Many of us yearn for a way to be fully online without all of the mindlessness, passivity and addiction that often entraps us. Some of us oscillate between fully online and fully offline in a sort of mad dance to establish what feels right. Others have lost hope that it’s possible to engage in a way that feels true and alive, and have resigned to... See more

J.R.R. Tolkien, speaking in 1939, named a clarifying power within what he called fairy stories: recovery, the ability to see the world as it actually is rather than through the “drab blur” of familiarity. Seeing the internet as a fairyland — an otherworld with its own logic — isn’t about mystifying technology. It’s about seeing it sharply, as the... See more

To survive an enchanted world, an otherworld like the internet, we need the right kinds of stories to help us move through uncertainty and cross thresholds without losing ourselves. Folklore — the world’s vast tradition of myths, legends and fairy tales — has long offered this kind of guidance in forms that are easy to remember under pressure. Some... See more