Sublime

According to Putnam, the more we prioritize our private bubbles over public life, the more we disconnect from our local surroundings. This has weakened American democracy. Fewer people are engaged in politics, and those who do are often at the political poles. With less social capital, our neighborhoods are connected by fewer informal, reciprocal t... See more

Eggers, a longtime San Franciscan, said: “When I read Boots’s script, I’d just published ‘The Circle’ ” — a 2013 dystopian novel set in Silicon Valley — “and it struck me that we were both picking up on changes we’ve seen in the Bay Area. There’s this strangely sinister cast to life here sometimes, where it’s still idyllic and free and open but als... See more

The future of the internet that most excites me is also, in many ways, a snapshot of its past. It’s a place where the Neil Gaimans of the world don’t need to feed their thoughts into an engagement engine, but can instead put out a virtual shingle on their own small patch of cyberspace and attract and build a more intimate community of like-minded t... See more

Social media algorithms identify our politics and then shepherd us into a hermetically sealed bubble, framing our worldview through a window of rage and extremism.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence,

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My latest column at The New Yorker is about the revenge of homepages: Why we're turning toward individual websites as the platform era of the internet continues to disintegrate.

I started working on this piece because I've found myself going to homepages more often. It's a way to get a controlled, curated look at what a publication offers, and a ch... See more