The Weekend Essay
Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet
Online platforms allowed me to cultivate a freer version of myself. Then the digital world began to close off.
By Kyle Chayka
Infinite Scroll
How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News
The Israel-Hamas war has displayed with fresh urgency the perils of relying on our feeds for updates about events unfolding in real time.
By Kyle Chayka
Infinite Scroll
Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore
The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over.
By Kyle Chayka
Letter from the Southwest
The Disturbing Rise of Amateur Predator-Hunting Stings
How the search for men who prey on underage victims became a YouTube craze.
By Rachel Monroe
Rabbit Holes
The Italy That’s Revealed by Italians on Social Media
A teacher in Tuscany collects the strange and beautiful images that capture what he calls “a marginal Italy.”
By Max Norman
Cultural Comment
TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants
Facebook is trying to copy TikTok, but this strategy may well signal the end of these legacy platforms.
By Cal Newport
Infinite Scroll
The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety
Interacting online today means being besieged by system-generated recommendations. Do we want what the machines tell us we want?
By Kyle Chayka
Infinite Scroll
How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines
Two new books examine how social media traps users in a brutal race to the bottom.
By Kyle Chayka
Double Take
Sunday Reading: Social-Media Disrupters
From the archive: pieces on tech magnates and their impact on how we consume information.
By The New Yorker
A Reporter at Large
How Democracies Spy on Their Citizens
The inside story of the world’s most notorious commercial spyware and the big tech companies waging war against it.
By Ronan Farrow
Infinite Scroll
Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and the Allure of Open-World Video Games
Increasingly, what players are seeking is a virtual environment that feels as inexhaustible as the real one.
By Kyle Chayka
Letter from Silicon Valley
Money in the Metaverse
In a virtual world full of virtual goods, finance could get weird.
By Anna Wiener
Books
How Politics Got So Polarized
In a new era of hyperpartisan identities, can anything bring “us” and “them” together?
By Elizabeth Kolbert
The Political Scene Podcast
Lina Khan vs. Big Tech
The new chair of the Federal Trade Commission intends to change the way we treat monopolies.
Cultural Comment
The Question We’ve Stopped Asking About Teen-Agers and Social Media
Should they be using these services at all?
By Cal Newport
Daily Comment
The Meta Narrative: What We’ve Learned from the Facebook Papers
Thousands of documents uncovered by Frances Haugen reveal, among other things, how employees of Facebook—or Meta, as it’s now known—talk when they think that no one is listening.
By Andrew Marantz
Infinite Scroll
We Already Live in Facebook’s Metaverse
Who among us wants to inhabit an even more virtual world of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation?
By Kyle Chayka
The Political Scene Podcast
The Nobel Prize Winner Maria Ressa on the Turmoil at Facebook
Ressa, a Filipino American journalist, discusses the latest revelations of the social network’s failure to control disinformation and hate.
Shouts & Murmurs
What’s in a Name? A Brainstorming Session at Facebook HQ
Rebranding ideas from Sheryl: SunLight, Magic, Luminere. From Mark: I Am Not a Robot.
By John Kenney
Shouts & Murmurs
Life in the Fantastic World of the Facebook Metaverse
Nazi propaganda, fraud, imagery with visible human female nipple—there was danger around every corner.
By Charlie Dektar