Shortly before the coronavirus became a full-fledged global pandemic, I chose to go on an indefinite social media hiatus. I would only log on every couple of weeks to share my articles — an unfortunate requirement of my job — and then promptly log the fuck off. I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with social media but used it compulsively because getting online attention is addictive. (It’s also the most efficient way to procrastinate.) …

We talk about this time as, well, “this time.” A “new normal.” These euphemisms capture our collective, existential adjustment to forced confinement. But they don’t quite convey the novel humiliations that have, like those first crocuses of spring or Google Hangout links in everyone else’s group texts, now burst onto the scene.

Once upon a time, in that distant epoch called “February,” the people had social lives. They would don their finest block-heeled, square-toed footwear and high-necked designer prairie dresses — or, if straight and male, a “shirt” — and congregate among others.

They would gather at commercial establishments and…

LOVE/HATE

Shortly after I began dating the man who would become my husband, I left my flip phone in the back seat of a cab. The next day, my iPod broke. This was in 2011, a time when it felt natural to get music from one device and texts from another, so I planned on replacing both. But my boyfriend was having none of it: It’s time to get an iPhone, he said. Though I’d resisted the device for years (who needed all those features?), his argument made sense, and I agreed. …

Great Escape

With every Facebook post you like, tweet you send, or question you type into Google, you’re giving the internet strength. Feeding the algorithms. Paying the advertisers. You’re also helping to fill server farms that will ultimately be replaced by bigger server farms, effectively anchoring the internet in the real world. This is all sweet and rosy, if the internet-human relationship is mutually beneficial. But it’s not clear that it is.

In some ways, our nonstop online lives are bringing us closer. But at least as often, the relentless pace of social media, email, and constant pings and beeps only serve…

The New New

Malka Older’s new speculative novel, State Tectonics, imagines a radically different world order from the one we know: Instead of residing in sovereign nation states, citizens of Older’s world opt in and out of small, distributed, heterogeneous communities based on their preferences. Some people want a hard line on crime, others prioritize universal health care and education, and still others seek out laissez-faire corporate governance. There’s something for everyone, and if you don’t like it, you can always switch. The entire system is stitched together by “Information,” a massive and highly bureaucratic organization that provides ubiquitous digital infrastructure, fact checks…

This is a story about courting money from power. It’s about how the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab was founded and funded, by whom, and how. It’s a story about Nicholas Negroponte before it was about Joi Ito and Jeffrey Epstein. And most of all, it’s a story about gall.

Last week, at a town hall meeting that was intended to reorient the Media Lab in the wake of revelations about convicted sex offender Epstein’s donations and investments, Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the Media Lab, stood up to speak about “his privilege as a ‘rich white man’ and how…

Love/Hate

When my oldest son was six or seven, I was newly divorced and trying to manage the unfamiliar logistics of joint custody. Family life was chaotic. Our daily routines were in flux. But my son found comfort in his Nintendo DS. Perhaps it’s because video games are predictable and the rules are always consistent. He clung to that device, throwing temper tantrums if we forgot it during the changeover between my house and his mother’s. Even when he wasn’t playing, he insisted that it always be within arm’s reach. It became his “transitional object.”

Pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott…

Power Trip

Last week, I was sent an unpublished essay by a woman who was sexually assaulted over two long years by a yogi so famous that his photograph still sits at the altar of countless renowned yoga centers.

It was not the first time she’d come forward about her abuse, but now she wanted to tell her own story unmediated — to be heard in full, in her words, as opposed to through a journalist.

The essay is chilling. It’s a tough read. And we’ll be publishing it next week as part of our latest issue of Medium’s monthly digital magazine…