I’ve been thinking about joy, memory, and the memory of joy after reading essays by Zadie Smith and Oliver Sacks in the New York Review of Books. In “Joy,” Zadie Smith talks about pleasure, and then joy — from a child, from love, from being on drugs. She has known joy six times: Three of […]

Sometime this past year, I ventured out for an eighteen-and-over night of dubstep. Nights on dance floors are now rare, as I can hardly stay up past 11 pm. But my friends offered me a ticket, so I went, and drank some beers to keep myself oiled. I stood in the middle of the dance […]

I am a careful curator of my own digital life, a user and lover of many websites on the Internet. But my Pinterest account was short-lived. One evening, I found myself pining for Bogotá—for its lively, colorful streets—as I scrolled through a photo essay on a travel blog. I made up my mind. This place […]

Two weeks ago, a dear friend passed away. In the first days after hearing of his death, Facebook was the hardest place to look, yet the one place I needed to look. A few hours after receiving the news, I wrote something and shared it as a Facebook note. I posted scanned photos from college—precious moments of […]

One afternoon in our high school library, I noticed my friend studying a glossy, colorful postcard of sorts, folded into a few sections. She opened it horizontally to reveal a triptych of thick paper. A jumble of text was plastered all over, on the front and back. She handed it to me. There were lists […]

Facebook makes us jealous. Competitive. Depressed. Facebook stirs up that fear of missing out. Facebook’s meaningless, frictionless sharing—think automatic Spotify updates—makes us care less. Facebook is destroying our friendships. Our connections. What it means to truly interact and be social. And so on. You’ve heard this all before. There are many of these articles floating […]