The First Comedown

It was a world in which we truly played with technology — where the field was level, and where everyone, no matter who they were or where they were from, had access to it. I came back to this place each weekend, as if returning to a womb to be reborn as an upgraded being — to interact in a frictionless realm where we allowed machines to manipulate our bodies like yo-yos, and where we responded to their maternal calls.

This Is Not a ‘Travel Blog’ (But It Is a Travel Blog)

In her essay about life on tour with a rock band, Claire L. Evans says that travel teaches her more about time than it does about place. I agree. My favorite kind of “travel writing” — or I suppose writing about place — embarks on an inner journey, and uses a physical location as aContinue reading “This Is Not a ‘Travel Blog’ (But It Is a Travel Blog)”

On Everything and Nothing & Reading and Not Writing

Sometimes I envision my Twitter feed as rushing water: my presence is a dam, and each tweet is debris making its way downstream. It’s now a challenge to let information simply flow—to let tweets swim by without me seeing or interacting with them.

Online Mourning and the Unexpected Refuge of Facebook

Alone, I sobbed. Yet I sobbed with Facebook open—his life revealed and exposed in bits on my screen, his friends spilling tears on his profile. I sobbed at home, by myself, but also with everyone else.

That Thing I Wrote That Wasn’t True: On Facts, Memoir & John D’Agata

But something happens as time passes—as I drift further from a memory, as a fact is dislodged from the place it had once made sense. I begin to play with a fact: I pluck it out, examine it, and let it stand on its own. It is vulnerable: the context that hugged it is stripped away.