“Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize, and abuse children, automatically and at scale.” James Bridle traces a profoundly disturbing digital trail through “industrialized nightmare production,” flagging a long tail of iterative violence that human oversight is powerless to contain.
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Sex and Hotels
Slate has done us all a solid by bringing Geoff Dyer’s classic Nerve essay back to the internet, which examines why sex in hotel rooms is so much sexier than in other locations.
Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Two: The Hunter and the Bomb
The story was that a radical man set off a bomb in the desert. But what about everything else that happened?
When Is an Internet Company Evil?
What is Facebook *really* about? Surveillance and advertising, not about “the power to build community” as its new mission statement so disingenuously puts it.
Cahiers du Post-Cinéma
The movie theater was once a kind of lay church, with festivals like TIFF serving as annual religious holidays — until new houses of worship opened online.
On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets])
Sarah Fay reflects on four years spent in solitude (and isolation [and loneliness]), viewing it through the lens of punctuation.
The Fight to Escape “A World of Anonymous Abuse”
Online harassment is as serious as offline harassment, and it rarely stays “only” online.
Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Three: The Widow’s Tale
When LaVoy Finicum was shot by law enforcement, the anti-government movement called him a martyr. That message is spreading.
Longreads Best of 2018: Arts and Culture
We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in arts and culture.
