Internet
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How We Got the Internet All Wrong August 15, 2025
For the last few years, experts have been fighting a battle over the impact of social media on young Americans.On one side of this battle, there were psychologists like Jonathan Haidt, who has forcefully argued that social media has terrible impacts ...
The Cult of Carrotmaxxing August 07, 2025
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Something strange is brewing in the weird wellness corners of the internet. Grown adults are religiously consuming raw carrot salads, claiming it’s transforming their hormones, clearing their skin, and giving ...
I Saw Oasis At Wembley August 01, 2025
When Oasis announced their return to the road just over 11 months ago, the least original people on the internet all made the same observation: No chance the Gallagher brothers stay together until next summer. It was semi-jokey conventional wisdom th...
The Website at the End of the Internet July 23, 2025
t doesn’t really matter who you are, how you spend your time online, or what you imagine your relationship with the internet to be. However you scroll, wherever you browse, and whatever you want to see on your screens, it has probably happened to you...
The Attention Economy July 22, 2025
I am a millennial, so I grew up with computers and easy access to the Internet. I chatted on AOL Instant Messenger. I used a “Hotmail” e-mail address. I’m old enough to remember “Tom” from MySpace and when you needed a school email to register for a ...
28 Years... After AOL July 21, 2025
To truly appreciate the rich cultural symbolism of 28 Years Later, the zombie-apocalypse-plague movie whose characters are currently projectile-vomiting blood in a theater near you, it is necessary to return first to 28 Days Later, the original zombi...
How TikTok is Transforming the English Language July 16, 2025
It seems as though everything happens faster on the internet. Each week brings a dizzying parade of new memes, fads, and slang words that evaporate as quickly as they materialize. It can be hard to keep up with the latest references unless you’re spe...
Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui? July 10, 2025
The breakfast photo is the ur-text of the narcissistic internet, a bit of content that no one else is necessarily interested in but which the poster feels the need, or even the responsibility, to make public for anyone online to see. Posting a pictur...
What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing? July 02, 2025
On a blustery spring Thursday, just after midterms, I went out for noodles with Alex and Eugene, two undergraduates at New York University, to talk about how they use artificial intelligence in their schoolwork. When I first met Alex, last year, he w...
An Interview With Justin Smith-Ruiu July 01, 2025
Justin Smith-Ruiu is one of the very greatest jewels in the Substack. He is a philosophy professor (currently at Université Paris Cité), a very valued member of theHinternet Editorial Board, and one of the sharpest and most interesting intellects cur...
The Internet Comes of Age June 30, 2025
“No axiom is more clearly established in law, or in reason, than that. . . wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power necessary for doing it is included.” Turns out that includes protecting kids from online pornography. Q...
Alison Bechdel’s Next Step June 24, 2025
In the early aughts, Alison Bechdel was a struggling cartoonist. She’d been writing and drawing her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For—about a group of mostly lesbian friends and lovers—since 1983, building a cult following in the process. But in th...
The Rise and Fall of Urbit June 19, 2025
During the 2020 Covid lockdowns, the privately owned realms of the internet became the obligatory venues for public life. As Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google saw their stock prices soar, I became more frustrated with how much of my time and attent...
The Risk of Serialized Reality June 19, 2025
When David Lynch died, the internet filled with quotes from him. I usually cringe at these sudden and predictable proliferations of soundbites that become nearly meaningless in their ubiquity. The point in moments like this is to show that you are th...
What’s Happening to Reading? June 18, 2025
What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren’t urgent questions. Reading was an unremarkable activity, essentially unchanged since the advent of the modern publishing industry, in the nineteenth century. In a 2017 Shouts & Murmurs titled...
The Social Pornography Complex June 12, 2025
Margo’s Got Money Troubles appears on the jacket to be a book about motherhood and pornography, but it’s really about the internet. But wait, according to internet discourse, the internet novel doesn’t exist. Actually it does exist but can never succ...
An Experience for Me June 11, 2025
In the fall of 2023 my first television show—a loose adaptation of my first novel, itself already a loose adaptation of a period of my life marked by familial strife, internet addiction, exploitative jobs, deep love of a violent animal and intellectu...
The Fatal Flaws of the Futureless Left June 09, 2025
Guy Edward Bartkus, the suspect recently charged with suicide car-bombing a fertility clinic in California, was an efilist — a devotee of an extremist form of antinatalism.Efilism, like all extreme ideologies today, is largely an internet phenomenon....
An Antidote to Regret June 06, 2025
Queer literature tends to center connection—sex, romance, and love. In her latest memoir, The Dry Season, feminist writer Melissa Febos takes a different approach: she spends a year celibate. Celibacy is a loaded term, often associated with everythin...
Crushing Banalities June 04, 2025
2018, Germany. A bungalow, with anthracite walls and a flat roof. Jerome Daimler’s parents purchased it. They’re divorced now. He lives there alone. The light outside is always muted, gray with little pockets of soft blue. He is constantly renting Te...
Colum McCann’s Limp Novel of Digital Life May 20, 2025
Have novels left anything unsaid about the internet of the past fifteen years? It feels as though they’ve exhausted the terrain, but perhaps they’ve just made the same points over and over, their fragmented forms conjuring a user experience of broken...
All the Words Fit to Print May 20, 2025
The scholar and researcher Stanley Kurtz once opined that one can really be a great reader in only one of three categories: books; journals and newspapers; or the internet. I’m not sure if it’s true, though it probably is. It may well be that Mr. Kur...
The Sleepers by Matthew Gasda May 12, 2025
A Contemporary Tragedy in a Classic StyleFour New Yorkers' paths collide in the days ahead of the 2016 election. Dan teaches Marxism while secretly courting a student. His girlfriend Mariko, an actress, finds refuge in her dying mentor's bed. When he...
The Fight for the Soul of Video Games May 09, 2025
In the 2000s, an ideological battle played out across the fictional cosmos of EVE Online. The MMORPG, which is set 21,000 years in the future, lets its players, alongside their friends and enemies across the Internet, explore a galaxy called New Eden...
What if AI Just Makes Everyone Really Boring? May 07, 2025
Last week, the Princeton professor D. Graham Burnett wrote an essay for the New Yorker about his fascination with how generative AIs and LLMs are changing the way his students interact with and ingest information. The first half of the piece is inter...
