the internet « Emily Magazine

Love is nothing like they say

I turned in the copyedited manuscript of Friendship on October 7th and since then I haven’t written or thought about writing anything besides tweets and emails. Which, to be fair, I have written MANY tweets and emails. But it is a huge brain shift away from thinking about the problems and characters in my book. [...]

Correspondence

In mid-January I started working at a job, envisioned originally as part-time and short-term, where my duties include managing a corporate social media presence. As you can probably imagine, this is the most effective social media addiction aversion therapy I’ve ever had. All that torment over the years about my ambivalent relationship with [...]

Laughing and crying

“Writing about the buddist here has been public display, of course, but it’s been a public display of trying to figure something out, I’m not sure what it is – something about desire, obviously, and the trajectory of mourning – but also about boundaries, about secret/public, about embodiment and meaning, and the fragility of the [...]

Our graffiti

Lately because of Emily Books I’ve been trying to anatomize my own taste. It’s not that I have to figure out why I like the things I do but it would probably be helpful to understand my impulses as I try again and again to explain what these books do that’s different from what [...]

Testing this theory

I was off the Internet for a couple days and then today I saw this in the subway. Can you read the small text? It says “You’re in the Arizona desert. You’re bitten by a diamondback rattlesnake. You have two hours to find the remedy or you die. YOU NEED THE INTERNET.”

Luckily I didn’t encounter [...]

Miss Information

When I was a teenager I would do this thing with my dad, who is a musician, where I would play him whatever Helium or Superchunk or Tori Amos or Pavement song I was currently obsessed with, to see what he thought of it. Typically this took place in the car. I would push the [...]

Online self vs. real self

After I wrote this column about Facebook I found I had extra bonus thoughts so I decided to put at least a few of them here.

When Gawker Media announced that all employees we were required to have Facebook profiles, in 2007, some of my coworkers were decidedly un-thrilled at this encroachment on their private lives. [...]