Modernity

How to Live in a Digital CityWhat we can learn from real-life urbanization to improve online livingBy Megan Garber and Andrea ValdezIllustration by The Atlantic. Source: Corbis / Getty.May 20, 2024 ShareSave While the vibrance, innovation, and cacophony of online life can feel completely unlike anything humanity has ever created before, its newness... See more

We still call women hysterical – but now we do it through BotoxAs women train their faces not to move and inject away their expressions, the result is faces that never read as angry, with no laugh lines to betray how much fun you hadShareLink copied ✔️October

30,

2025BeautyBeauty FeatureTextEllen AtlantaRead MoreLife & CultureIs inconvenience the... See more

Digitally isolated

It’s can’t be connection if it leaves you alone.

By Justin February 14, 2013

A poignant depiction of the iPhone as a prison via Felipe Luchi for Go Outside Brazil.

I keep thinking about being digitally isolated. What is “digital isolation?” In a nutshell: today we are more connected to anyone/everyone than at any point in history yet

... See more

From Anxiety to Animosity: How Social Media Damages Relationships

A preview of Nicholas Carr’s new book Superbloom

Nicholas Carr

Feb 03, 2025

Introduction from Jon Haidt:

There’s a story I often tell to explain how we got into this mess––how we let a few tech companies take over childhood, making it passive, solitary, and monetizable. The story begins

... See more

Mar. 3, 2020

The Tyranny of Terrazzo

Will the millennial aesthetic ever end?

By Molly Fischer

Illustration by Fala Atelier

Illustration: Fala Atelier

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

You walk beneath a white molded archway. You’ve entered a white room.

A... See more

The Internet’s Lonely Urban Design

The Information Superhighway paved over Virtual Villages; can we bring them back?

Keaton Brandt

·

Follow

12 min read

·

Jan 28, 2024

1.94K

49

In the beginning, the internet resembled a quaint village where everybody knew your name. It was largely self-governing and self-policing, with its own norms and customs. Like many... See more

The Cult of Yesterday

Capitalism, Necromancy, and the Dark Side of Nostalgia

River Quintana

Feb 09, 2024

Some of the sources of Pop Art VI, Peter Blake

Subscribe

Capitalism, it seems, can’t let go of the past. Like a necromancer, it reanimates the corpses of bygone trends, ideologies, and aesthetics, then sells them back to us at a markup. This... See more

“The word for world is forest” — Ursula K. Le Guin

In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern... See more

The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han review – how big tech altered the narrative

Stuart Jeffries

Mon 19 Feb 2024 03.00 AEDT

In Charlie Kaufman’s puppet animation Anomalisa, everyone looks and speaks the same. It’s as though a scene in an earlier Kaufman-penned film, Being John Malkovich, in which Malkovich surveys a restaurant from his table and

... See more