current moment, chess’ bizarre new cultural primacy, and some surprisingly accessible chess analysis.
Games like this showed how chess heretics were unshackling themselves from dogma—exposing their kings and pushing their h-pawns with abandon! While this required Carlsen and other older players to unlearn things ingrained in them for most of their lives, Firouzja and his generation were born into this world. They, and those who will come after them, won’t need to undo what teachers and books taught them. It’s all but certain that modern technology will have a profound impact on how the next elite chess players and world champions play the game.
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At Wired, Matt Reynolds suggests that increasing human longevity could possibly be related to extending our “healthspan” — the length of time we enjoy relatively good health before we become frail and more likely to suffer serious consequences from falls.
Healthspan—years lived in good health—might be the unsexy cousin of longevity research, but figuring out ways for people to live healthier lives could have a much greater impact than extending lifespan by a few years. A big part of extending healthy lives is pinpointing when people start to decline in health, and what the early indicators of that decline might be. One way is by looking at frailty—a measure that usually takes into account factors like social isolation, mobility, and health conditions to produce an overall frailty score. In England, the National Health Service automatically calculates frailty scores for everyone aged 65 and over, with the aim to help people live independently for longer and avoid two major causes of hospital admissions for older people: falls and adverse responses to medication.
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Charlie Werzel worked at Buzzfeed News during its heyday, a time, he writes, that “felt a bit like standing in the eye of the hurricane that is the internet.” With glorious anecdotes and thoughtful analysis of Buzzfeed News’ achievements, this is a fitting tribute to an institution that last week sadly shuttered its doors.
Morgan was barreling through the office, lifting his shirt up, smacking his belly, and cracking jokes about how pale all of us internet writers looked. I remember our lone investigative reporter, Alex Campbell, scurrying away from his desk, a row away from mine, to continue his reporting call in silence. A few months later, the story he’d been working on would help free an innocent woman from prison.
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In this beautiful essay, Jasmine Attia recounts her experiences growing up as the American child of Egyptian immigrants as she and her mother make waraa eynab (stuffed grape leaves), a hand-made dish made with experience, tradition, and love.
But my hands must still learn what the right amount of meat feels like between my fingers. There is no recipe in my family, nothing written down, no measurements. Measurements are for the inept. This is my mother’s mantra. We, the proud women of the family, we feel and smell and taste and touch and create. We know when it is good because we know when it is good. But some of the clan is gone, and they are only echoes now. My mother and I don’t speak of the deceased, but we understand why I must be the one to roll. I am soaking in the instruction. It is a heavy responsibility.
My mother and I roll about a hundred grape leaves. They are now ready to be cooked. We lay them in a pot one layer at a time, one arranged horizontally and the next vertically. Garlic cloves are inserted throughout. A soup is made. You must put in sumac. No sumac, no waraa eynab. I understand this. My mother grabs a handful of the crimson powder, its lemony scent filling the air around us, and she drops it into the pot. The soup can’t be too loose. She stirs the unready soup with a spoon. It must be just the right thickness, and not too salty.
She shows me what is right. I must taste it to know. I must see it. I pour the soup over the precisely arranged grape leaves so that I can see just how much of them should be covered with soup. Too much soup and you get mush. Too little soup and you get cardboard. Both very bad outcomes for an Egyptian apprentice like me.
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Alexandra Kleeman covers a lot of ground in this examination of the recent remake of Dead Ringers: Comparison to David Cronenberg’s original 1988 psychological thriller, Rachel Weisz’s career, how pregnancy is portrayed in media, and reproduction in the United States. Cleverly interweaving her themes to avoid any overwhelm, this is sure to keep your attention — and make you want to watch Rachel Weisz’s stunning performance in the series.
So much of the anxiety around reproduction in the United States has to do with the contradiction of being dependent and isolated at once: dependent on a health care system that must be paid for privately; dependent on a political apparatus outside your control that can force you to give birth while denying any resources or care to the baby that is born; isolated by the moral codes and prescriptions that circulate in the media and among the people in our lives. We often approach pregnancy with a hunger for clean, clear answers — the exact week at which a pregnant body should no longer be allowed caffeine or soft cheese, or the moment at which a bundle of cells becomes a legally protected human being — but living matter resists these attempts at containment.
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Computer scientist Jaron Lanier suggests that for society to thrive in the age of artificial intelligence, data dignity — a concept under which people are paid for what they contribute to the web — is something we must carefully explore. It’s not about the robots taking over and obliterating the human race (although some think that’s going to happen!) it’s about putting people before machines, about prizing clarity of intent, purpose, and collaboration for the benefit of all.
The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature. My attitude doesn’t eliminate the possibility of peril: however we think about it, we can still design and operate our new tech badly, in ways that can hurt us or even lead to our extinction. Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams. We can work better under the assumption that there is no such thing as A.I. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we’ll start managing our new technology intelligently.
If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration.
A positive spin on A.I. is that it might spell the end of this torture, if we use it well. We can now imagine a Web site that reformulates itself on the fly for someone who is color-blind, say, or a site that tailors itself to someone’s particular cognitive abilities and styles. A humanist like me wants people to have more control, rather than be overly influenced or guided by technology. Flexibility may give us back some agency.
Anything engineered—cars, bridges, buildings—can cause harm to people, and yet we have built a civilization on engineering. It’s by increasing and broadening human awareness, responsibility, and participation that we can make automation safe; conversely, if we treat our inventions as occult objects, we can hardly be good engineers. Seeing A.I. as a form of social collaboration is more actionable: it gives us access to the engine room, which is made of people.
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Music star and civil rights icon Harry Belafonte died this week at the age of 96. A decade ago, on the heels of the release of the icon’s memoir and a documentary about his seismic influence, acclaimed journalist Jeff Sharlet wrote an intimate, lyrical profile of Belafonte. It’s about his singular cultural symbolism and its complications, about witnessing the evolution of his own legacy, and about reckoning with what, in a life full of remarkable achievements, he couldn’t accomplish:
Belafonte wants to tell me about a movie he never made, probably never could have made.
Amos ’n Andy. Not like Bamboozled, Spike Lee’s postmodern riff on blackface, but Amos ’n Andy as a history of minstrelsy going back to the beginning. It was the director Robert Altman’s idea. A movie of a minstrel show. White men in blackface who mimicked every brilliant song, every joke, every true story ever told by a black woman or man: stole it all and played it again, as both tragedy and farce, tragedy because it was farce.
“It’s about the mask,” Belafonte says, speaking in the present tense like he’s talking strategy and tactics, sipping Harvey’s Bristol Cream. “It’s about how much time people spend being false, how often we façade our behavior. Nobody’s better at that than the minstrels. And in them I see all of us. Everybody’s in the minstrel show. Behind the mask, you can say and do anything. The Greeks did it. Shakespeare used it when he wrote the jester. Those he could not give the speech to, he created the jester to say it. All of America’s problems are rooted in the fact that we’re all jesters. Not one of us truth tellers. So how do you get to the truth? Well, how do Amos ’n Andy do it? What’s behind the mask?”
This: In the mimicry and the falsehood, you can still find the roots of the song. “The art for me is how do you bend it your way?”
Maybe it couldn’t be done. He told Altman, “You’re going to get us both fucking killed. Black people gonna be completely outraged. Don’t go to black people with blackface. And white people know it’s politically incorrect. There’s no audience.”
Altman said, “Except everybody.”
Belafonte’s quiet. Then: “But Altman left me here all alone.” Altman died in 2006. His last movie was A Prairie Home Companion. Belafonte shakes his head, talking to no one now. “Everybody’s in the minstrel show. Everybody’s a minstrel act.”
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In this essay for We Are the Mutants, Michael A. Gonzales describes his experiences in the ’80s as both a patron and an employee of the Tower Records on Fourth and Broadway in New York City. The details in his piece immediately transported me back to my favorite summer of my youth, in 1998, when I worked at my local Tower in San Mateo, California, alongside a bunch of cool, creative, and rebellious teens and young adults. We were all so different from each other, steeped in various musical tastes and subcultures, yet all came together inside our store to sell records, CDs, cassettes, and VHS tapes — and to talk about and share a collective passion for music.
My Tower Records experience is vastly different from Gonzales’ — famous artists and celebrities didn’t come into our store, for instance, and our Bay Area suburban strip mall location pales in comparison to the bustling, legendary location in the Village. But still, I appreciate the small moments he recounts, like his interview for the job, or running the register, or how employees raced to the stereo to change the music. I have similar fond memories from that glorious summer, when music became really important to me, and — with the encouragement of very expressive, interesting coworkers-turned-friends — when I embarked on my own journey of self-discovery.
Though I lived in Harlem and Jerry dwelled in Brooklyn, we often met in front of Tower when we planned on “hangin’ in the village.” We’d flip through racks of records for an hour or so, which was usually followed by smoking a joint in Washington Square Park while watching comedian Charlie Barnett. Back in those days, I had a bad habit of running late and, on one occasion, he befriended a guy begging for change in front of the store. An aspiring playwright, Jerry wrote a one-act about the encounter. Years later, I heard how fallen Grandmaster Flowers, a pioneering DJ from Brooklyn, used to shake his coin cup on that spot and I just knew that’s who Jerry had met. That same year I hung out with Jerry as he waited in line overnight to buy tickets for The Police’s Synchronicity Tour. That year we both worked as messengers in Manhattan, but we were ready to splurge our minimum wages on Sting.
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Twenty years ago, when I was 10, my mom died of colon cancer. That’s how I like to tell people: as quickly as possible. I say it before I know them. I say it as fast as I can, usually shoving a second topic into the same sentence. My mom died when I was 10 — what have you been reading lately? My mom died when I was 10 — do you want to order another round? I’ve said it on first dates and in job interviews. I say it as fast as I can because I can’t stand the face people make. Their eyes get a little wider, their eyebrows raise and reach toward each other, their mouths tug down just the slightest bit. They pity. Their faces say, “Oh, honey,” and I want to bolt, so I bolt past that part of the conversation. They always make the same face; I have learned how to make that face disappear as quickly as possible.
But there is another face, sometimes. I recognize other “dead mom kids” almost instantly. They don’t pity — they laugh. They raise their hand for a high five. They respond with, “Mine too!” and my whole body relaxes.
In writing, I have found more and more dead mom kids. (You’re a dead mom kid no matter how old you were when your mother died, by the way.) I was in a slam poetry club in college and performed pieces about my mom’s death, hoping that I wouldn’t have to tell all my new college friends individually. Ideally they would come to a slam and get the information they needed but they couldn’t ask any questions, and I wouldn’t be able to see their faces. But in the poetry group, I was one of many who had lost a parent. I didn’t have to talk about the loss with them — I could just talk about the writing. Years later, I attended a writing conference and read part of an essay about my mom after a poet read a dead mom poem and before a fiction writer stood up to say, “I guess I’ll do dead mom stuff, too!”
With writers, I can laugh about grief. There are so many of us, and we are so used to searching for the right words for it, a shorthand comes easily. No grief is alike — even when I meet people whose moms died when they were young, of cancer, our griefs are completely different. I have never read anything that got it exactly right, but I have read plenty that reminds me that I’m not alone. That it is, really, a club, and no matter the specifics of our loss, we all share a language.
The essays in this list attempt to answer questions or explain something about the feeling of being a dead mom kid. If you’re not in the club, may they function as an interpreter. If you are, I hope you recognize something of yourself somewhere in here. I hope you know we speak your language, too.
Too many times to count, I have been in the middle of watching a children’s movie with a friend who turns to me to say, “I never noticed how often the mom dies in these movies!” Perhaps they only noticed because they’re next to me. I never notice it; I just expect it. I anticipate it so well that if I’m in a movie theater, I try to spot the other members of the club: who drops their M&Ms, who carefully searches for the perfect kernel of popcorn for as long as the mom is dying on screen. In “Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead,” Sarah Boxer deep-dives into the history of dead mom narratives. In fiction, dead moms go as far back as 9th century China. Boxer traces the dead mother plot through animated movies of the 2000s, offering a why for this constant assault of dead moms. She notices that in many of these dead mother movies, the single father becomes an almost supernaturally perfect dad, and reminds us that in 2014, only 8% of households were led by single fathers. Boxer’s analysis is wide-reaching and thorough. She treats the dead-mom-in-movies phenomenon as questionable instead of a given, a choice instead of a necessity in the genre, and flawed instead of natural.
And yet, in this medium where the creators have total control, we keep getting the same damned world—a world without mothers. Is this really the dearest wish of animation? Can mothers really be so threatening?
Our mothers are often our introduction to food: They feed us first, and they choose what kinds of food to put in front of us. Michelle Zauner explores the connection between food and grief, and how certain foods connect her to the memory of her mother. Zauner is a writer and musician who fronts Japanese Breakfast and “Crying in H Mart” is the opening essay of her 2021 memoir of the same name. Zauner is half Korean; her mother was and is her connection to her Korean identity. Food is the bridge between Zauner and her mother: “I remember the snacks Mom told me she ate when she was a kid and how I tried to imagine her at my age. I wanted to like all the things she did, to embody her completely.” Zauner captures the sometimes illogical nature of crying over loss: She can calmly describe her mother’s cancer but cries wandering the aisles of H Mart, the supermarket chain specializing in Asian foods. At H Mart, Zauner is removed from her life in Philadelphia, partially because these stores are far from city centers, but also because she is surrounded by reminders of her mother and by others searching for a reminder of people and places that are far away. She shows the power of food to connect us to the people we have lost, especially our mothers, who feed us from the start and shape our relationship to food.
H Mart is the bridge that guides me away from the memories that haunt me, of chemo head and skeletal bodies and logging milligrams of hydrocodone.
Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding into a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard wall that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.
Mothers leave notes. They leave voicemails, they slip scraps of paper into your lunchbox. When they’re gone, it seems unbelievable that their messages are gone too. My own mother tried to write me and my brother letters while she was sick, but they made her cry, and crying made her fall asleep. When Morgan Talty’s mother was alive, she recorded voicemails and wrote notes that revealed her mood, whether she was safe. He knew her by the notes she gave him. In “Messages,” Talty shows how much grief lives in the moment conversations become one-sided. He listens repeatedly to the 60 voicemails from his mother he has on his phone. He searches and searches for a final word from his mother, and then he finds it. He’s right to predict that I would be jealous of his story, but he also captures something essential about mother death: Once they’re gone, we are desperate for any trace of them at all. It seems impossible that just because they are gone, they can no longer communicate with us. Whether we find a final message or not, we search for one.
Mom could kick your ass with her words, spoken or written, but she could also heal you. I still have every letter she wrote me, and when she left this earth, I went through them all — each scrap of paper she had given to me or that I had plucked from her apartment while cleaning it with my sister — looking for something, anything, from her to tell me where she’d gone. Because she was good like that.
Meghan O’Rourke’s 2011 memoir The Long Goodbye details the death of her mother, and her subsequent realization that on a societal level, we are not equipped to properly grieve. Nothing prepares us, even when a mother is sick for a while. And then, we are on our own, with only their leftover objects to feel them close to us. O’Rourke’s essay “In My Mother’s Shoes” describes how much those objects — gifts she gave before she died, a scent she used, a scarf she wore years ago — can function as a bridge between the living and the person who is gone. Putting on her mother’s clothes is an adult game of dress-up for O’Rourke, as she simultaneously tries to wear her mother’s responsibilities, like picking up new socks when her brother forgets to pack them. She shows the weight that these objects take on once their owner is gone, and the process of deciding which objects are the ones that matter enough to keep.
If it breaks my heart that I can no longer learn about my mother’s life by asking her questions, it helps in those moments to have touchstones of hers around me, to look at, to wrap myself in. The ordinary beauty of a pair of earrings or a scarf, the utility of these things remind me of my mom, talismans that bring me real solace.
Maggie Grimason’s father died when she was 8. Years later, the news of Notre Dame burning interrupted her mother’s funeral. In Grimason’s essay “What a Ghost Sounds Like,” the fire in Paris could only be connected to her mother’s death. Notre Dame was discussed with a distinct “before” and “after,” the same absolute and irrevocable splicing of time that happens when a mother dies. Nothing could be, or sound, the same. After her father’s death, Grimason listened to a tape recording of his voice saying just one phrase. Her essay explores sounds, how sound remembered can never be exact, how the bells of Notre Dame can never sound the same again, how her father’s voice can’t be identical to that recording, or her memory of the recording. Sound is connected to the ghost she saw as a child, and to grief, and to fear. She wants to write in order to remember the people she has lost, but writing can’t help us remember what it all once sounded like.
People love to say, That’s just a coincidence. Those words try to pare down the event while simultaneously acknowledging—and brushing off—its meaning. Empty or not, the poetry of Notre Dame burning, the steeple falling—we watched it again and again.
And as I watched, heavy with the grief of losing my mother, I thought Good, or at least, That makes sense.
Claire Hodgdon is a Brooklyn-based writer and educator with an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia University. Her work has been published in journals Pidgeonholes and HAD and nominated for a Best of the Net award. She is working on her first book, an essay collection about the aftermath of loss at a young age. Find her at www.clairehodgdon.net or on Twitter @claire_hodgdon.
Editor: Krista Stevens Copy-editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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When politicians and media pundits talk about public safety, what do they mean? Safety for whom, and from what? Katie Prout’s essay implores readers in Chicago to see unhoused people living on the city’s trains as vulnerable members of the public, not as threats. She also urges readers to acknowledge the difference between safety and emotional comfort:
To my knowledge, no evidence exists that shows unhoused CTA riders are more likely to commit crime or exhibit “unruly behavior” (whatever that is) than their housed counterparts, and yet this narrative linking the presence of unhoused people to dangers and discomforts for housed riders has been repeated over the last couple years: “CTA is developing plans with social service agencies to address issues of mental health and homelessness that also affect safety on trains and buses,” reported WTTW after the memo’s release; “Enhance safety for riders by expanding police officer patrols with the Chicago Police Department, increase the number of security guards from 200 to 300, reintroduce canine units, target fare theft with new tall fare gates and collaborate with social services organizations for unhoused people,” reported the Sun-Times.
“[The CTA is] . . . a big, crashing mess at the moment, with the tubes filthy and stained with graffiti, elevators and escalators out of operation, cars converted into rolling homeless shelters, rules about eating and smoking seemingly forgotten, and police presence all but invisible,” wrote Crain’s Chicago Business’s Greg Hinz in 2021, with the cadence and restraint of Peter Venkman terrifying the mayor in Ghostbusters. In the accompanying photo, taken by Hinz, a Chicagoan is curled up across four seats, huddled under a dirty jacket. “People just aren’t going to ride a system that is dirty, dark and scary,” he continued. “Are you listening, Mayor Lori Lightfoot?” A quick Google search of “Chicago CTA homeless” pulls up other photos of people — asleep, unconscious, and presumably unconsenting to being the example of all that is “dirty, dark, and scary” — in stories from CBS News, ABC7, WBEZ, Medill, and the Chicago Defender, among others.
Not every person who is homeless is mentally ill or uses drugs, and having one of those traits — or all three — doesn’t make you dangerous; it makes you vulnerable. Indeed, study after study demonstrates that people without homes are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than they are to commit it.
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At its low points, Twitter has been a space to spread disinformation, a feed for doomscrolling, an outlet to intensify your anxiety. At its best, it has brought people together, created communities, launched careers, given voice to the previously voiceless, and galvanized movements. As Twitter continues to sputter, Willy Staley offers an insightful examination of what the birdsite has done to the brains of the Extremely Online, and what exactly people have been doing on it for the last decade and a half.
It’s hard to look back on nearly a decade and a half of posting without feeling something like regret. Not regret that I’ve harmed my reputation with countless people who don’t know me, and some who do — though there is that. Not regret that I’ve experienced all the psychic damage described herein — though there is that too. And not even regret that I could have been doing something more productive with my time — of course there’s that, but whatever. What’s disconcerting is how easy it was to pass all the hours this way. The world just sort of falls away when you’re looking at the feed. For all the time I spent, I didn’t even really put that much into it.
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