Chatrooms taught me everything I needed to know about what real people were like before I had to grow up and become one of them.
internet culture
Inside the NBA’s Great Generation War
“Not so long ago, retired NBA stars could put on a suit, go on ESPN, and lay into the next generation of young players with little pushback. Then something shifted.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, our editors recommend longreads by Kelsey Vlamis, Brian Feldman, Skip Hollandsworth, Tessa Somberg, and Alison Espach.
The Secret History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater
Online video in the pre-YouTube era tended to be low-res, anonymous, and utterly without provenance. You didn’t know who made the video, who was in the video, or where the damn thing came from. Well, thanks to this rollicking piece of forensics, now you do — at least for one seminal clip in which an […]
Very Online
CJR fellow Karen Maniraho talks with five very online journalists — Ryan Broderick, Jason Parham, Taylor Lorenz, Rebecca Jennings, and Rusty Foster — about what it’s like to cover tech and internet culture today, how they navigate through viral moments and algorithms, and how they look for meaning in a constantly noise-polluted, chaotic space. Because […]
What’s The Vibe? A Reading List
Amorphous and intangible, a vibe is hard to describe. Let these five longreads sharpen your focus.
On the Internet, We’re Always Famous
“Never before in history have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers.”
The Day the Good Internet Died
“Did a Good Internet ever even exist, or am I just nostalgic for my youth?”
A People’s History of Black Twitter, Part I
“We make spaces out of spaces where we were not intended to be. That’s what we do.” This is the first installment in a three-part oral history series on Black Twitter.