For this week’s Longreads Top 5, I picked Kyle Chayka’s essay in The New Yorker about growing up on the early social internet: think AOL Instant Messenger and LiveJournal (and then MySpace and the rest of the social networks that we know and hate today).

Here’s my blurb (originally published on Longreads):

In this excerpt from his new book, "Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture,“ Kyle Chayka recalls an early internet that allowed “creative possibility” and “self-definition”—a web that many of us miss. When he tells us his AOL Instant Messenger username, “Silk,” I immediately recall my first AOL screen name, “RsrvoirGrl.” (Yes, in high school I was obsessed with Quentin Tarantino films.) When he describes posting to LiveJournal, where his writing “became a kind of public performance,” I remember my own musings on Diaryland, another early publishing platform. Those diary entries make me cringe when I read them now, but they’re also so unfiltered and passionate; I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t written with such energy since. His later experiences are just as fun to read, and remind me of a few milestones in that evolving space: the way my MySpace profile suddenly fused my online “shadow” self to my physical IRL identity; the first virtual encounter with my future spouse (I’ll never forget the first tweets my husband and I exchanged); the way Instagram initially inspired the photographer in me, and then slowly sucked all of my creativity. As with a number of pieces I’ve read recently about the broken state of the web, this essay doesn’t really say anything about the internet we don’t already know—or already feel in our bodies, minds, and attention spans. But I always enjoy Chayka’s writing, and his thoughts here on what it was like to be online when “being online wasn’t yet a default state of existence” are relatable and served up with just the right amount of nostalgia.

Read ”Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet“ at The New Yorker.

I read so much but can never remember to share story links here. Trying to get back into it … with a fascinating science essay by Sabrina Imbler on the de-extinction business, led by a well-backed and funded company called Colossal. Imbler is a science journalist currently covering the creatures beat for Defector, and always writes entertaining, engaging, and accessible stories.

Why I recommend it, as I wrote on Longreads:

Ever imagine what it would be like if a long-lost species roamed Earth once again? Colossal, a well-funded company at the forefront of the de-extinction business, plans to make this a reality. On the surface, this sounds like an ecological dream, as well as a way for humans to do good and reverse some of the destruction we’ve caused on this planet. But what does de-extinction entail? In this fascinating read, Sabrina Imbler explains that a recreated dodo would not actually be a dodo, but a genetic hybrid of the dodo and its closest living relative (the Nicobar pigeon). What, then, would teach this lone dodo how to be a dodo? Or, in the case of the mammoth, which would be developed with the genetic help of the Asian elephant, how would the animal physically come into being? The uneasy answer: a surrogate elephant mother who would never be able to consent to carrying another species. (In the hope of an alternative, Colossal has a team focused on developing an artificial womb, which—depending on your perspective—might be even creepier.) There’s a lot more to ponder here, including the key question of who, ultimately, de-extinction is for. As Imbler asserts, it’s not for the animals, but for Colossal’s VCs and investors, who include Paris Hilton. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Always, always click on a link with a Sabrina Imbler byline. They write my favorite kind of science writing: curious, thoughtful, and accessible. This piece is no exception.

Here’s a link to the piece:

I read and shared a lovely essay by Aidan Ryan recently on the unused and abandoned fragments we accumulate as we write over the years. For Ryan, these are bits and pieces that sit in a folder on his computer titled “Miscellaneous,” and in his musings he writes about the creative processes of other writers who similarly keep wells of ideas and thoughts, sitting indefinitely until we decide they’re ripe and ready for the page and public eye. I sometimes have thought about my own half-baked phrases and ideas swirling in my back of my mind like kittens at the pound, waiting to be adopted, to be lifted out from the dark. (That sounds a bit odd when I type it out!)

Anyway, it’s a beautifully written piece, especially if you’re like Ryan — and me, as I’ve maintained a purgatory-like space in my blog dashboard for years for all of my half-written and forgotten drafts. (Sometimes, they’ve come to the surface in unexpected, creative ways.)

A snippet from Ryan’s piece, at The Millions:

I think about a folder in the cloud, the one called “Writing.” And the folders within it, branching universes: “Poems” and “Essays,” and within that “Outtakes,” and within that the file called “Miscellaneous,” now over a hundred pages. And I think of the stories that as a child I told and retold in bright plastic—before I found a world of words that I never had to pack away.

This week’s new essay on Longreads, “All True at Once” by Maria Zorn, is a stunner. It’s about the loss of a sibling, grief, gender, and Ms. Pac-Man. Sounds bleak, and yes, some of it is dark, but there are also a few laugh-out-loud moments and it’s just different and quirky and beautifully written. Her voice is unique. It’s also Maria’s first-ever published piece, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have edited it. 

This is not to say that I didn’t ever experience a sense of loss. It was always there, a constant drip. Sometimes I’d think about the scene Mom came upon when the locksmith finally got your apartment door open and feel as though my kneecaps were going to crumble into ash beneath me. I wondered if there were claw marks on the floor from where you tried to stay as you felt your heart stop beating, or if you slid easily away like a clump of lint and dog hair into a Roomba. In these moments I wished to be vacuumed whole.

Read “All True at Once” at Longreads.

At The Rumpus, Anne P. Beatty writes a beautiful personal essay about adolescence and adulthood; the fear of stasis when a person goes back to the place they grew up; and becoming a writer. Just lovely musings about life, ambition, and getting older.

When we talk about our hometowns, we’re likely also talking about the rocky geography of adolescence: its intractable grip on our throats, which we might conflate with the landscape in which we were almost, but not quite, free. Adolescence is an age marked by deficit— what we don’t have, or don’t have yet.

My desk faces the wall; I don’t want to see the horizon when I write. As a kid, I was constantly looking beyond myself, beyond my world. What’s out there to see? To write about? Now, I just want one more hour, thirty minutes even, to work from within.

While writing, I’m free, but bound. At dusk, I leave my desk and collect the sheets from the backyard, unpinning their sweet starch from the line. Scattershot lamplight falls from the windows onto the garden pebbles, the air conditioning compressor, the scraggly lilac I need to dig up. The sheen of thunder ripples in the distance. Over the roof is a blue night sky clinging to its last bit of pigment, the way I cling to the sheets as I gather them, loving their stiffness, their strangeness after a day outdoors, and shoving them into reluctant heaps in the basket so I can bring them inside. That night the sheets hold a diagonal crease: the memory of the line, an imprint as obvious and useless as the adult our childhood selves once planned to be.

At The Offing, Grace Loh Prasad reflects on planting roots in a place away from her family, loss, parenting, and the idea of “community.” Some parts really got to me, as I and my partner have experienced some of what Prasad describes. The editor in me thinks that the entire essay runs a bit longer than it should, but overall I was moved by it.

One by one, the sides of our perfect square collapsed. Even though we lived an ocean apart for more than two decades, each loss was like sawing off a table leg, causing the whole structure to wobble and fall. Although my brother and my parents weren’t present in my daily life, they provided an invisible scaffolding that I didn’t realize I depended on until they were gone. All the things that proved I had a home in California—house, job, passport, driver’s license, ability to vote—were the result of choices I had made, rather than natural ties to a culture and community. It was a one-sided equation: I could claim it, but it did not claim me. The only true unit of belonging I had that was intrinsic and undeniable and could not be undone, that understood my complicated identity without needing an explanation, was my family.

How I wish I had a sibling or cousin with children in the same city so that we could send our kids to the same school, share dinners and holidays, coordinate vacation plans, and so on. How I wish my son could grow up with a clan, a group of mothers and children traveling together through life like a pod of orcas, always looking out for each other, secure in their belonging to something bigger than a family of three.

The older he gets, the more I worry that I have not done enough to knit a tapestry that will enfold and protect him, that will open doors and give him room to stretch while keeping him out of harm’s way, that will imprint a pattern so deep and recognizable that he can always find his way home. This is what I am most afraid of: that I will be exposed as the mother who cannot weave, who cannot on her own produce the work of many hands, the unseen web that no one notices but everyone needs. Try as I might, there is no material stronger than kinship.