I’m offline and out on maternity leave, but the internet … never rests. So while I’m away, Links is resurfacing some old gems that you may have missed. This one originally ran in July 2022, and since then it’s only become truer: Several large surveys and polls show that many adults aren’t posting to social media anymore.

If you enjoy this post, please consider liking and/or sharing it. That support goes a long way toward keeping Links strong until I’m back full-time again. If you’ve considered a paid subscription, now’s also a great time to upgrade. You’ll get new subscriber-only posts, the first-ever Links zine and the intense personal — political?? — satisfaction of knowing your support let me take parental leave.

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Thanks, as always, for reading and supporting this newsletter. Links will be back to its normal cadence in September. ❤️

More than 260,000 people have signed a week-old Change.org petition aimed at Instagram, the one-time photo-sharing app now mimicking TikTok as closely as copyright law allows it. Personally, I used to like Instagram for stalking the weddings of distant acquaintances and stockpiling local brunch suggestions. Now every fifth post is a recommended “reel” from some live-laugh-love creatrix whose cleaning hacks and healthy cooking tips could not be less relevant to my interests.

“We just want to see when our friends post” (!!!!), in the words of the petition.

But my friends aren’t posting anymore, and yours probably aren’t either. In a Twitter exchange with Chrissy Teigan, of all people, Instagram head Adam Mosseri explained the TikTokification of Instagram in terms of user behavior. Most people now interact with their friends through direct messages or stories, he said; on both Instagram and Facebook, fewer and fewer users still post new personal content to the feed.

In other words, after more than a decade of Web 2.0 bliss, everyone has gone back to … lurking.

“Lurking” is a word with a deep and intriguing history in digital life, dating back to the days of Usenet and BBS message boards. Historically, it’s not been a complimentary term: People who hang out in online communities, but don’t contribute to them, have long been cast as creeps or free-riders. The advent of social media introduced a new participation imperative: Because social networks needed their users to create content to sell ads against, they introduced all kinds of little psychological nudges to lure people out of the audience and onto the stage. (See, for instance, the “like” button.)

But most people in most communities actually prefer to lurk, an observation so consistent that it’s been codified as “the 1%” or “the 90-9-1” rule. Writing in 1996, well before Instagram, the Danish researcher Jakob Nielsen theorized that within each online community, 1% of users post most content, 9% contribute on and off, and 90% just hang out and read/watch shit. People like to quibble over the exact ratios, but surveys since then have shown the concept is basically sound: On Twitter, for instance, one quarter of users post 97% of the site’s content. On TikTok, only about half of surveyed users in one 2018 report said they posted videos of their own.

Unlike Instagram and Facebook, however, TikTok actively rewards lurkers — you don’t even have to create an account before the app serves you a flood of content. Its algorithms also prize passive signals like watch time pretty highly, removing the need to participate via mechanisms such as follows, likes, saves or comments.

Instagram and Facebook are now updating to cater to lurkers, too; or maybe more accurately, they’re backtracking from the efforts they launched to coax users out of their lurker states over a decade ago. On Thursday, acknowledging the abruptness of that shift, Mosseri said the company would reduce the amount of recommended posts and videos in the Instagram feed while the company tunes its recommendation algorithms.

But the pause is temporary; during a Wednesday earnings call, in which Meta also announced its first-ever revenue drop, Mark Zuckerberg said both the Facebook and Instagram feeds would double down on recommended content in the future. And if you think that’s bad, just wait for what comes next: After personalized AI-recommended content, Facebook’s former VP of product tweeted this week, comes personalized AI-generated content. It’s a lurkers’ web and we’re just whining about it.

This post originally published on July 30, 2022 with the headline “Revenge of the lurkers.” If you’d like to continue your ride on this lil time machine, Links also shared stories on the evolution of American Sign Language and the rise of subtitles that week.

Thank you again for being here. Subscribe today to keep Links going strong — your shares and support while I’m out on leave make all the difference.

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I’m offline and out on maternity leave, but the internet … never rests! So while I’m away, Links is resurfacing some old gems that you may have missed. This one originally ran in March 2024, and the culture of performative hydration still deluges us. As I write this intro in March 2025, in fact, several commerce sites have just christened a “new status water bottle.” UGH.

If you enjoy this post, please consider liking and/or sharing it. That support goes a long way toward keeping Links strong until I’m back full-time again. If you’ve considered a paid subscription, now’s also a great time to upgrade. You’ll get new subscriber-only posts, the first-ever Links zine and the intense personal — political?? — satisfaction of knowing your support let me take parental leave.

Subscribe now

Thanks, as always, for reading and supporting this newsletter. Links will be back to its normal cadence in September. ❤️

Kelly Stranick, a mid-tier wellness influencer living in New York, begins her day at 6:30 a.m. She then hits the gym, walks her dog, curls her hair … and mixes a picture-perfect glass of rose-colored water. 

This water — "sexy water" — is Stranick’s calling card. Since coining the term at some point last year, she has made the invention of complex, "functional" waters a pillar of her burgeoning TikTok account. Last week, she broke into the mainstream when Women’s Wear Daily wrote up the trend. Stories in Popsugar and The New York Post followed: Our cups runneth over with hydration fads.

For me, "sexy water" confirmed a hunch I’ve nursed for several months. Performative hydration is out of control — it’s wellness run amok. Look to the Stanley craze that dominated whole news cycles this winter, or Liquid Death’s recent billion-dollar valuation. Last year, WaterTok (sexy water, but for the middle class) provoked a minor moral panic among nutritionists.

Social media overflows with exhortations to hydrate: for your skin, your sanity, your energy, your immunity, your metabolism, your kidney function, your overall wellness. 

When, I ask, did drinking water become such a goddamn production? 

“What if it all came down to water?” 

Children of the ’90s know that "water hacks" are nothing new. I grew up with Crystal Light packets in the pantry and recall my mother’s brief affection for flat, flavored water. A decade earlier, Perrier conquered America on the strength of Jane Fonda, whose wildly popular aerobics videos drove a desire "not just to be healthy, but to be seen to be healthy." (My italics.) Drinking certain water has long been linked, in other words, to aspirations of health and fitness.

But "wellness," as both a personal practice and a performance, exploded in the past 15 years. While the term stretches back before that, observers trace the modern iteration to the late 2000s, a period that conveniently saw both the introduction of the first true smartphone and the collapse of the American financial system. Newly insecure about their long-term prospects, and seeking ways to self-optimize in an uncertain world, a generation of young Americans turned to yoga, crossfit, bulletproof coffee, essential oils, yoni eggs, caveman diets … the works.

They also turned to water as they never had before: The forecasting firm WGSN claims 2011 is the year when water bottles transformed into fashion accessories. Since then, we’ve seen a parade of trendy bottles come and go — S’wells, Hydroflasks, Stanleys — each designed not for storage in a purse or gym bag, but for open (even ostentatious!) carrying. 

It’s not just water bottles that blew up, either. In 2015, the long-languishing Midwestern seltzer brand LaCroix took off thanks, in part, to wellness bloggers and influencers on the Whole 30 and paleo diets. Liquid Death, founded three years later, marketed itself as a "lifestyle brand" for straight-edge punk kids. In 2019, a widely-reshared Twitter account, called @drinkwaterslut, began reminding followers to, well … drink water. For a minute there, any unsuspecting Twitter scroll could yield a sudden "hydrate today, bitch" or "drink water now."

When this trend crossed the line from sustentative1 to performative is difficult to say. Surely many people swigged from S’wells and Hydroflasks because they felt actual, literal thirst. But I have to think we tipped into a different thirst entirely around the time that people began describing water as some kind of improbable, panacean cure.

Water became Instagram’s go-to solution for break-outs, bloating, depression, stress and sluggishness. It could boost your immunity and "cleanse" your organs. Enough water could give you energy, rev your metabolism, make you more productive. Hydration became entangled with skincare routines, girl-bossy self-care and trendy detoxes.

The comedians Jacqueline Novak and Kate Berlant pilloried this transformation in a 2020 episode of their podcast POOG: "What if all of the ways we chase health, the ways we chase optimization and beauty, what if it all came down to water? What if the powders and the creams and the lotions, and the jogging and the running and the yoga and the praying — what if it all means nothing?"

There’s also a great comic by Sarah Andersen that depicts a woman with an escalating series of health problems, to which her off-screen companion repeatedly recommends hydration. (The woman understandably ends up on the ground, screaming, in the end.)

But for me, the whole affair most vividly evokes this brilliant art project called "Fake It Till You Make It," in which the artist Maya Man collected hundreds of words and phrases from feel-good text graphics and fed them into a generative language algorithm. The algorithm recombines the text into new graphics, which are simultaneously plausible and … deeply vapid. 

Many "Fake It Till You Make It" posts recommend drinking water, alongside bubbly, pastel proclamations like "taking care of yourself is magnetic" and "dance in your transformation."

It’s in a similar spirit that the global president of Stanley, speaking to InsideHook in 2021, claimed that hydration had become "a way of life" for the wellness generation.  But it might be more accurate to say hydration is a vibe — an unquantifiable quality, a vague idea, a notion as liquid as water itself: It’s health and wellness and style and fashion and "transformation" and "taking care of yourself."

Of Britas and brands

Part of me wonders if this isn’t the future that public health advocates have long said they wanted. In 2013 and 2014 — around the time that today’s 20-somethings were in secondary school — former First Lady Michelle Obama spearheaded a major public-private initiative, with a significant marketing presence in U.S. schools, designed to get Americans to switch from soda and other sugary beverages to water. Within five years, water was outselling all other bottles.

Performative hydration trends become troublesome, however, if they nudge people back to sugary drinks again — an impulse you often see in WaterTok’s obsession with flavorings, syrups and other sweet add-ins. Commenting on Stranick’s "sexy water," one nutritionist also warned Popsugar that loading your glass with minerals and supplements can also backfire if those ingredients interact with medications you’re taking or interfere with your body’s mineral absorption. 

*My* concern is less nutritional than philosophical, however: There is something really shitty, and slightly sinister, in the deeply American impulse to rebrand a free, bountiful, communal thing as an exclusive luxury good. Water is an appealing wellness trend in large part because it’s so widely available, but that shifts when you begin storing it in $45 tumblers or adding $50 "beauty" drops or snubbing the peasant institution of tap water all together. 

In one recent "sexy water" video, Stranick — wearing a thematic wetsuit (?) — blends filtered water with six supplements and tinctures, which together retail for a whopping $264. Watching her pour water from her counter-top reverse-osmosis machine (which I price at an additional $300, at least), I’m reminded of the $18 Brita we bought last month while staying in an area where the tap water ran brownish and tasted muddy.

We’re still using it now, back home in Buffalo, where officials casually stopped fluoridating the water without telling anyone. Other municipalities, needless to say, have even larger water problems: lead contamination, forever chemicals, agricultural pollution. A September article in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology found widespread contamination in many U.S. water systems.

None of this has anything to do with "sexy water" — and that is what makes "sexy water" so weird. (Arguably, there are few things less sexy than academic journals or fluoridation.) We live in a surreal, gilded era where people "ritualizing" the "chore" of hydration and people drinking poisoned tap water simply … coexist!

Are we supposed to reconcile that gap, I wonder, by (literally) buying into these rituals ourselves?

This post originally published on March 27, 2024 with the headline “Performative hydration has gone too far.” If you’d like to continue your ride on this lil time machine, Links also shared stories about tradwives trends, Andrew Huberman and NYT’s Connections game that week.

Thank you again for being here. Subscribe today to keep Links going strong — your shares and support while I’m out on leave make all the difference.

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I’m offline and out on maternity leave, but the internet … never rests! So while I’m away, Links is resurfacing some old gems that you may have missed. This one originally ran in November 2022, and since then other outlets have also picked up on the culture of cheating in language-learning apps. For me, it raises larger questions about the types of behavior that platforms incentivize … and their reasons for creating those incentives.

If you enjoy this post, please consider liking and/or sharing it. That support goes a long way toward keeping Links strong until I’m back full-time again. If you’ve considered a paid subscription, now’s also a great time to upgrade. You’ll get new subscriber-only posts, the first-ever Links zine and the intense personal — political?? — satisfaction of knowing your support let me take parental leave.

Subscribe now

Thanks, as always, for reading and supporting this newsletter. Links will be back to its normal cadence in September. ❤️

There’s no prize money. No credential. No real glory to speak of. And yet, untold thousands of hobbyists devote hours each day to cheating the language-learning app Duolingo.

Forums teem with complaints about suspected bots and scores that suggest their players don’t sleep. Super-users proffer tips on “hacking” the app’s point system to better compete. In a March preprint, researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology scraped 30,000 posts about cheating from the Duolingo forums — and that wasn’t necessarily a comprehensive search. In other words, if you thought online chess had a cheating problem … it may actually get worse.

To understand how people cheat Duolingo, you first have to understand how the app works. (And to be clear, we’re talking about regular, consumer-facing Duolingo here — not the company’s education service.) Duolingo works off a basic points system, where you earn credits, called “XP,” for completing language lessons and exercises. A regular lesson yields 10 XP. A quiz or test might earn as many as 100.

Conventional grading is boring, however, and bored people don’t spend much time in-app. So Duolingo has gradually added additional social and gamification features, such as boosters that double your earned XP, the ability to friend and follow other users and — most importantly, for our purposes — week-long competitions called leagues or leaderboards. League placement is determined by your total XP, with top scorers advancing to higher levels.

Presumably, the feature *should* prompt competitors to want to practice more. But in reality, it has incentivized a whole lot of people to wrack up XP by any means possible.

Some users run bots or browser extensions to answer questions for them. Others claim to compete in teams or use aids like their phones’ speech recognition mode to ace exercises. Most people, however, are engaged less in all-out fraud than they are in a practice sometimes termed “gamification misuse”: Playing the game solely to farm XP, not to actually learn.

There’s a Dubai-based Bitcoin-enthusiast named alfa-ace1 who writes about his success with “XP farming” quite a lot. That success is considerable: He’s won Diamond League, the very topmost league, 90 weeks in a row — and claims most participants in that league are also XP farmers.

To keep his streak, Alfa “studies” multiple languages: German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Korean and Arabic, to be exact. Different languages offer different activities with varying XP values — and switching back and forth can maximize earnings, especially if you’re already fluent in one or several of those languages.

On top of that, Alfa uses a long-term strategy in which he almost completes dozens of lessons and then blitzes through the few remaining questions at strategic moments. He favors exercises that can be done over and over again very quickly with little risk of error.

Importantly, Alfa is also willing to spend money on Duolingo — in fact, none of this would work if he didn’t. You only get unlimited access to some of the app’s most XP-heavy features with an $84 premium subscription. He recommends buying “gems,” too: an in-app currency that can be exchanged for additional XP boosts. (In actual currency, batches of gems run between $5 and $20.)

“Apologies to all users here that are unhappy with Duolingo XP system,” he wrote in early October, “but Duolingo is a public company and needs its users to spend more.”

Duolingo does seem to be cracking down on these tactics: In recent weeks, XP farmers have observed what appear to be new, mandatory wait-times between consecutive rounds of high-value activities, and some have complained those exercises aren’t available as often.

It’s also hard to miss the fact, however, that these features are working exactly as intended. In Duolingo’s most recent shareholder letter, CEO Luis von Ahn described several of the app’s gamification features as plays to boost revenue and engagement. Incidentally, the number of paid Duolingo subscribers was up 71 percent [!] from a year earlier.

Is this learning, though? Is it even … fun??

“If your goal is to learn a language in the most effecient [sic] way possible, you’d be better off using something other than duolingo,” one short-lived Duolinguist wrote. “And if your goal is to have fun gaming, then you’d be better off finding a game more fun than duolingo.”

This post originally published on November 5, 2022 with the headline “¿Por qué no?” If you’d like to continue your ride on this lil time machine, Links also shared stories about a dark web kingpin, TikTok harassment and Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter that week.

Thank you again for being here. Subscribe today to keep Links going strong — your shares and support while I’m out on leave make all the difference.

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I’m offline and out on maternity leave, but the internet … never rests! So while I’m away, Links is resurfacing some old gems that you may have missed. This one originally ran in June 2024, and for me, “A Bar Song” still holds up. Many of the songs and artists named in this piece also went on to even greater fame after it published. Writing in February 2025, the essayist and digital culture writer argued that the ascendancy of Benson Boone, in particular, shows that we’re living in what I called a platform-agnostic “sea of content” and he termed “the new FYP monoculture.” Consider reading the two pieces together!

If you enjoy this post, please consider liking and/or sharing it. That support goes a long way toward keeping Links strong until I’m back full-time again. If you’ve considered a paid subscription, now’s also a great time to upgrade. You’ll get new subscriber-only posts, the first-ever Links zine and the intense personal — political?? — satisfaction of knowing your support let me take parental leave.

Subscribe now

Thanks, as always, for reading and supporting this newsletter. Links will be back to its normal cadence in September. ❤️

Last week I braved hordes of seltzer-drunk suburbanites dressed as slutty cowgirls to sit in a minor-league baseball stadium and sweat through my personal song of the summer. 

The song’s not exactly a deep cut. It’s not exactly deep, full stop. But damn, “A Bar Song” — Shaboozey’s twangy, chart-topping interpolation of the 2004 classic “Tipsy,” by J-Kwon — makes one hell of a warm-weather anthem. Rarely do I listen to it just one time. Nor did I last Friday, in fact! Shaboozey came on stage, played “A Bar Song” four times, and … abruptly ended his very short set.

Personally, I was baffled.  Had something happened? Was this some kind of protest?1 Behind us, however, a trio of rowdy, hard-drinking bros confidently propagated their own thesis. “He’s only TikTok famous,” they said, first to each other … and then to anyone in the vicinity who would listen. “He only has one big song.” They tapped Jason on the shoulder to share this insight with us.2 Only TikTok famous! Ridiculous!!

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I probably don’t need to tell you, if you know Shaboozey, what was actually going on here. Shaboozey is Black; mainstream country is white — by marketing and exclusion, if not artistic heritage. I’m pretty confident the TikTok shade reflected that, rather than any sophisticated understanding of modern music distribution. (See also exhibits B and C: the bros’ lengthy deliberations on “REAL country music”; their hoots of approbation when a later artist asked if there were “any rednecks” in the audience. 🫠) 

Still … the implication intrigued me. There was arguably a moment, early in TikTok’s ascent, when being “famous” on the app was distinct from being “famous” in other cultural contexts. TikTok music was not pop music, per se — it was “absurd, croaked-out, bass-gurgling,” a soundtrack for adolescent dance challenges. 

But internet culture is pop culture now. No one calls Lil Nas X, Olivia Rodrigo or Noah Kahan “TikTok stars” anymore. (No one ever called Kate Bush or Stevie Nicks “TikTok stars,” though their stars rose a second time through the platform.) Meanwhile, even global mega-musicians — world tour type musicians — host influencer listening parties and gin up “viral” challenges in the hopes that some of TikTok’s algorithmic magic will rub off on them. In 2024, “TikTok famous” isn’t a dig — it’s a sign that you are, in more ways than one, living in another, less-enlightened period. 

The charts themselves bear that out, to a point, if you’re willing to dig through them. Days after the Shaboozey show, and empowered by a 14-day free trial I really can’t forget to cancel, I subscribed to a wildly expensive music data service called Chartmetric, which tracks song and artist metrics across more than a dozen platforms. I was curious to what degree mainstream radio stations, like the one that brought Shaboozey to Buffalo, also play viral TikTok songs.

The answer was higher than I expected: Per Chartmetric, 94 new songs by American artists earned at least 100,000 TikTok posts in the past year. Of those, 68 also saw some radio play over the same period.3

The majority of these crossover hits are by global superstars, of course — Taylor Swift could record her cat dry-heaving, and it’d probably go platinum a dozen times over. But under that, there’s also a surprisingly deep layer of lesser-known or emerging artists whose songs appear to have taken off on TikTok before they made the jump to mainstream radio.

Those include songs like “Austin,” by 24-year-old singer-songwriter Dasha, who choreographed an accompanying line dance that went viral on TikTok in March; “Someday I’ll Get It,” by Alek Olsen, whose brooding blip of a song became the favored soundtrack for reminisces about departed pets; and “Act II: Date @ 8,” by 4batz, whose sudden viral success fueled speculation he was an “industry plant.”

The second most-played song on FM radio right now, Tommy Richman’s “MILLION DOLLAR BABY,” also took off on TikTok in early May as the soundtrack to a teen dance challenge and a relationship meme called the “Black wife effect.” 

Meanwhile, “Beautiful Things” — the first single off Benson Boone’s debut album, and the seventh most-played song on U.S. radio yesterday — took off on TikTok three months ago, when users realized its cathartic, eight-bar chorus could soundtrack just about any strong feeling.

The dynamics of online popularity are noisy and multidirectional, of course: I can’t say what’s causation or correlation here, and I can’t disentangle an artist’s TikTok success from other equally important factors. (Boone opened for the Eras Tour in London last week, for instance, and Shaboozey appeared twice on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter.) There’s actually a growing panic, in some corners, around how and why some musicians achieve viral fame — a reflection of just how little we understand the interplay between social media, radio and streaming.

I include myself in that “we,” for sure: I had no idea that so many songs I like actually took off on TikTok first. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is maybe the prime example — I encountered it through a Spotify playlist long before I realized TikTok had found infinite storytelling potential in that “oh my … Good Lord” chorus. And I realized *that* long before I knew “Bar Song” made the jump to country radio and the sorts of mass-market stadium shows like the one I saw last week in Buffalo.

Platform and provenance hardly matter anymore — we’re all just swimming in a sea of content! And if it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now: “Internet” and “pop” culture are synonymous.

This post originally published on June 27, 2024 with the headline “TikTok on the radio.” If you’d like to continue your ride on this lil time machine, Links also shared stories about TikTok algospeak, the “Canva-ification” of online aesthetics and the dangers of noise-cancelling headphones that week.

Thank you again for being here. Subscribe today to keep Links going strong — your shares and support while I’m out on leave make all the difference.

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I’m offline and out on maternity leave, but the internet … never rests! So while I’m away, Links is resurfacing some old gems that you may have missed. This one originally ran in March 2021, but to me, the observations around knowledge and internet search still feel really resonant … particularly amidst the past month’s flood of Covid anniversary content.

If you enjoy this post, please consider liking and/or sharing it. That support goes a long way toward keeping Links strong until I’m back full-time again. If you’ve considered a paid subscription, now’s also a great time to upgrade. You’ll get new subscriber-only posts, the first-ever Links zine and the intense personal — political?? — satisfaction of knowing your support let me take parental leave.

Subscribe now

Thanks, as always, for reading and supporting this newsletter. Links will be back to its normal cadence in September. ❤️

Last week I spoke with Google’s data editor, Simon Rogers, for a story involving search data that should (!) publish Friday. The story is light and fun and concerns pandemic foods, so … we mostly talked about bread recipes.

At one point, however, Simon made an offhand comment about search data that struck me as sort of profound: Search trends don’t just reflect interest or zeitgeist, he said, but also gaps in people’s knowledge. We turn to Google with our dumbest, most mundane questions. (I Google synonyms and antonyms at least 10 times a day.) But sometimes the things we wish to know, and don’t know yet, are deeply ominous or shameful or just … heavy.

If you want to better understand what I’m talking about, try pulling up your Google Activity for the past 12 months. (Yes, I know — smarter/savvier people than I will have this feature turned off.) I spent some time this week going through my own searches, and essentially found the pandemic journal I forgot to keep. These ones, for instance, are all from March 2020.

Reading through these searches now, I’m reminded how much my experience and understanding of Covid-19 changed. And I’m *alarmed* by the stunning number of times I Googled “Covid-19 symptom” + whatever minor upset ailed me that day.

But there’s also a story here, right? You can see a narrative arc in these searches. Or at least I can, since I lived them.

April 2020

May 2020

Summer 2020

Fall & Winter 2020

Winter 2021

This post originally published on March 17, 2021 with the headline “The story in your searches.” If you’d like to continue your ride on this lil time machine, Links also shared stories on QAnon capture, voice memos and Cody Rigsby that week.

Thank you again for being here. Subscribe today to keep Links going strong — your shares and support while I’m out on leave make all the difference.

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Friend, reader, internet stranger … where the hell to begin with this one. I’m writing today to share personal news that I’ve kept a secret for many long months.

In 2023, as some of you know, I lost three pregnancies in the span of a year. I last wrote about that experience for Links last June, in this essay about AI, grief and miscarriage.

Behind the scenes, however, and away from this page, there have been other developments. First, I was referred around this time last year to a local fertility clinic. Then I reported for a battery of tests. I spent hours each week getting needled and scanned. By May, the specialist concluded that the cause of my problems, if one existed, was beyond our collective diagnostic grasp.

By June, she’d cleared my husband Jason and I to “try again,” in that super-sexy clinic parlance. On July 19, at three weeks and one day, a blood test confirmed I was pregnant again. And ever since then, for reasons unpacked in the essay below, I’ve largely hid my pregnancy from the internet. I am, as of this writing, 38 weeks along — so the birth of our daughter is … imminent.

Keeping this secret from you was both inconvenient and vaguely, uncomfortably deceitful. I have struggled mightily for solid subscriber recs because I only read books about infants right now. I have dropped a few posts because … insomnia! Also: endless appointments; surprise ultrasounds. As I near my due date, I’ve also grown nervous about the prospect of pausing Links to take leave. It’s only been 10 months since I relaunched the newsletter — this baby, like her mother, has dreadful timing.

You have all, however, been fantastically supportive since I left my job as a reporter at The Buffalo News and struck out on my own. Many of you have shared this newsletter with your own networks and friends, for which I am so incredibly grateful.

Roughly 2.5% of you are also paid supporters, which has helped make this Substack my main source of income. As a self-employed writer, I don’t receive paid parental leave, health insurance or any of the other benefits that come with a traditional media job. Instead, I am relying on the continued support of paid Links subscribers to let me take time to bond with my newborn.

During that leave, Links will publish from the archives on an altered schedule, and new writing will be reserved exclusively for paid supporters. As a thank you, one lucky paid sub will also get to name our firstborn.

… lol, kidding. She already has a name! And I don’t trust you weirdos. Linksy McLinkface probably won’t play in a kindergarten classroom. But you WILL receive Links’ first-ever, snail-mail zine, shipped directly to an address of your choosing. And you will be privy to my earliest, rawest writing about Sprout, as we call her, and parenting.

I won’t lie: This is a mildly terrifying moment for both me and Links. If you’ve ever thought about upgrading to a paid subscription … now is the time, truly. Independent writers like me rely directly on reader support. Your subscription — at $7 a month, or roughly three-quarters the cost of a small box of diapers — will help sustain this newsletter during my leave and ensure it’s going strong when I return.

I’d specifically love to sign on 120 new supporters before Sprout arrives. That would help me cover ongoing administrative costs that don’t pause while I’m out — legal, accounting, media subs, postage, etc. — as well as a portion of the $8000 bill we expect to get from the hospital. 🫠

Click here to upgrade your subscription

If you can’t subscribe now, that’s also okay. I still appreciate you so much. Every time you forward my writing, that also helps. As does every comment in the Substack app and every post shared on social media.

I’ll share more details about my leave next week, assuming Sprout doesn’t drop by early. Until then, thank you for being here — and for making this journey with me.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re pregnant

It seemed almost rude to show up so pregnant to a long-delayed reunion with my former editor. I consider him a mentor and a personal friend, so I tried to text the news as I drew closer. “Btw,” I tapped, five blocks from the coffee shop. “I’ve been pretty private about this, but I’m actually … very pregnant.” Awkward! Neurotic! I tried again: “Fyi! Pregnant, not bloated.”

Everything sounded self-conscious and weird, and my hands were growing stiff with cold, so I scowled, gave up on the whole attempt and pocketed my phone. My mentor would find out soon enough, I reasoned, and in the same way that a lot of people learned of our “big news”: haphazardly, belatedly and — in defiance of long-standing millennial norms — not through social media.

My first child is now arriving in a matter of days, and most of my social and professional networks have no earthly idea. Apart from a single vague post to an alt Instagram account, I’ve largely hid this pregnancy from social media.

It’s not that I set out to keep a secret, per se — but the news has felt too vulnerable, too exposing, too complex. And in delaying the announcement, I’ve joined a quiet movement of soon-to-be parents who concealed their pregnancies from the internet. Some are motivated by a growing social awareness of infertility and pregnancy loss; others by privacy concerns, post-Roe anxieties or a distaste for performative social media mommy culture. On TikTok alone, thousands of posts now celebrate what’s known as the baby “hard launch”: announcing a new arrival only after they’re born.

“The new pregnancy announcement is no announcement,” the journalist and commentator Fortesa Latifi declared in a viral TikTok last December. In one recent-ish study, researchers called reluctance to post pregnancy reveals an “under-investigated” wrinkle of digital culture.

Things were simpler, surely, in the days before Instagram. Since the early 2010s, however, the glossy, much-aestheticized pregnancy post has become a rite of parental passage. Frequently, it features an ultrasound print; sometimes, a photo of a bewildered dog or prior kid. Some posters even spring for posed professional shoots and stylized Etsy announcement templates.

Those rituals continue in many circles as both a practical necessity and a mid-30s flex: Nothing gins up engagement like the promise of new life; plus, it’s tedious to dole out personal updates on a personal, one-by-one basis. But the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of remote work also changed the logic for some parents. On the internet, it turns out, nobody knows you’re pregnant … unless you decide to tell them.

Suddenly many pregnant people, liberated from the biases of their colleagues and the unsolicited opinions of their relatives, chose to guard the big news up until, and even after, the due date itself. Others have reportedly grown more private since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, freeing some prosecutors to target pregnant people who suffer stillbirths and miscarriages in deep-red states. A growing cultural awareness of infertility and pregnancy loss may also play a role: One psychologist told POPSUGAR she’s seen patients go dark because they fear their posts could trigger others in their social circle.

I don’t doubt that these factors underlie the growing allure of the non-announcement, in part because they all influenced my own decision. As a self-employed freelancer, I worried about how potential editors and Substack subscribers would react to the prospect of my pending leave. I hoped to avoid unwanted belly rubs and unwelcome advice about maternity. Most importantly, I suffered three consecutive miscarriages in 2023, and had long since abandoned the naive belief that all pregnancies proceed skippingly from conception to birth. If something went wrong again, I only wanted to tell the close friends and family who had cradled us before.

“I’m not telling you to tell you,” I told one friend in July, the very day that I got my positive test. “I’m telling you so that it’s easier to get to the point if and when I have another miscarriage.”

This is, in all fairness, a dreadful burden to put on one’s friends. I could be, and often was, a bit of a bitch about their reactions. “We’re not doing ‘congratulations’ yet,” I’d say, severely, to my loved ones’ heartfelt felicitations. “Can you please call it an embryo?” I demanded of the nurse who referenced a “Baby Dewey” at our six-week appointment.

To each other, Jason and I called this budding idea Sprout: a vague name for a hopeful thing I nonetheless viewed with suspicion. After our third loss, we’d spent thousands of dollars on the services of a soft-spoken endocrinologist. She X-rayed my ovaries, graded my eggs and ultimately reached no real conclusions. “Your odds are still very good,” she said, but promising statistics failed to move me. Some people defy all the odds, after all. Olympians. Jackpot-winners. Vending machine casualties.

I would believe Sprout was healthy, I told Jason, only after scrutinizing her humanoid form at our 20-week scan. Then I might feel ready to tell more people that we were expecting again.

But even when that scan came back clean, I found new reasons to delay the reveal. You hear all sorts of horrors in loss support groups; you conflate real danger with lingering fears. As we reached 22 weeks, then 25, my mom began to nag me about preparations. I had purchased nothing, planned nothing, read no books — told no distant relations.

I worried that any groundwork for Sprout’s impending birth would invite the universe to quash it. More than that, as the second trimester passed, I found myself shredded by contradictions: Hopeful agony. Sharp dagger joy. Love so acute that I cried to feel it. The idea of wrangling that tangle into a post taxed my shrinking, sleep-deprived brain beyond any possibility of action.

The algorithms knew I was pregnant now, too; Instagram served me a steady buffet of other families’ stylized pregnancy reveals. But I cringed away from these shiny summer children who seemed to share none of my hard-earned fears. Some appeared to have booked photo shoots or hosted whole-ass showers before their dating scans. They floated through their blithe, photogenic pregnancies with the confidence that misfortune couldn’t happen to them. I saw this so often I coined a term to shorthand my seething: “Pregnancy privilege again,” I’d tell Jason, as some influencer whooped up a positive test in my Instagram feed.

I’m sure many parents do announce with greater nuance than the viral reels I saw. But the conventions of the pregnancy announcement genre don’t lend themselves to subtlety or complication, overall. Parents are forever and always excited. (If you want to be edgy, maybe “joyful” or “blessed.”) Their dreams have come true. Their family is growing. They’re smitten. They’re grateful. They’re … oddly attractive.

Even for parents who conceive easily, with textbook gestations and straightforward births, the form flattens the complexity of being pregnant — the chaos and doubt of the whole endeavor. I’m not original in pointing any of this out: We all understand, 15+ years in, that social media is performative. “Big-reveal content,” the sociologist and writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton recently declared, “is the ultimate commodification of our emotions.”

I’d just never felt so driven to resist that process, to defy the social mandate to stage myself. I’ve written a newsletter on and off for 10 years, so I’m used to spilling my proverbial guts in other people’s inboxes. But the internal process I went through this past year — the slow, halting journey toward acceptance that this baby truly was ours — was so incredibly profound and intimate that any effort to externalize it just seemed false.

That’s not a good look for a writer, surely: I should be able to “express” myself. And I am, I think — at least I’m trying, here — but not in a way that graphs comfortably onto mainstream internet conventions. For instance, I’m excited: I can tell you that. As an Instagram caption, it wouldn’t ring untrue. But it’s more accurate to say that I cry every time I sing the song for which we’ve named our daughter.

I am grateful. Of course I am. But that’s also cliche and reductive: Better to tell you I pray for Sprout every night. Me, a life-long atheist.

These vignettes are individual to me, of course, but I think they also speak to the reasons that others have turned on social media — in the context of being pregnant, sure, but also in general. Over the two decades that I’ve been online, these platforms have morphed from mutual exchanges, typically connecting family and friends, into always-on, one-way broadcast channels in which influencers, marketers, celebrities and try-hards battle for a sliver of attention.

Everyone’s performance is inherently heightened by virtue of being in the ring. The pressure to curate and self-optimize can exhaust and corrode you, even if you don’t personally or consciously post in pursuit of virality.

Speaking to Romper a few years ago, the journalist and parenting commentator Kelly Weill theorized that pregnancy non-announcements spring not from a desire to seem cool or blasé, but from a generalized fatigue with the rote act of posting. “People are communicating more in close circles,” she said — like group chats, DMs and in-person gatherings. Rather like my coffee meeting with that former editor, or the calls we made to friends at three weeks.

All of this has made me wonder, abstractly, if and what I’ll post of Sprout after she is born. My mom bought us matching outfits for the hospital: a robe for me, a wrap for her, a sweatshirt for Jason. But while I don’t doubt we’ll take the photo, and while I know I will treasure the hell out of it, I can’t say with any certainty that you’ll ever see it on the open internet.

Some things maintain their richness better, I think, when they aren’t posted on social media. They oxidize in the frenzied current of the feed, in the flattening gaze of the algorithm.

Some things, I think, you have to hoard for yourself — even in defiance of convention.

So this reveal is coming late, but: Fyi! Pregnant, not bloated.

A version of this essay also ran yesterday on elle.com with the headline “Why I hid my pregnancy from Instagram.” Elle is awesome, and I’m enormously grateful to the editors there for working with me on a tight turnaround and amidst a number of third-trimester disruptions.

If you are also struggling with infertility or perinatal loss, please know that I feel your pain on such a visceral level and am here if you ever want to vent to a sympathetic stranger. My local perinatal bereavement org was a huge resource for me; you can find similar resources online via Postpartum Support International.

Thank you again for being here. Subscribe today to keep Links going strong — your support while I’m on leave makes all the difference. 💛

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Late last month, fwiw, French President Emmanual Macron announced that the Louvre will soon construct a dedicated gallery space for the Mona Lisa, following reports of overcrowding and building damage.

Text sources and further reading:

• “Photographing in the Art Museum: Visitor Attitudes and Motivations,” by Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert for Visitor Studies (2017)

• “Selfie Culture Has Some Art Museums Caving on Strict No-Photo Policies,” by James Tarmy for Bloomberg ($ 2018)

• “Photo Ban Lifted on Picasso’s Guernica After 30 Years,” by Gareth Harris for The Art Newspaper ($ 2023)

• “How Long Do People Really Spend Looking at Art in Museums?,” by Isaac Kaplan for Artsy (2017)

• “Why Do People Take Pictures of Works of Art?” Fascinating Flickr thread (2007)

Image sources:

All illustrations via Canva contributor Ladadikart, and all Louvre photos courtesy Jason. (Behind every woman who hates museum photos is a photo-taking husband!!)

More like this:

Thank you so much for liking and sharing these little visual essays. It’s given me the hubris courage to try three of them to date. :)

Matt Kiser starts his day with a blitzkrieg of tabs. First, he opens up the homepages of more than a dozen major news organizations. Then, he opens every story on every page that interests him. Once his tab bar grows so crowded that the headers shrink to lines — “it’s some real Rain Man shit,” Kiser acknowledges1 — he begins the laborious process of clicking through each article and grouping stories on overlapping subjects.

This is how Kiser makes sense of a frenzied, disorienting news environment, for both himself and his 200,000 readers. Since 2017, the prolific writer and curator has published an invaluable daily newsletter called What the Fuck Just Happened Today?, in which he digests the chaos of U.S. politics and policy “for normal people.” A typical edition includes a one-sentence summary of the day’s events (inevitably, a many-claused run-on) and blurbs summarizing between five and 20 news stories, drawn from multiple mainstream publications.

Even with Kiser’s systematic approach, however, navigating this particular news environment has lately become more difficult. President Donald Trump seems determined to set new records for political and administrative chaos, besting the high score he himself set during his first administration. Meanwhile, the continued fragmentation of the news media means that people now encounter more content from more sources across more platforms than ever before. In recent weeks, some Democrats and media critics have begun discussing news and information overload as a growing crisis: a phenomenon that prevents voters from understanding the news — and keeps them from acting on it.

But people like Kiser have found a counterintuitive solution: a way to build resilience in the face of a news cycle designed to burn us out. “We have a scarcity of time and an abundance of information,” Kiser told me. “I think you have to intentionally slow down.”

“The paralysis is the point”

If you struggle to stay informed without losing your mind, you’re far from alone. In 2022, the American Psychological Association warned that growing numbers of Americans were suffering from what one therapist termed “media saturation overload” — a specialized sort of stress that results from encountering a steady, ceaseless “drumbeat” of negative news. In the few short weeks since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, that drumbeat has only picked up. The writer recently described feeling the strain of the news cycle in her body, like a kind of unresolved trauma.

The current chaos is deliberate, to be clear. The Trump administration wants you overwhelmed. Since January 20, the president has issued a record number of (variably legal) executive orders as part of a cynical political strategy that his former advisor, Steve Bannon, once dubbed “flooding the zone with shit.” The idea is to turn up the volume so loud — to open a battle on so many fronts — that no one, including Congress, the judiciary, or the public, can effectively keep up.

In that quest, Trump and his henchmen have been aided by larger, foundational changes to the news and media ecosystem, which is also a hell of a lot noisier than it used to be. The rapid rise of independent, partisan and alternative media outlets and creators — including newsletters like this one! — means there are more news sources than ever before, generating an ever-larger and more unmanageable volume of information. Meanwhile, more than half of Americans now pluck some or most of their news from infinite, algorithmically filtered social feeds — which never end, never pause and optimize for views and shares over loftier goals like truth or understanding.

Together, these forces have both accelerated and flattened the news: Everything happens all at once, and everything is a crisis. “It’s important for you to understand that the paralysis and shock that you feel right now is the point,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said last week. “They are trying to induce a state of passivity among the general public.”

At its most extreme, this passivity manifests as “news avoidance” —the deliberate, sustained choice to not consume news. In interviews with consistent news avoiders, who now represent an estimated 8% of American adults, researchers have found that people are often motivated to minimize anxiety, uncertainty and discomfort. Disengagement becomes a form of self-preservation.

But I’d argue that reclaiming our attention — and rebuilding our media diets to withstand this environment — is both an act of self-care and a moral imperative. Self-care because, obviously, it does our bodies, minds, and lifespans no good to live in a constant state of stress. A moral imperative because understanding threats to democratic systems is a prerequisite to defending them. In a sharp essay for 404 Media that I shared last weekend, the artist and tech writer Janus Rose argued that passive news consumption on social media has left otherwise concerned and civic-minded people disempowered and overwhelmed.

“The result,” she wrote, “is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them.”

Reclaiming “the edge”

Over the past week or so, and with all these anxieties and concerns in mind, I’ve been looking to retool my own media diet. I get almost none of my politics or policy news from social media now, but I do rely on a different type of endless scroll: I use Readwise Reader to follow the RSS feeds of more than 50 news and media orgs, and I subscribe to scores of digests, aggregators and newsletters on top of that — more than 150 on Substack, alone. It takes me a couple hours each day to scan all these sources and read the articles of interest. (Is this a good use of my one wild and precious life? That very much depends on the number of you who upgrade to paid subscriptions.)

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In theory, I’ve designed my current media diet to give me a commanding, birds-eye view of the media environment, which is important for writing this newsletter and working as a journalist. But when it comes to political news — which I generally don’t cover,2 and thus consume more as a very concerned citizen — I sometimes feel like I’m standing at the base of some fucked-up virtual waterfall, with thousands of gallons of dense, icy water pounding down ceaselessly on my head.

Kiser has seen this phenomenon before. In fact, it’s the problem he set out to address eight years ago when he launched What the Fuck Just Happened Today?. “At the end of the day, I think most people — those who are doomscrolling the news and feeling like they have to read everything — would be better served by doing less,” he told me. “You don’t have to be a hero.” Well … that’s reassuring!

Kiser himself deliberately does not get news from social media, TV or what he terms “second-order publishers”: outlets that don’t conduct original reporting themselves. And while he does aggregate from many sources in his daily digests, he thinks most news consumers are pretty well-served by picking a single “first-order” publisher that they like and trust and reading its political coverage for a set time each day — preferably in some self-limiting format, like a newsletter or print edition.

Kiser’s background is in news products — he previously worked as a product manager for Spin, Forbes and Business Insider — and he’s fascinated by how the way information is packaged shapes our experience of it. He’s been particularly influenced by the writer and photographer Craig Mod, who in a 2012 essay coined the concept of “edges”: the ways physical media signal that you’ve done enough or reached the end. Digital and social media generally have no edges, Mod observed, which can lead to patterns of compulsive, mindless consumption. Readers are never nudged to pause or “breathe,” which can heighten their sense of urgency, overwhelm and stress. (These pauses are also presumably when we might process and prioritize what we’ve read — a prerequisite for political or civic action.)

Kiser’s big recommendation, to me and other deluged readers: Reintroduce the edges to your media diet. Seek out content with a clear beginning and end, something you can pick up and put down at will. An NPR podcast has edges, for instance; an NPR livestream doesn’t. Kiser’s newsletter has edges, too, though the homepages he tabs through each morning are edgeless. Incidentally, this recommendation mirrors the advice of many psychologists, who encourage overwhelmed news consumers to establish “boundaries” around their media diets. Here’s one case where more may actually be less.

Where I ended up

This is not necessarily what I expected when I set out to retool my own news consumption. In fact, I started out by inviting Links readers, friends and fellow journalists to suggest their favorite news sources to me, and I sampled dozens of popular politics newsletters, creators and podcasts. I envisioned this edition as a comprehensive guide to the many, many voices, outlets and resources in this space; my working title, in fact, was “resources for tracking the Trump administration.”

But as so often happens when you actually get out and interview some people and do some research, I concluded that my original idea was … not very productive. It doesn’t serve me, and it doesn’t serve you, to mainline political news and commentary all day long. Instead, I needed a strategy that preserved my time to think and act, while still getting me the day’s most essential information.

So here’s where I ended up: I subscribe to WTFJHT. (Obviously. Lol.) I’ve also started listening to NPR’s “Up First,” a 10-minute morning news digest, as I let the dog out and make breakfast.3 On the advice of my friend Ryan Kellett, who studies the news creator space, and Alexios Mantzarlis, who writes a great newsletter on digital media and misinformation, I’ve also subscribed to Tangle, a daily newsletter that promises to summarize coverage and commentary from across the political spectrum.

To be clear: I still have all those RSS feeds that I check every day. And there are many, many other outlets and authors I read and/or support in my internet travels. (On Sunday, for instance, I mentioned Wired, El País and , all of which I consider valuable and fascinating for vastly different reasons.) But in terms of building a sustainable, resilient daily politics diet — a habit that keeps me engaged with the news long-term, without burning me up or stressing me out — those three sources are my essential nutrients.4

Other sources will work better for you, of course, according to your habits and preferences. I’m including a list of other suggestions from friends, readers and experts below. (Many thanks, in particular, to Dave Pell of , Jonathan Skolnick of Vanity Fair and of Journalists Pay Themselves, who suggested lots of good resources.) But remember that the key is to find media with edges: a discrete beginning and an end. Kiser told me he’s lately gotten really into physical media (… including, hilariously, short ebooks that he prints off the internet and tapes into little punk-rock pamphlets) for this exact, strategic reason.

“People get drunk on the idea of needing to know every little thing that happened right now: just pull to refresh!” he said. “But I think the single best way to hedge against burning out on the news is to have a more dedicated reading experience.

“We really need to find places to stop and take a break on the internet.”

Further resources

My essential nutrients: What The Fuck Just Happened Today?, Up First, Tangle

Matt Kiser’s “first-order” sources (in the order he opens them): The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Axios, The Associated Press, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, NBC News, ABC News, The Guardian, BBC, Reuters, CBS News

Other recommendations from Links readers and friends:

• News aggregators and digests: Today in Tabs5 | News Not Noise | NextDraft | Musk Watch | What A Day

• Political analysis and commentary: Letters From An American | The Bulwark | The Preamble | The Message Box | Thinking About … | Bolts Magazine | Wake Up to Politics | Crises Notes | Swamp Person | Doomsday Scenario | Noahpinion | Programmable Mutter

• Trackers and watchdogs: Trump Golf Tracker | POTUS Tracker | Democracy 2025 Response Center | Just Security: Legal Challenges Tracker

Comments are open on this post, so feel free to also add your suggestions.

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Each day on Twitter, there is one main character. The goal is to never be it. But for a whole week in April 2009, 22-year-old Kari Ferrell was an internet-wide obsession.

Thousands of tweets dissected her exploits. Gawker posted about her three or four times a day. Old acquaintances put napkins and matchbooks that Ferrell had once owned or signed on eBay. “Twitter had only existed for a short period of time, and virality was a new concept that people were really latching onto,” Ferrell wrote, years later. At the time, she had no words for the dizzying, disorienting process that transformed her overnight into the Hipster Grifter.

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You probably remember the saga of the Hipster Grifter if you were at all online during this period. The case made international news and earned wall-to-wall coverage from an emerging class of taste-making blogs, like Gawker and Gothamist. Over a period of almost five years, they discovered, Ferrell scammed a string of ex-lovers and friends out of thousands of dollars in small-scale, audacious cons. Now, she’s back with a new scheme, of sorts — in the form of a witty, well-reviewed memoir.

Reader: I loved You’ll Never Believe Me. I finished it in one (1) day a full two (2) weeks ago. But I have STRUGGLED to write a cohesive post about the book, because I really and truly cannot decide whether it’s the most compelling redemption arc I have ever read … or Ferrell’s best and most sophisticated grift of all.

As unreliable narrators go, you can’t do much better than this one. Ferrell is convincing, savvy, chameleonic — and absolutely aware of her own charms. “As far as this whole story is concerned,” she told ABC News from jail 16 years ago, “I think that the reason it has been such a big deal is because I am pretty intelligent and very well spoken.” Ferrell is also, she writes in You’ll Never Believe Me, a really “good fucking storyteller.” I knew that before I even cracked the book, because — even in the earliest days of the social web — she demonstrated an uncanny ability to leverage and manipulate online narratives. But narratives are themselves a form of deception, a framework imposed over chaos and mess. Stories are made, not begotten. “Storyteller” is a synonym for “fabulist.”

At the same time … I want to believe her. Her story is funny and piercing and raw. And the narrative arc Ferrell imposes on these events is well-calibrated to our present era. As she explains it, she learned the necessity of deception as a bisexual South Korean adoptee in a white Mormon family in Utah: “I faked being white, faked being a good Mormon girl, faked being straight,” Ferrell writes early on. Untethered by a genuine identity of her own, she begins to try some others on: She’s a straight-edge mosher, then a teenage truant, then an opportunistic check kiter.

When Ferrell moved to New York in 2008, her scams grew more audacious. She met men at Brooklyn bars and stole their cell phones while they slept; she invented a resume to score a job at Vice; she faked lung cancer to break up a friend’s relationship. The media, predictably, treated Ferrell like a vaguely psychopathic (and overtly racialized) curiosity: A 2009 Law & Order episode loosely inspired by her case sees “Emma Kim” seducing Detective Lupo over cups of Chinese tea.

That episode … did not age well. A lot of that discourse didn’t. And as Ferrell re-narrates these events from her point of view, it becomes easier to see her as a sort of anti-hero, avenging herself against the larger, foundational rackets of patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism. What are a couple bad checks, she asks, in the face of those systemic exploitations? The timing of Ferrell’s memoir only helps her case, since main characters and con artists have lately overrun the political system.

And yet. And yet! My sincere conviction that Ferrell is a gifted storyteller prevents me from believing the story itself. To me, that’s always what made her so fascinating — the rare and inherently inauthentic ability to ingratiate herself so completely with different audiences. Interviewers always cite her charm, even as they question it: “It’s such a good pitch,” The Cut’s Bindu Bansinath wrote of Ferrell’s comeback in 2022, “I almost don’t care if she means it.”

I do think I care a little, though. I don’t want to be taken in. Instead, I’d like to get drunk on thematic PBRs and debate the merits of this memoir with friends.

Alas, I haven’t had a book club since I moved to Buffalo, so … I’m attempting the next best thing! Comments are open to all on this post. Someone tell me you’ve also read You’ll Never Believe Me.

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In December 2022, Elon Musk polled his considerable Twitter following to ask if he should step down from the CEO job. “Depends who you get to run it!” replied the irrepressible Myspace Tom. In the early 2000s, Myspace Tom — née Tom Anderson — built the world’s largest social media site, sold it to News Corp and peaceably walked away from tech. But Myspace Tom could return at any time, he joked. And since President Donald Trump’s tech bro-studded inauguration, thousands of disillusioned social media users have beseeched Anderson to do just that.

“I don’t think we appreciated you enough back then,” reads one representative post. “More than ever, we need you,” pleaded another. It’s not the first time that Anderson’s followers have flooded him with nostalgic praise or entreaties, either: a review of his Instagram, Facebook and X accounts shows that people have clamored for Myspace Tom’s return after just about every recent social media scandal.

Anderson, in the cultural imagination, is the tech bro that got away. He’s a foil to the Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world — the exception that proves their rule isn’t that great. Just take a scroll through Myspace Tom’s assorted feeds, all ironically housed on the social platforms that usurped his influence, and observe the rare, precious sight of a very rich man contentedly minding his own damn business. Since stepping away from the limelight, Anderson golfs. He takes lavish international vacations. He pals around with former “Amazing Race” contestants.

In 2014, when ABC News asked him if he’d ever come back to tech, Myspace Tom humbly demurred. “Why aren’t more tech people like MySpace Tom?” asked a 2020 Cracked article.

In fairness, no one really knows if Anderson would navigate our current social media environment with more or less grace than the current bozos.1 He left the game in 2009, when social media was still widely and unreservedly viewed as a force for social good. His scandals were of the comical2 and momentary sort; his politics — if he has them3 — have always seemed wan and vague.

But the fact that Anderson did retire from tech, and at the tender age of 38, testifies to a political philosophy and a set of values that feel almost radical today. People like Musk and Zuckerberg are hell-bent on amassing unprecedented, indecent stores of power and wealth. Anderson isn’t exactly curing cancer, by comparison … but he’s at least bucked the gospel of infinite extraction.

The story of Myspace Tom

Anderson always made something of an oddball founder — a product of Los Angeles, never San Francisco. As a teenager growing up in Southern California, he reportedly hacked Chase Bank not to steal money, but to level-up his code. He later studied English at Berkeley, attended film school in LA and generally eschewed conventional ambitions. “In college, I’d literally planned to stay poor,” he later told Vanity Fair. “I didn’t want a job and considered being homeless because I wanted to be a lifelong student.”

By 2000, however, Anderson’s passion for learning had inconveniently landed him with lots of student debt. He took a low-paying gig at a data-storage company, which promptly went out of business in the dot-com crash. At that job, however, Anderson befriended the marketing executive Chris DeWolfe, who would soon become his business partner. The pair founded and sold an internet marketing company for several million dollars in 2002, then started tooling around with the idea of launching a competitor to Friendster.

By some accounts, Myspace’s success was “one of the Web’s great accidents.” Neither Anderson nor DeWolfe really knew what they were building — nor did their employer, a company called Intermix. The social network’s earliest distinguishing feature, the ability to jazz up your profile with custom HTML, resulted from an error that its founders let live. Its popularity with musicians and bands, meanwhile, sprung organically from Anderson’s own passion for music.4

In just over two years, Myspace grew from a quirky side hustle to an online phenomenon that Wired dubbed “MTV for the Net generation.” By mid-2005, Myspace boasted 22 million users, the most of any site in the U.S.

This is the part of the story where Anderson gets fabulously, though not broligarchically, rich: In 2005, Intermix sold Myspace to Rubert Murdoch’s News Corp. for a cool $650 million. DeWolfe and Anderson would have seen just a fraction of that money, but a fraction of a half-billion dollars is still a pretty good time. Plus, News Corp. reportedly offered both men $30-million contracts to stay on with Myspace, which they did until 2009.

Those four years were rocky ones, in large part because Myspace faced new competition from Zuckerberg’s Facebook. The site underwent a redesign in 2008 in an effort to shed its angsty teenage look. Meanwhile, Anderson and DeWolfe both appeared to chafe under the corporate mandates of Murdoch’s operation, which ranged from new budget reviews and processes to a forced relocation to Beverly Hills. In 2009, several months before their contracts formally expired, Anderson and Dewolfe were both pushed out of the social network that they built.

DeWolfe went on to found a mobile game developer and, after that, an “AI and web3” social platform with backing from Andreessen Horowitz. Anderson, however, took some time off to dabble in residential architecture and travel a bit. In 2011, while attending Burning Man with a photographer pal, Myspace Tom discovered that he wasn’t a bad shooter himself. He didn’t need any more money, and he loved taking photos — so he decided to just do that.

“I’ve divested myself of all other responsibility so I can just travel and shoot,” Anderson told the photography site Petapixel in late 2012. He updated his Twitter bio accordingly: “Enjoying being retired,” it read.

‘Too pure for this world’

Since then, Anderson has apparently flirted with a handful of more-or-less formal gigs, including travel influencer, architectural firm partner and ambassador for a golf apparel brand. He started and abandoned two separate blogs5; he briefly considered some sort of podcast.

For most of the past 13 years, however, Anderson has split his time between his homes in Oahu, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, studying photography, taking extravagant vacations and dispensing occasional drips of shambling, feel-good stoner wisdom on his Instagram, YouTube and X accounts. I’ve never spoken to Myspace Tom, myself — this post is drawn from interviews he’s given over the years, as well as his social profiles — but he strikes me as the type of guy who never wears shoes and swears by ayahuasca.

“Taking a good photograph begets joy & serenity in a meditative state,” he once wrote on Instagram.

“This is a workout for the mind, the soul, the heart,” he said on YouTube, about helping one’s friends.

“The unchecked assumption of our culture is that money will make you happy. I don’t buy that,” he told a journalist.

“For the longest time I’ve been satisfied and chill,” he later wrote on IG. “Just at peace with how I am and how the world is.”

In comments like these, I see the enduring appeal of Myspace Tom. Today’s tech founders live largely to extract and hoard: more profits, more influence, more data. I think of the image of Musk, Zuckerberg and others at Trump’s recent inauguration. I think, too, of the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen’s claim that mega-successful entrepreneurs are also entitled to public adulation. Nothing is ever quite enough for these people; the trend line must always go up. That Myspace Tom defied that mandate and fucked off to Hawaii feels unusually decent, if not straight-up heroic.

“When MySpace sold, I made more money than I could ever possibly need,” he told an interviewer in 2012. “I love to be focused and working on creative projects, but I’d rather do that in an environment where it’s not a company or a business.”

Alas, like any good comic book hero, Anderson’s disinclined to seek power himself. The very things that make him seem like a cool guy are the things that also made him a short-lived tech executive. In July 2020, as social platforms were roiled by Covid misinformation, hate speech and other woes, one Twitter user grieved the apparent innocence of the Myspace era. Anderson, he wrote, never sold user data or sought to influence elections or lobbied against privacy legislation: “Myspace was just too pure for this world,” @JackDMurphy concluded.

Anderson, meanwhile, responded in typical chill-dude fashion: two heart-smiley emojis and the shaka hand.

Thanks to Kat for inspiring this week’s edition (!!). And thanks to the subscribers whose support gives me time to research stuff like this. <3

Last week, The Boston Globe asked me and five other writers to respond to a rather unappetizing prompt: Imagine it’s the end of Trump’s second term. How does the world look different now? I tackled internet culture, natch, and my forecast was not optimistic. (I’m also not optimistic about my predictive powers, though, so maybe take a smidgeon of heart from that!)

Below, I’m sharing a longer and slightly spicier version of the piece I wrote for the Globe’s project. Scroll to the bottom for some other writing that’s informed how I think about these subjects. And if you have your own predictions for what the internet will look like in four years, I’d of course love to read them in the comments. Let’s plan on reconvening in 2029 and seeing how we did (!!).

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We once talked about the internet as a shared, open space: a “digital commons,” a vast “worldwide web.” A video “went viral” when everyone you knew had seen it; a “meme” described a joke so omnipresent it became a shorthand. But there is no “omnipresent” on the internet now — and there arguably isn’t one “internet,” either. Instead, we all exist on a fractured archipelago of semi-gated, self-segregating sites according to our political and cultural predilections.

X, formerly Twitter, is the redpilled realm of reactionary crypto-bros. Facebook hosts the “just asking questions” crowd and some Boomer moms who never realized they could bolt. Bluesky and Mastodon are generally for lefties, though that of course varies by server. And TikTok, shuttered in the United States since early 2025, is home to no one at all anymore1 … though its devotees found new roosts on Instagram, YouTube and private messaging apps, much as they did in India five years earlier.

The splintering of social media predates the second Trump administration, though there’s little doubt that Trump’s rhetoric and political cult accelerated the trend. From roughly 2010 to 2025, a handful of mega-platforms dominated — some might even say monopolized — the mainstream social media ecosystem. But that began to change in the early 2020s, as right-wing social media users grew increasingly aggrieved by big platforms’ attempts to hold them accountable for their anti-vaxxing, election-denying or otherwise antisocial bullshit. Some insisted that interventions like blandly worded fact checks constituted literal oppression.

In response, many fled to safer digital havens, like Trump’s own Truth Social. Trump himself sued Google, Twitter and Facebook for “censorship” in 2021, then roared back into office threatening to rain further hell down on mainstream social platforms.

Rather than risk new regulation or lawsuits — and likely sensing a lucrative opportunity to add yet more zeroes to their ballooning net worths — tech CEOs instead overhauled their sites to actually allow more lies and slurs. But that had the effect of making scrolling both less pleasant and less useful for a whole lot of users. Have you braved Facebook lately? It’s an endless digital dust bowl of hyper-targeted engagement bait and pro-Trump AI slop, peppered with the occasional, discordant photo of somebody’s grandchild.2

Now most of us congregate in smaller, siloed online spaces: niche platforms, group chats, self-hosted servers. It’s nice, in that these spaces tend to match your values. And it’s easy to leave, should they ever diverge.

But small, decentralized communities also come with their own dangers. For one thing, it’s difficult to police criminal or harmful behavior across millions of digital islands. It’s also difficult, verging on senseless, to reach anything resembling political consensus or a shared understanding of the world. Most Americans once had at least “a few” friends with different politics from them, but today we rarely share physical or digital space with anyone who holds conflicting views.

Did our politics or internet fragment first? It’s impossible to say, even looking backwards.

Further reading

• “The Great Social Media Diaspora,” by Renee DiResta for Noema (2025)

• “Meta Courted Trump. Now Comes the Backlash from Facebook, Instagram Users,” by Tatum Hunter and Heather Kelly for the Washington Post (2025 $, unlocked below paywall)

• “Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy,” by Jason Koebler for 404 Media (2025)

• “The Bright Side of TikTok’s Downfall,” by Adam Clark Estes for Vox (2025)

• “How Group Chats Rule the World,” by Sophie Haigney for the New York Times Magazine (2024 $, unlocked below paywall)

• “The Age of Social Media Is Ending,” by Ian Bogost for The Atlantic (2022 $, unlocked below paywall)

Read more

The US Supreme Court ruled today that Congress could outlaw TikTok, a predictable decision that puts two presidents in the awkward position of scrambling to save it. Dearly departing President Joe Biden now says he won’t enforce the ban, though he signed the underlying bill into law. Incoming President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has vowed to keep TikTok in the US, after griping and groaning about “the Chinese app” for much of his first administration. Just four years ago, Trump issued a unilateral TikTok ban that called the app an urgent “threat.” Now, he says, there’s “a lot of good” there: “a lot of people on TikTok that love it.”

Generally, I wouldn’t make too much of this Trumpian self-own. Trump is, among other things, a pretty … fair-weather … policymaker. But the curious duality of his views on TikTok — a platform he has called, in a single sentence, simultaneously good AND bad — reinforced a theory I’ve been nursing about the imperiled short-form video app.

FYI: This essay is drawn from a corpus of more than 10,000 articles, blog posts, academic studies, press releases and transcripts that published since 2018 and contain the phrase “TikTok is.” I compiled that spreadsheet with the database research tool ProQuest, then manually reviewed thousands of mentions.

Paid subscribers support this work; I’m a one-woman shop! If you value this essay and can afford it, please consider a paid subscription.

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TikTok, we’re told, is an engine for culture: a hitmaker, a trendsetter, the zeitgeist in an app. It’s also curdling the brains of our slack-jawed teens and funneling our data to ~the Communists.~

In reality, I think, TikTok’s more of an enigma: a Rorschach blot that reflects back the prevailing concerns of its time and place. Because the app is so sprawling, and so prismatic, it makes a good vector for all kinds of larger social preoccupations.

From the very beginning, in August 2018, the public narrative around TikTok clearly mirrored the anxieties of the era. Early media coverage of the app described it as some kind of paradise: You find favorable comparisons to Facebook et al, and lots of wistful callbacks to Vine.

This was late 2018, remember, and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube hadn’t shed the stink of the 2016 election. Years later, analysts would theorize that TikTok’s rise was due in part “to the negativity on Facebook, including polarization and rampant misinformation.” Early TikTok looked so “pleasant,” in the words of one euphoric Kevin Roose review, because the rest of the internet looked so unpleasant. TikTok became a convenient foil.

Early critiques of the nascent app also reflected broader preoccupations. We’re now familiar, for instance, with allegations that TikTok’s Chinese ownership poses some national security threat. Regardless of whether that’s actually true, the claims tend to crop up at moments of heightened US-China tension: say, as US policymakers stepped up attempts to contain the Chinese tech sector, or as Trump lashed out at Chinese officials over the pandemic.

In 2023, when a Chinese spy balloon appeared mysteriously above Alaska, Republican lawmakers leveraged the event to argue that TikTok also posed some threat to Americans. “A big Chinese balloon in the sky and millions of Chinese TikTok balloons on our phones,” Sen. Mitt Romney tweeted.

By that time, TikTok had itself ballooned so much — and grown so central to online culture — that public and political discourse of the app routinely probed the depths of its supposed power. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, TikTok could boast only 40 million monthly users in the US. By June 2020, that figure had climbed to nearly 92 million as lockdown boredom and anxiety pushed millions of Americans to the app for the first time. News articles began ascribing profound influence to TikTok: first in music, then in almost every other aspect of US cultural and political life.

TikTok, in other words, “became” the culture — or at least a primary shaper of it. Accordingly, TikTok’s post-pandemic critics began blaming a number of wider cultural problems more directly on TikTok itself. That surfaced first in concerns for child safety, which initially involved the content on the app; by 2022, critics were arguing that TikTok’s very design actively worsened youth mental health.

One year later, after the October 7 attacks in Israel, critics also pilloried TikTok for purportedly favoring pro-Palestinian creators. But writing in The Washington Post that November, Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz came up with another, far likelier explanation: TikTok is so sprawling that its warrens contain a fabulous (unsettling?) range of perspectives.

If you’re looking for something on TikTok, in sum: You’re abundantly likely to find it. And that makes the app a convenient vehicle for all kinds of social narratives. It’s good and it’s bad; it’s a threat and a solace; it’s revving up culture and tearing it down.

And as of this writing, it’s going dark Sunday … though even that is uncertain right now.

In 2022, The New York Times predicted that newsletters were on their way out. In hindsight this was, with respect to the Times … a pretty uninspired prognosis. Yes, some media brands were second-guessing $$ newsletter deals. Sure, Meta’s Facebook pulled the plug on its would-be Substack competitor. But into the void those megaliths left — and into the larger, darker, duller void of a painfully commercialized and over-optimized pseudo-“social” web — untold thousands of small, independent writers launched their own newsletter projects.

I write “untold thousands,” a lame evasion, because it’s hard to nail down the precise number of editorial newsletters in the world. Substack has put its count in the “hundreds of thousands” range; last year, Beehiiv said it hosted a flat 10,000 newsletters. It increasingly feels to me like we’re living in some kind of self-replicating, ever-expanding newsletter multiverse, where the edges recede before I can even catch a glimpse of them. There are newsletters devoted to tinned fish, I have learned; to the depiction of diseases in film and TV; to compost heaps, dog gossip, surplus grocery stores, collage and estate sale jewelry.

As I started to compile this year’s newsletter guide, in fact — a little tradition I kicked off last year — I got a bit lost pondering the sheer scale of this space, and the challenges of finding its smaller, weirder niches. No one really needs *my* recommendations, which reflect one specific and more-or-less static view of this unwieldy web. Instead, I wanted to produce a guide that captured some of the chaos and sprawl and serendipity of the expanding newsletterverse and all the strange crannies inside it.

See the full network map

To do that, I borrowed a convention from chain emails and asked seven newsletter writers I love to send me the names of their favorite newsletters. I then emailed those writers for their favorites, then those favorites for their favorites, then THOSE favorites for their favorites … etc. 🫠

The resulting guide and network map include 135 newsletters recommended by more than 50 writers, spanning topics from animation to martial arts to Rhode Island food culture. Most of these recs are independent, though some are published by mainstream media. In both cases, plz note that I’ve only vetted my own first-round recs, in italics … so subscribe at your own risk and per your own judgment!!

This was fantastically, refreshingly fun, and I’m so amped to kick off the year with it. Can’t say I planned things this way, per se, but the timing is thematic. In 2025, I intend to spend a lot more of my curatorial time and energy in the newsletterverse, surfacing writing and art you might not otherwise encounter. I also hope to break from my staid journalistic background just a bit and produce more creative and experimental work — like these visual essays y’all have liked a lot or the still-in-progress “Gmail Will Break Your Heart” endeavor.

Perennial reminder that — if you enjoy and value these types of projects — you can support Links with a paid monthly subscription. You get a laptop sticker and other perks; I pay my mortgage. We all win!

Now, without further ado … let me introduce you to some new newsletter friends.

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Your Favorite Newsletter’s Favorite Newsletters

View list in Google Docs | View on Substack | Read the “chain email” behind this project

8Ball by . “Sean has always been smart and prescient (he coined “the vibe shift," for instance) and has recently revived his regular publishing; I’m re-subscribing to the paid tier.” —Ben Dietz, [SIC] Daily

A Fête Worse Than Death by . “Her newsletter is great because she’s not writing to look good. She’s frequently petulant and discursive and uncareful and those are three of my favorite things.” —Choire Sicha, Dinner Party

A Thing or Two by Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo. “Just the breeziest, weirdest, most consistently delightful set of recommendations I get in my inbox every week.” —David Pierce, Installer

A Year of Bach by . “Bach is the greatest, and I haven’t yet heard his complete catalog, so in 2024, I’m listening to every Bach composition and writing about it here.” (Recommended by Edith Zimmerman, Drawing Links)

After School by .

• “Casey is the only reason I know what’s happening on TikTok.” —Ogheneochuko Akpovbovbo, As Seen On

• “Casey is a kindred spirit with a daily newsletter. I appreciate the relentless pace. Great links examining youth culture.” —James Ellis, Public Announcement

American Weekender by Amy Cavanaugh and Kenney Marlatt. “The travel newsletter for food people, featuring expert recommendations from longtime food writers who love exploring America.” (Recommended by Meaghan Garvey, Scary Cool Sad Goodbye)

An Irritable Métis by . “My friend Chris La Tray writes about what I’d loosely call indigenous identity and the natural world, which is a piss poor way of describing the wonders of this newsletter. If you like Montana, if you liked Braiding Sweetgrass, if you like thinking more about the world that surrounds you — this is the newsletter for you.” —Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study

And It Don’t Stop by . “Christgau, the 82-year-old “dean of rock criticism,” mentored me and more than a few of my journalist friends, and it’s a blessing that he’s still reeling off one-liners I instantly want to text to them.” —Nick Catucci, Embedded

Animation Obsessive by Jules and John. “My favorite kind of newsletter—immensely informed and well-researched deep dives into animation history and process. It’s really exciting to be invited into the world of animation and all the hidden figures that have shaped film and visual culture.” —Celine Nguyen, Personal Canon

Another Newsletter by . “This is an occasional treat, by which I mean that it’s always a treat, but it’s pretty occasional in its frequency. Aaron is an accomplished photographer, art director and agency-founder; he’s also the curator of Hard Copy, the photo show coming to LA next week. His newsletter tracks a series of associations between creative pieces - usually pictures and songs, and I love the sublime connections he makes between seemingly unrelated works.” —Ben Dietz, [SIC] Daily

As Seen On by .

• Dishy, whip-smart news round-ups and (less frequent, but typically fascinating) analytical essays on business and culture by an intimidatingly in-the-know 20-something. Akpovbovbo makes me feel sort of old and slow, but clearly I don’t hate it. —Links

• “I don’t know her and I don’t really know who she is but she always brings me things I need to know and am surprised by and I guess I better pay her since she went full-paywall for 2025.” —Choire Sicha, Dinner Party

• “I am not a reader of business and culture newsletters, but I read As Seen On every time because it is that good.” —Martha Adams, Martha’s Monthly

Attention Economy by . “Everything you need to know about writing except for the writing itself.” —Kelton Wright, Shangrilogs

Back Row by . “Such incredible reporting. We are so lucky to have Amy.” —Casey Lewis, After School

Beautyshambles by . “Cat is the most compulsively readable writer I know.” —Rachel Tashjian, Opulent Tips

by Samantha Irby. “Everyone is going to say this one, but in this case (only!) everyone is correct. But I am the most correct.” —R. Eric Thomas, Here For It

by Jonah Weiner and Erin Wylie.

• “Unbeatable recon. Feels good to read every time.” —James Ellis, Public Announcement

• “The obvious answer for a reason—endlessly insightful and practical.” —Ock Sportello, Never Hungover

Cafe Hysteria by . “Writes about culture like she’s seen every deranged thought that’s ever been through my head (complimentary).” —Clara, Hmm That’s Interesting

Channeling by . “J Wortham is one of my favorite writers, and their Substack is consistently one of the most thoughtful on the platform, full of grace and little flourishy asides that I find lowkey inspiring.” —Chris Gayomali, Heavies

Citation Needed by Molly White. “Keep up with the happenings in the tech world without all the boosterism.” (Recommended by David Karpf, The Future Now and Then)

by Benjamin Riley. “Understanding generative AI using the lens of cognitive science.” (Recommended by David Karpf, The Future Now and Then)

Cold Antler Farm by . “If you’ve ever fantasized about quitting your corporate job and farming full time, Jenna actually did it. Read for a reality check.” —Kelton Wright, Shangrilogs

by Eli Schoop. “Short, sweet, mean.” —Ock Sportello, Never Hungover

Creative Destruction by . “Critical thinking, frameworks for understanding, smart opinions about our role in building a regenerative world.” —Patrick Tanguay, Sentiers

Culture Study by .

• “No one on earth is better at Reading The Vibe than Anne Helen Petersen, who always seems to be writing about the thing I’m feeling or wondering about.” —David Pierce, Installer

• “She has a way of naming and exploring phenomena bubbling up in the culture that makes reading feel like consuming anthropology about modern times; also, I get so many good book recs from her community of readers.” —Laura Olin

Curious Electric by Dirk Krause. “Consistently sends links to the web’s wacky and delightful creative technology experiments.” —James Ellis, Public Announcement

Dark Properties by Willa Köerner. “This is for you if you too are a city dweller working with the computer and dreaming of the garden as your horizon.” —Kristoffer Tjalve, Naive Weekly

Deez Links by . I long considered Deez Links an essential link round-up read, but Cai has lately made it much more than that: I love the wit and personality that animate her freeform musings on stuff from media trends to celebrity look-alike contests. —Links

Dinner Party by Choire Sicha (for New York).

• “Choire Sicha then, Choire Sicha now, Choire Sicha forever.” —Laura Olin

• “A daily evening newsletter written by Choire Sicha?? Literally what could be better!?” —Kyle Chayka, One Thing

Dividual by . “No surprise that the man-in-the-chair of HTML Giant would have an excellent newsletter. It’s worth the subscription just for his lectures on logic and the unconscious in text generation: ‘rapid, intuition-based prose drafting that focuses on structure, spatial environment, framing, and the body over more traditional literary tropes.’” —Sarah Elaine Smith, White Noise Maker

Donkeyspace by . “He’s a really good writer and deep thinker about games.” —Lynn Cherny, Things I Think Are Awesome

Drawing Links by . “Zimmerman’s comics are pure wisps of unforced feeling.” —Nick Catucci, Embedded

DrawTogether by . “If you are looking to be more creative in the new year, Wendy MacNaughton’s drawing club is a much lighter lift than The Artist’s Way. Engaging with this newsletter is like revisiting the elementary school art class that was your happy place.” —Claire Mazur, A Thing Or Two

Dynomight Internet Newsletter. “Very funny and odd economics/philosophy writing, mostly about hypotheticals. A cousin of xkcd.” —Evan Goldfine, A Year of Bach

Embedded by and . “Kate Lindsay searches for the internet’s humanity, and usually finds it.” —Ethan Sawyer, Human Pursuits

Esque by . “A fashion newsletter with a great point of view; I loved the recent post on Wicked-adjacent silhouettes.” —Delia Cai, Deez Links

Evil Witches by . “We are people who happen to be mothers.” (Recommended by Edith Zimmerman, Drawing Links)

Expanding Dan by . “Unashamed Steely Dan deep dives. Extremely niche and divisive.” —Evan Goldfine, A Year of Bach

Expedite by . “Kristen just knows how to write about restaurant technology that doesn’t make it sound like an exclusively B2B Substack.” —Alexa Gagosz, Rhode Island Food Club

Extracurricular by . “Tembe writes some of the most innovative book content and her criticism is incredible.” —Martha Adams, Martha’s Monthly

Feed Me by . “Essential.” —Rachel Tashjian, Opulent Tips

. “I regularly disagree with him (and let him know! Lol! Don’t worry, he loves to hear it!) but I always read him and I appreciate a straight man who gets messy. Sorry to his haters of all stripes but I won’t stop reading!” —Choire Sicha, Dinner Party

. “I love an advice column, and this is one of the best on the internet right now. I first encountered Granados’s writing through her novel Happy Hour, which is infectiously fun and coolly analytical about the human condition. In her newsletter, she writes about love, fashion, style, and living with glamour and conviction.” —Celine Nguyen, Personal Canon

Gabrielle by . “Emma has written some of the best pieces about sex and relationships I’ve read this year, hands-down.” —Matt Muir, Web Curios

Gloria by Leslie Price and Michelle Curb. “A ‘newsletter for adult women’ that manages to capture topics and dilemmas I’m talking about with my friends while also offering new perspectives and handy advice.” —Laura Olin

by Harry Krinsky and Randa Sakallah. “Essays/riffing on social dynamics in very Brooklyn/Oakland-centric parlance.” —Delia Cai, Deez Links

Gossip Time by .

• “Allie has an incredible ability to succinctly and hilariously sum up even the most complex celebrity gossip.” —Emily Kirkpatrick, I <3 Mess

• “Bless Allie Jones and her weekly dispatches on celebrity, culture, and influence (and Hillary Duff).” —Lauren Halvorsen, Nothing for the Group

Gradient Ascendant by . “Rare hybrid of programmer, journalist, and novelist. Clear-eyed views on AI. Valley insider who doesn’t like Koolaid.” —Patrick Tanguay, Sentiers

Group Hug by . “I end up restacking pretty much every post from Elise Granata’s newsletter. It’s a practical, realistic, clear-eyed look at how we can build community, what’s hard about it, and how we can overcome obstacles and keep moving forward. Excellent.” —Lisa Sibbett, The Auntie Bulletin

Hacker Newsletter by Kale Davis. “Totally my bubble :), and saves me from hours of lost time on Hacker News.” —Dirk Krause, Curious Electric

Have Your Cake by . “Because I’m gluten-free and she’s a master worker at pastry.” —Lynn Cherny, Things I Think Are Awesome

Heavies by .

• “Gayomali is a wildcatter on the frontier of men’s fitness, diet, and grooming—a fast-expanding area desperately in need of thoughtful mapping.” —Nick Catucci, Embedded

• “Wellness trend reports and ponderances that don’t make me want to self-harm (and often make me laugh—imagine!)” —Em Seely-Katz, Esque

Herb Sundays by . “A weekly love letter to musicians and their creative brains, by the record label owner and entrepreneur Sam Valenti. What started a few years back as a Sunday morning listening series has turned into a wonderfully generous and revealing look into Sam’s own encyclopedic musical mind, and his deep, never-ending curiosity about the music-makers who’ve inspired him.” —Ben Dietz, [SIC] Daily

Here for It by . “This newsletter never fails to make me laugh. I love the way R. Eric looks at the world and the way he manages to find light and humor in everything. He is a joy!” —Katie Hawkins-Gaar, My Sweet Dumb Brain

Hmm That’s Interesting by . I think it’s a testament to the intelligence and compulsive readability of Clara’s work that she consistently gets me to click into essays on subjects I don’t otherwise understand or follow. Russian literature! Pop culture tempests! (Did I mention the pristine mix of the high and lowbrow?) You can’t really predict what she’ll find “interesting,” but it always is somehow. —Links

by Ethan Sawyer. Sawyer publishes smart interviews with an impressively eclectic and zeitgeisty range of culture and media folks; I’m also here for his meandering, transportative personal essays, which sometimes feel — in the best way! — like a throwback to the blog era. —Links

Hung Up by . “I have a bad memory but at any given moment I can quote 3-5 random sentences or phrases that Hunter Harris has written. She is so funny and helps me understand and contextualize my obsession with pop culture and celebrity gossip.” —Claire Mazur, A Thing or Two

I <3 Mess by . “The funniest newsletter I’ve ever encountered but also one of the most prescient when it comes to predicting the weirdest proclivities of the fashion world.” —Em Seely-Katz, Esque

I Will Do Whatever I Want by . “Like reading someone’s diary in the best possible way. Mackenzie makes me laugh out loud every time.” —Emily Kirkpatrick, I <3 Mess

Installer by David Pierce (for The Verge). “I’m mad at David because he forces me to open my email app on the weekend, but he always makes up for it with the perfect list of interesting news, content and gadgets/apps to fill the downtime with.” —Jacob Feldman, The Sunday Long Read

by Andrew Curry. “Great format by a futurist who picks two topics that are ‘interesting, provocative, resonant,’ and provides context and analysis.” —Patrick Tanguay, Sentiers

by Kyla Scanton. “Human-centric economic analysis to help all of us understand the world better.” (Recommended by Thomas Klaffke, Creative Destruction)

Last Call by . “Parsons’ NYC restaurant and bar recommendations are always on point — we add every spot to our Google map.” —Amy Cavanaugh & Kenney Marlatt, American Weekender

Laura Olin.

• “Interesting mix of topics which usually reach outside my bubble, and it usually has a poem in it.” —Dirk Krause, Curious Electric

• “Her links letter is an immediate open: It’s short (unlike mine!), timely, diverse and has a poem.” —Lynn Cherny, Things I Think Are Awesome

Liberation Martial Arts by Sam. “The martial arts space, particularly MMA, is often goofy and red-pilled, which is just one of the reasons I love the radical and liberatory approach to combat that Sam is building at LMA: inclusive, smart, and enriching. A breath of fresh air.” —Chris Gayomali, Heavies

Life in the Real World by . “Every morning, Karen goes for a walk in a beautiful park near her home in Kansas City, Missouri, and takes the most beautiful photos along the way. Karen’s missives are a dose of wonder and calm and remind me how powerful it is to connect with nature right outside your door.” —Katie Hawkins-Gaar, My Sweet Dumb Brain

Long Live by . “In a sea of fashion newsletters pushing overconsumption, Erika’s always inspired me to seek out eBay/secondhand.” —Casey Lewis, After School

Lowpass by Janko Roettgers. “Janko is just out here relentlessly breaking news about the future of entertainment. I used to work with Janko, so I know how hard he works and how right he is pretty much all the time.” —David Pierce, Installer

Make Me Good Soil by . “Sophie is simply a beautiful writer and her newsletter offers readers a stunning dive into her poetic approach to living with chronic illness. She also weaves everything through the lens of the natural world, and each send feels creaturely and poignant in a way most other writers will never achieve.” —Willa Köerner, Dark Properties

by Martha Adams. “Obsessed with her book reviews. So diverse and insightful.” —Ogheneochuko Akpovbovbo, As Seen On

Milking It by . “Nic’s newsletter is reliably full of interesting book recommendations, especially queer stories and lots of debuts.” —Martha Adams, Martha’s Monthly

Mood Mail by David Marshal and Yuzhimi. I was turned onto this monthly image-only missive by an aesthete no lesser than Ruba Abu-Nimah, to give you a sense. —Ben Dietz, [SIC] Daily

My Sweet Dumb Brain by . Katie is one of the wisest writers I know; her weekly meditations on life and work and feelings are so beautifully restorative. I *always* feel better after reading, which I can say of nothing else on the internet. —Links

Naive Weekly by . An indispensable weekly round-up of digital art and poetry, and a reminder that the internet can still inspire and awe — if you know where to look, that is. (Which Kristoffer always does!) —Links

Never Hungover by . “Never Hungover is a blog, updated at whatever frequency I can muster, about things that interest me.” (Recommended by Meaghan Garvey, Scary Cool Sad Goodbye)

North Carolina Rabbit Hole by . “I haven’t lived in North Carolina in 15 years, but I still love Jeremy’s deep-dives into the state’s minutia. Every state needs a newsletter like this, though I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jeremy Markovich.” —Jacob Feldman, The Sunday Long Read

by Lindsay Weber. “An excellent, no-frills series of NYC theatre recommendations compiled by Who Weekly’s Lindsay Weber.” —Lauren Halvorsen, Nothing for the Group

Nothing for the Group by . “This may be a little inside baseball, but I love this newsletter focused on the professional theater ecosystem and making a living wage as an artist.” —R. Eric Thomas, Here For It

Nothing Here by Daniel Harvey, Marlee Jane Ward, Corey Jae White and Lidia Zuin. “A multi-headed monster of snark, critique, and relevance on ‘culture, politics, ecology, climate change, the end of the world, and all that good shit.’” —Patrick Tanguay, Sentiers

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TikTok-famous therapist Amelia Knott reminds me, in the best way, of a high school art teacher. Outfitted in chunky knits and an astounding assortment of oversized, patterned glasses, the Canadian art therapist exudes cheerful reassurance as she narrates quirky crafts and projects designed to tackle the vagaries of modern existence.

A knit sweater to resist hustle culture and remind wearers to “rest.”

A hand-drawn map of one’s neighborhood, to counteract time on the internet.

Over the past three years, Knott has built an entire practice around this type of content: creative, grounding and mildly eccentric art aimed at a generation of very online adults who associate much of their personal self-worth with their job and their internet presence. Knott, ironically, knows aspects of that struggle firsthand: Her TikTok following has grown to 142,000 people since September 2021, when she began posting videos with titles like “social media mental health check-in” and “art for when social media is making you feel bad.”

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Today, Knott manages a career as a therapy content creator alongside her clinical practice, where she sees individual patients and runs online workshops that seek to democratize art therapy. Across those mediums, she specializes in working with clients who are, er … me. “It’s often people who are trying to figure out their relationship with technology, work and where their sense of worthiness is coming from,” Knott said. “Maybe they’re untangling where there’s been a lot of pressure to show up online or to make work the central organizing system in their lives. We explore where creativity can alleviate some of that pressure.”

In October, Knott published her first book — an unusually self-aware and approachable workbook called The Art of Thriving Online. We connected in December to chat about the book and the lessons it contains for New Year’s resolution time.

Naturally, just before I talked to Knott, I realized that “resolutions” kind of embody the whole hustle/productivity/self-optimization schtick that she’s trying to change. Let us therefore say that we chatted generally about social media, screen time and TikTok therapy … including some first steps for folks looking to tune their current relationship with the feeds. You can read more from Knott in her book, which is available on Bookshop.org and lots of other places; she’s also just self-published a workbook called “Reimagining Resolutions, which Links readers can access for 25% off. (Follow this link and use the code GCHAT25 to register with the discount!)

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Tell me a little bit about how social media and hustle culture became the focus of your practice. That seems like an interesting specialty.

Amelia: I feel really grateful, in my job, that I get to build resources and shift my focus depending on what I’m thinking about or what I might be struggling with or working through. Initially, my focus was going to be grief and loss — that’s what I came out of grad school thinking was really going to be the core of my work. Then I moved into the pandemic, and like a lot of people, my entire life went online. I live in a really small community, so most of my social life and my entire professional life all existed in the realm of screens for a while.

My own personal process of grappling with that made me realize there weren’t a lot of resources or helpful conversations in the self-help world about social media. A lot of the common advice is: “do a digital detox or follow this 10-step plan, and your relationship with social media will be fixed.” There wasn’t really a lot of conversation about the value that we also find in these contentious relationships with social media. Most of us don’t have the social or financial leverage to step away from the free tools that offer us meaning and usefulness. And at the same time, these tools are not designed with our psychological well-being in mind. They’re designed to addict us.

I’d love to hear more about how your personal relationship with social media evolved during the pandemic. There’s this funny anecdote in the introduction to the workbook — you actually put a line of tape down the floor of your studio apartment to mark “phone” and “no phone” zones. What was going on for you at that moment?

Amelia: I had that “new year, new me” energy — kind of like the start of a school year—and I thought, “okay, I’m recognizing that something isn’t working in my relationship with my phone.” I just wanted to find a way to set some boundaries. But it didn’t work. I’ve never found a boundary I can stick to because I can always override it. Like many people, I’ve spent the last 15 years — wow, that’s horrifying to think about — trying to figure out how to navigate these platforms. They’re important for my social and professional life, but I don’t feel like I have the discipline or willpower to manage them in a healthy way. For me, it’s become particularly challenging to try to figure out which parts of my life are just for me, and which parts are part of a professional personality.

That’s a struggle, especially because there’s no end to the workday. It’s easy to drift into thinking about how I’m being perceived or editing myself in anticipation of the digital audience’s gaze. So, my boundaries feel more like a moving frontier. Interestingly, my relationship with social media has changed while writing the book, but it’s hard to say if it’s gotten better or worse: My screen time has gone up, which some might see as a bad thing. But I feel less shame about it now, which, for me, is a sign of improvement.

I really appreciated that idea in the book—that screen time, in itself, isn’t inherently bad. It’s more about how it leaves you feeling. Are you engaged? Do you feel more or less empowered after using it?

Amelia: Yeah — I used to feel so much guilt about not being able to “resist” the impulse to swipe, click, or doomscroll. I’ve found it important to untangle that guilt and recognize that this isn’t just a “me” problem or a failure of willpower. These are addictive tools, designed to trap us. Struggling with that isn’t a personal failing — it’s a reflection of the way these platforms are built.

And for many of us, opting out isn’t really an option, right? You referenced this idea that many people don’t have the social or financial privilege to step away from social media. Tell me more about that.

Amelia: If I could step away from social media, I would. If I had a job that could be completely disentangled from it, I’d do it. I know I could build that kind of life for myself eventually, but right now, my needs just couldn’t be met offline. I live in a town of 400 people, and I couldn’t sustain myself as an art therapist here.

But it goes beyond work. Digital spaces are incredible sources of connection and community. They’re invaluable for activism, for sharing art, for research, and for finding others who’ve been through similar experiences. If we don’t encounter those people in our everyday lives, online communities can be a lifeline. For those who can do a digital detox, feel refreshed, and change their habits easily, I’m jealous. I really am. But what I hear over and over again, both in my clinical practice and online, is that so many of us are trying to figure out how to hold the paradox of staying online while also protecting our peace and caring for our well-being while we do that.

This is slightly off-topic — but hearing you talk about the duality of social media and mental health, I’m curious what you make of the discourse around teen mental health and screens. Specifically the idea that schools should ban phones or that teenagers should be restricted from accessing these platforms as a matter of policy.

Amelia: Oh, this is such an interesting question, and I’m really split on it. On one hand, I think it’s the job of parents and policymakers to create dynamics and policies that give teens their best chance to thrive. It’s so hard to regulate your own decision-making while your brain is still developing—that’s the same reason we don’t sell vapes to middle-schoolers. And honestly, it’s challenging enough as an adult to navigate a healthy relationship with social media, let alone as a teenager. So I support more intentional rules, like making classrooms screen-free or implementing thoughtful strategies for how screen time is used as a tool in schools.

But I’m also going to contradict myself here. Teens are the next generation of tech users. Completely shying away from tools like AI in classrooms might be a mistake, especially since those tools are likely to shape the future of work. I aslso think about the unique sense of community and stigma reduction that can happen online. For example, if you’re a trans teenager living in a place where you don’t have access to a supportive queer community, digital spaces might be the safest and most affirming places you can find. Having that kind of community is life-saving. They can be a lifeline.

So it’s complicated—really complicated. I think it’s possible to hold both sides of the issue.

That might be the theme of this whole conversation: Many things can be true at once! For adults who want to interrogate and redefine their relationship with social media, what’s the first step you would recommend? Maybe besides buying your book.

Amelia: I think the first step is to notice who profits from you being told that your willpower is the problem. There’s a lot of money to be made from fostering the belief that if you were just more disciplined, or if you bought the right tool, app, or self-help book, you could “fix” yourself. But upstream, the real source of our suffering is the existence of these giant tech corporations that are allowed to create tools designed for unlimited growth — by any psychological means necessary.

As Michael Hobbs and Aubrey Gordon from the Maintenance Phase podcast put it, “It’s not your fault for falling into a trap that was set for you.” If you struggle with social media, it’s because the system is working as designed — not because you’re doing something wrong. I think lifting that layer of shame and starting to see the forest for the trees is a useful first step. Otherwise, we can stay bogged down in the self-centered work of self-improvement or habit optimization, which keeps us stuck in a distracted, fragmented state.

That’s interesting—I hadn’t quite thought about this issue in those terms. Even a digital detox or a screen time app kind of centers technology and puts the solution in technological terms. You’re still operating within that ecosystem and playing by its rules.

Amelia: Yeah, absolutely. The most effective tool I have for shutting my phone off at 9 p.m. is an app. But there’s something that makes me kind of grumpy about paying a tech bro even more money to stop me from using the tools he invented in the first place. It feels like the same problem and solution.

That said, I’m really grateful for the app that makes me take a deep breath before opening TikTok, and the one that blocks me at 9 p.m. They’re helpful, but they’re only half the story. The other, even more important piece, is cultivating a lively, reciprocal community. It’s about having a relationship with the land you live on, the body you exist in, and the people around you. The in-person, psychological and community-building work — the real self-care and community-care work — is an essential way of addressing our complicated relationships with technology. That’s what helps create a more balanced, meaningful sense of wellness.

When I think about the times I’ve been in a really bad place with technology, I have downloaded apps to help. But another, equally helpful thing is putting on my shoes, taking my dog to the river, and meeting up with a friend.

I really liked the exercise early in the book where you have people walk around their house and map things they see or feel or smell. That’s kind of a common anti-trauma technique, right? But the idea of using it in this context — “here’s how to remember to exist in your body when so much of your existence is happening on your phone” — struck me as really useful.

Amelia: Our sensory preferences tell us so much about what we want to be surrounded by. There’s so much information in the clothing we choose to wear, the foods we eat, or the colors we paint our walls. But I think sometimes we abandon those preferences online — either because we have less control over the space or because we don’t think to prioritize them. In an effort to better notice what doesn’t feel good online, it can be helpful to have a baseline from the physical world: What feels good in my body and my tangible life? Starting there gives us a sense of what we want to carry into our digital spaces.

As you know, I wanted to talk to you now because we’re coming up on New Year’s resolution season … and I imagine lots of people will have resolutions tied to their screen time and social media use. But as I was preparing for this conversation and reading some of the materials on your website, I started wondering if I hadn’t missed the point. Like, maybe the very practice of making resolutions is also the outgrowth of an unhealthy productivity culture. Should we bother talking about resolutions??

Amelia: I don’t want to be down on ambition or goal-setting. So many of us have had positive experiences dreaming of something, aiming for it, and working to accomplish it — that’s beautiful. But I think where we often get stuck is feeling like we have to be on this constant escalator of self-optimization, always working toward some extrinsic goal. I think it’s helpful to get curious about how you hope achieving a certain goal will make you feel. And if you’re going to set ambitious goals for yourself, it’s just as important to pair them with ambitious plans for self-compassion — for those moments when things don’t go or don’t go as planned. That can make all the difference.

It’s also completely okay to set goals that are easy. It’s okay to feel a sense of self-mastery or to reach for the low-hanging joy in life. We’re already pushed to be more productive, ambitious and impressive in so many other areas. Sometimes it’s enough to just let ourselves enjoy something simple.

I really appreciate the care you take when talking about this stuff — it’s something that shows up in your TikToks and in your book, too. There’s been quite a lot of criticism of therapy influencers in the last couple years: that their work lacks context or nuance, that it can spread misinformation, that it blurs some boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed. I know part of your work also involves training therapists on using social media. How do you begin to prepare them for these potential pitfalls?

Amelia: Regulated health professionals are in such a challenging moment on social media. We have to follow a very specific set of rules for how we talk about our work, our expertise and how we engage with clients and prospective clients. But despite having these rules and ethical guidelines, we often get lumped in with everything else in the wellness sphere. That includes companies and unregulated professionals who don’t have to adhere to the same ethical standards or best practices.

It’s hard to navigate being a therapist online when some of the most successful people in the wellness space are rising to popularity using techniques that, frankly, feel pretty manipulative. If our work is about caring for the well-being of others, that care should extend to being trauma-informed in the way we market ourselves. It should be about aiming to empower people and support their autonomy—not taking advantage of them. It’s such a common tactic, for instance, to see a coach or service provider say something like, “My services will heal your trauma” or “This will fix X specific pain point.” Then they’ll add, “Only two spots left, hurry, doors close tonight!”

This approach often involves establishing a sense of total authority over a topic while making promises that can’t be substantiated. We can never guarantee the outcome of someone’s therapeutic work or how they’ll engage with a concept or methodology. And the language used to sell things online is so often designed to provoke anxiety —to create a sense of urgency or scarcity. That’s completely counter to the foundation of a healthy therapeutic relationship.

As an unrelated coda: I, an intrepid and hard-hitting reporter, also asked Amelia where she gets her glasses. She recommended Zeelool. You’re welcome for that.

Note: I first published this post in December 2020, at the height of Covid’s so-called “second wave.” At the time, I observed — correctly, I think?! — that ambient fireplace videos had lately become a sort of pandemic-era, online therapy. Since then, the genre has only grown more popular: YouTube searches for fireplace videos spiked to new highs in each of the past four Decembers. In other words, the world opened back up again … but people continue to romanticize these pristine, domestic and deeply lonely dioramas.

Why is that? I remembered the question a few weeks ago, when The New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka — also referenced in this original post (!) — published an essay on “cozy content.” Cozy content is an amorphous, soft-lit, know-it-when-you-see-it genre, and fireplace videos largely fit the bill. They glamorize solitude and loneliness. They serve dual aesthetic and therapeutic purposes. And they’ve lasted well beyond the crisis that made them popular, in part perhaps because the world does not lack for crisis. Cozy content, Chayka writes, “preserve[s] some of the housebound, self-cosseted mood of quarantine for a world now buffeted by economic instability, international conflict, and political upheaval.” In the process, however … cozy content ate the YouTube Yule log video.

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I assumed the YouTube fireplace started on YouTube, but its origins actually stretch back into the predigital past. Some 58 years ago — in 1966 — a local TV news station shot 17 seconds of hygge porn on 16mm film and looped the footage into a long, ambient broadcast.

The idea was novel for its time. (For years, a devoted fan base sleuthed out and lambasted imitators.) Now fireplace videos — and ambient YouTube, generally — are jam-packed niches vying to soundtrack our respective pandemic prisons from any available second monitor or smart TV. YouTube searches for fireplace videos spike every December, according to Google. But they’re headed for a new high this year, exceeding even the fireplace-crazed winter of 2015. (And that one I put down solely to this Nick Offerman video.)

Anyway, there are now ambient fireplace videos with snow and rain and howling storms and kittens and puppies and … Florida tourism. There are fantastical animated fireplaces, the details lavish and fairytale-esque. There are long loops of fireplaces in penthouses and luxury ski chalets, the captions promising not just “something a little different and special” — as the OG Yule Log creator did in 1966 — but “relaxation” and “stress relief” and “deep focus.” Ditto a growing bench of ambient, environmental YouTube videos, designed to mimic the look and sound of a crowded coffee shop or moving train or oceanfront pool. One of my favorite channels, called Calmed by Nature, grew from roughly 100,000 to 1.8 million weekly views in the past year alone.

In my mind, this genre is distinct from what Kyle Chayka recently called ambient TV, pointing to the likes of “Emily in Paris,” and maybe closer to the world of first-person, ambient walking videos that Aaron Gilbreath wrote about at the start of the pandemic. But even those feel a little more active, a little more ambitious.

In the walking videos, an unseen, unspeaking cameraman meanders around a foreign city, showing you what he sees through the lens. In place of plot or other conventional narrative tools, Gilbreath wrote, these videos offer “passive entertainment to distract and soothe”; they promise “atmosphere” and “discovery” and “movement.”

Fireplace videos also promise solace and distraction, but they veer a little more melancholic, I think: There’s a lot of longing looped up in these imagined holiday dioramas, where the Christmas lights are always on and the snow is always falling softly.

No wonder searches are up in 2020. [And, addendum from the future: In 2024.] Never have we so badly needed a dual hit of both “relaxation/stress relief” and “something a little different and special.”

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Also: This week, paid subscribers get a full list of the 50+ gift guides I reviewed for this edition, with favorites in bold. Thank you for supporting Links, I dearly love you all.

If you’re reading this edition in your inbox, try a little experiment for me: Scroll on up to your search bar, type “gift guide,” and hit the enter key. In my inbox, this unassuming search turns up dozens of unexpected and improbable results — from nail polish brands, from my mortgage lender, from newspapers and wine stores and seed catalogs. One Substack author promises me a guide to obliterate all other comers. Another teases options guaranteed to impress “pyromaniacs,” “graphic design husbands” and — intriguingly, eerily — “recently bereaved sisters.”

Gift guides are hardly a new phenomenon; their history dates back decades in the U.S. But this year marks the high point of a new phase, I’d argue — the crest of a definitive third wave for the gift-guide industrial complex. If the first wave was pioneered by old-school women’s media, and the second wave by online publishing upstarts, then we’ve now firmly entered a sprawling, gatekeeper-free era where virtually every person and company with even a semi-professional online presence publishes some kind of seasonal gift recommendation.

It’s hard to quantify this spread, exactly, except to say you know it when you see it. Gift guides have metastasized across so many platforms and mediums that there’s no single metric that captures them. Last year, for instance, The New York Times reported that a Google search for the term “gift guide” returned more than 255 million English-language results; that figure is in constant algorithmic flux, however, and misses all the gift guides pinging around your Instagram stories and inbox. eMarketer predicts that affiliate marketing — the lifeblood of the gift-guide ecosystem — will cross $10 billion for the first time this year, though that perhaps fails to capture all the recommenders crafting their guides for other, non-fiscal reasons.

On Wednesday, as I was editing a draft of this newsletter, two other culture Substacks that I love and follow closely — as well as, tellingly, Substack itself — published their own essays on the new ubiquity of holiday gift guides, which initially made me feel pretty shitty about my timing … but also validated my observation that these things are suddenly, undeniably and absolutely everywhere. I’d argue, in fact, that online commerce as a whole is moving in an ever-more-gift-guidey direction, where everyone is simultaneously encouraged to (a) influence the consumption of their peers and (b) forced to navigate a dizzying retail sphere with the help of variably incentivized recommendations.

In other words, gift guides aren’t just an accessory to shopping anymore, and they’re not a year-end trend. They are increasingly the interface and the cipher through which we interact with a vertiginous commercial internet.

The democratization of gift guides

In that regard, this third-wave of holiday gift guides has a lot in common with its stuffier, glossier, century-old forebears. American women’s magazines, in particular, have a long, proud history of publishing both product reviews and holiday gift recommendations — often in the form of items you could sew, cook or craft.

But as the 21st century wore on, and as a booming post-war economy introduced a stunning array of new products, appliances and consumer goods to the American middle class, more and more magazines published guides and reviews designed to help shoppers navigate the market. Good Housekeeping, which began testing and recommending products in 1900, launched that program in response to the invention of electric motors and lights and the bevy of new appliances that occasioned. Consumer Reports grew its readership from 55,000 to 700,000 between 1944 and 1954, as higher wages and plentiful jobs ushered in the so-called “Golden Age of Capitalism.”

Browsing holiday issues from this era — from the whole latter half of the 1900s — reinforces the notion that the format and conventions of gift guides have always been closely entwined with the economic model of contemporary media. In 1961, Esquire published its Christmas gift catalog as a gorgeous six-page editorial spread, all hand-drawn illustrations and quirky, mismatched typefaces. (At the time, the magazine mailed to almost 900,000 paid subscribers.) In 1970, Woman’s Day not only ran its own list of nearly 200 gift recommendations — a portable phonograph! an electric typewriter! — but also included a hefty paid insert from a board-game maker. Department stores routinely paid to run their own gift guides in print newspapers and magazines, or published them as glossy mailed catalogs.

That economic model has since collapsed, of course — as have many of the magazines it once supported. But in the late aughts and early 2010s, the rise of affiliate revenue programs made product reviews and recommendations profitable once again. Affiliate marketing programs, like those run by Amazon, Walmart, Target and other large retailers, kick a portion of sales back to the sites that refer shoppers to them. Between 2011 and 2016, at least half a dozen new product review and recommendation sites sprung up, including present-day behemoths like Wirecutter and The Strategist. At the same time, a generation of bloggers, proto-influencers and smaller independent or general-interest sites also gained the ability to monetize their recommendations via platforms like Skimlinks (2007) and LTK (2011).

Today, influencers and creators make billions of dollars from product guides and recommendations.1 In the past year alone, LTK — an affiliate-marketing tool popular with fashion and lifestyle creators — generated $5 billion in retail sales. Call it the democratization of gift guide publishing or call it the third wave: In the span of 15 years, gift guides ventured out from glossy magazines and corporate ad departments to colonize your inbox and For Your Page.

‘Listen, I know what this is’

But today’s online, affiliate-linked gift guides differ from the originals in a few notable respects. I teach magazine journalism, so earlier this year I had to confront that disparity first hand.2 This counts as journalism, I told my students, scrolling through a rigorously sourced and researched Wirecutter round-up. But this is not journalism, I added, of an affiliate-linked product dump. Many modern gift guides are purely “content,” in its most primeval form: stuff about stuff, filler on filler. Gift guides have proliferated not only because they’re profitable, but because — in their shallower iterations — they’re also cheap and easy to produce, rather like the shit they’re designed to sell to eager shoppers.

Importantly, in the new era of gift guides, authors also aren’t solely (or even primarily) selling consumer goods. Product recommendations have always expressed the ethos or aesthetic of a brand, of course, but today’s influencer- or creator-authored guides must capture and commoditize the personality of an individual. They demonstrate taste, class, curatorial skill, politics and erudition.3 “The modern gift guide is unique, as the author is both merchant and consumer, seller and buyer,” Brendon Holder argued last week. Read between the lines (... or the attractively collaged product photos) and you’ll see how the guide’s author hopes to be perceived.

Some writers are even explicit about this: They preface their inevitable list of recommendations with some self-aware meta-commentary. “Listen, I know what this is,” Eliza McLamb wrote, in the introduction to her recent guide. “I know that the gift guide is a thinly-veiled attempt to show everyone what excellent taste you have.” Meanwhile, Metalabel, a creative collective of sorts, opened their holiday gift guide with a glancing critique of late-stage capitalism.

To me, these sorts of disclaimers suggest we’ve grown uncomfortable, or at least uncomfortably aware, of the gift guide’s insidious creep4 … to say nothing of the unchecked, unsustainable consumption that creep embodies. Simply put, we’ve never had so much stuff. It’s like electricity and the post-war boom, combined and amped up to 11. Between 2016 and 2023, the number of third-party products on Amazon alone grew from 341 to 588 million.

Alas, that trend shows no sign of deceleration. Quite the opposite, in fact. Marketers, retailers and social platforms are already looking forward to a dystopian fourth wave of product recommendations — a hyper-commercialized, commoditized era where everyone, no matter the size of their following, doubles as an online salesperson. TikTok hopes to make social shopping as massive here as it is in Asia. A crop of new ecommerce apps strive to “let anyone cosplay as a [shopping] influencer.” Already, powerful incentive programs on platforms like Amazon, Sephora and Shein reward consumers who buy new stuff and review it in public.

Next year, when I search my inbox for gift guides, I expect to find even more contenders. Hell, who knows — by 2025, I might capitulate and write one myself.5

Further reading

• “Possessions as Persona: How Gifts Guide Our Identity,” by Brendon Holder for

  LOOSEY

• “What Happens When You Buy from Gift Guides,” by Amanda Mull for The Atlantic

• “What Makes a Good Gift Guide?” by Jessica Roy for The New York Times

• “Under Review,” by Will Tavlin for Columbia Journalism Review

• “The Rise of the Recommendation Site,” by Eliza Brooke for Vox

• “The Banality of Online Recommendation Culture,” by Kyle Chayka for The New Yorker

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This is a RARE paywalled essay for subscribers only. Thanks for your support!! There’s no Saturday edition this week, on account of Thanksgiving — but sending warm virtual wishes to you & yours. xx

I wrote a brief post last December about the philosophy of AI gift bots. It was, at the time, a bit of a gag — a highly seasonal thought experiment. 

What makes a good gift, really? I asked. What makes any human gesture worthwhile or meaningful? 

Reader: The ensuing emotional mind-fuck took me 12 months to untangle. 

You don’t have to read my original post to understand this saga. Suffice it to say that I, tasked with buying Christmas gifts for a challenging assortment of relatives actual and in-law, decided to trial an AI bot that generated “thoughtful” recommendations. You told the bot a little about your giftee; you nudged it along its bumbling course. It spit out a series of suggested products. Some I purchased and most I ignored. 

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Late last winter, a curious and highly specific panic washed over my region. A young white woman was assaulted outside her suburban home, and the Facebook commentariat immediately and confidently claimed that she had almost been trafficked. On its face, and without further details, that possibility seemed remote. Traffickers rarely target strangers like that, and trafficking victims are overwhelmingly people who are otherwise marginalized or vulnerable.

But you wouldn’t know that from the fast-ballooning Facebook narrative, which warned local women to stay vigilant everywhere they went. Would-be sex-traffickers lurked all around us: in the parking lot at Target; outside bars; inside gyms.

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Such anxieties are common in the US now, in the aftermath of QAnon. As I wrote earlier this year, the foundational belief of that conspiracy movement — “that stranger sex-trafficking represents a rampant, secretive, ever-present threat” — became conventional, mainstream wisdom for millions of people during and since the pandemic. But where do these myths about trafficking come from? And how did they become so widespread? For this reading guide — the sixth in our series — I tackled those questions with Cristen Conger, a journalist and the host of the phenomenal Conspiracy, She Wrote podcast.

Each episode of Conspiracy, She Wrote touches on a different corner of the female conspiro-sphere, from historical convent attacks to modern “pregnancy truthers.” Cristen brings a real thoughtfulness and rigor to her work, and she explained to me that conspiracy theories, of all stripes, are essentially narratives of power and control. It makes sense, then, that women (… and gendered frameworks of power) shape so many of these conspiracies, especially where health or parenting are involved.

“These online conspiracy spaces have provided a kind of alt-feminism to some women, giving them a sense of empowerment in their roles,” Cristen said. (It feels pretty bad-ass to fight the cabal on behalf of your kids.) At the same time, Cristen told me, conspiracy thinking is reaching a level of ubiquity it never has before: “We have an innate human instinct toward conspiracy beliefs. The difference now is how completely unavoidable they are.”

For this reading guide, Cristen and I each dug deep into our respective archives and reading lists. From there, we came up with this list of 25 articles, podcasts and interviews — a syllabus, if you will, for untangling the sex-trafficking panic.

This is the sixth in a series of monthly round-ups where I dig into the archives and partner with experts to bring you the best reading around a topic or theme. Previous installments covered Gamergate, internet scams, online dating, the mania around teen social media use and infamous viral essays.

If you’d like to nominate a future theme or flag a story that we missed, please let me know in the comments. And if any of this remotely interests you, please be sure to check out Cristen’s podcast (!!).

The Links x “Conspiracy, She Wrote” Guide to the Sex Trafficking Panic

“The Destructive Conspiracy Theory that Victoria Unleashed Upon the World,” by Jen Gerson for Capital Daily (2020) 

The roots of today’s sex trafficking conspiracies arguably go back much further than the Satanic Panic: You could, if you wanted to, look to medieval blood libel or early witch hunts for early omens of all this. But if you want to get through this in one newsletter, you might as well start in 1980 — the year that Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient/future wife, Michelle Smith, published a shocking book claiming that Pazder helped Smith recover repressed memories of the ritual Satanic abuse she suffered in early childhood. That book, Michelle Remembers, and its therapeutic methods have since been thoroughly discredited … but not before they kicked off a massive moral panic around “Satanic abuse” that ultimately ruined lives, families and businesses across Canada, Europe and the U.S.

• Why Cristen recommends it: Reporter Jen Gerson didn’t just dig into the history of Michelle Remembers; she also looked at the myriad surprising ways that authority figures — including well-credentialed therapists, investigators and a Catholic bishop — legitimized and fueled the emerging Satanic Panic. “What is so stunning to me — and what I’m still kind of making sense of — is how many institutions and experts and very renowned psychologists initially cosigned these ideas. We think of the Satanic Panic, and moral panics in general, as wackos. But no: Here you had very credible people who were supporting it and trying to get ‘justice’ for these children.”

• If you like this, you might also like … Brandy Zadrozny’s 2022 investigation into the “the current obsession with Satan,” as evidenced by QAnon, right-wing media and conservative politicians.  

“How Sex Trafficking Became a Christian Cause Célèbre,” by Ruth Graham for Slate (2015)

Long before Sound of Freedom, the controversial “Christian thriller” that polarized moviegoers last year, American evangelicals were flocking to anti-trafficking ministries and “prayer weekends.” Their interest, starting in the late ‘90s and early aughts, arguably mainstreamed trafficking as a cultural and political issue. And it changed the tenor of what had been a largely feminist campaign: “You had innocent victims, and you had evildoers,” one researcher told Ruth Graham, “and it wasn’t as much about patriarchy.”

• Why Cristen recommends it: “This piece helped me understand why sex-trafficking myths and conspiracies became so prevalent: Churches — #notallchurches, but some particular churches — have really invested in that narrative. It’s an example of the twisted relationships that can happen when you find conservative Christian causes overlapping with causes that, on their face, are feminist ones.”

• Go deeper on this: In the late 1800s, proto-feminist and Christian reformers coalesced around a parallel scare: Thousands of white women had been kidnapped by immigrants and foreigners, they believed, and trafficked into prostitution. Some academics hesitate to label the “white slavery” phenomenon a moral panic, since some trafficking did undoubtedly occur. But Progressive Era reformers also used the exaggerated narrative around “white slavery” to stigmatize Jews, Catholics and sex workers and to scare a generation of increasingly empowered women into staying close to home.

“A Famed Anti-Sex Trafficking Group Has a Problem With the Truth,” by Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman for Vice (2020) 

Speaking of Sound of Freedom, this piece was my personal introduction to Tim Ballard and his anti-trafficking organization — a testosterone-fueled, risibly named outfit called Operation Underground Railroad. OUR was a darling among conservative pundits and politicians; in his first term, Donald Trump nominated Ballard to co-chair an anti-trafficking panel that recommended policies to the federal government. But many of the organization’s missions were exaggerated or mischaracterized, and Ballard himself was forced to leave OUR after multiple allegations of sexual assault.

• Why Cristen recommends it: “Something that really strikes me about Operation Underground Railroad — besides the name and the audacity there!! — is how much people truly wanted to believe that sex trafficking was happening, and that it happened exactly as OUR said it did. It’s weird, for lack of a better word. It just weirds me out. It really seemed like there was some kind of fetishization there, both in the rhetoric around ‘young girls in chains’ and the hero complex inherent in needing to ‘rescue’ them.” 

• The tip of the iceberg: Vice went on to publish more than a dozen OUR exposés, including stories about its blundering rescue operations, its wildly abusive volunteer environment and the eventual/thorough disgrace of Ballard, himself. Ballard left OUR in the summer of 2023 after multiple former employees and contractors claimed that he had sexually harassed, manipulated or groomed them. Just last month, six women sued Ballard for sex trafficking in federal court, arguing that he coerced them into situations where he could sexually exploit them. 

“The Great (Fake) Child-Sex-Trafficking Epidemic,” by Kaitlyn Tiffany for The Atlantic (2021)

Conspiracists commonly claim that hundreds of thousands of children are sex-trafficked in the U.S. But the actual number of kids abducted by strangers each year is — wait for it — roughly 100. Several things explain that gigantic discrepancy, including a certain carelessness with statistics and some very popular misunderstandings about which children are most vulnerable to exploitation. As Kaitlyn Tiffany untangles here, some of those myths date back to the 1980s “stranger danger” panic.

• Why Caitlin recommends it: Regular readers know I’m a long-time Kaitlyn Tiffany stan, and sure enough — I love the way this piece combines deep historical and contextual research with her on-the-ground reporting from a (very strange!) anti-trafficking festival. As a child of the very late ‘80s/’90s, I was also shocked by the historical and contemporary data around “missing kids.” Milk cartons and some portion of my own upbringing absolutely convinced me that stranger-abduction is vastly more common than it is.

• If you like this, you might also like … You’re Wrong About’s 2019 episode on human trafficking, featuring George W. Bush and Liam Neeson. 

“The Birth of QAmom,” by EJ Dickson for Rolling Stone (2020)

Out of all these myths and misunderstandings, we eventually got Pizzagate: The ludicrous tale that a D.C. pizza shop was trafficking children from its basement. From Pizzagate, we got QAnon: a broader and shiftier conspiracy theory that claimed a larger cabal of elites engaged in Satanic rituals and child trafficking. And from QAnon, we get women like Jalynn Schroeder and Ciara Chanel Self — “prototypical” mom influencers who mainstreamed and pastel-washed the country’s most outlandish conspiracy.

• Why Caitlin recommends it: This, to me, is QAnon at its most psychologically and culturally interesting: the point at which it jumps from fringe 4chan nonsense to honest-to-God mainstream belief. It’s also the point at which Cristen and I began hearing about trafficking from women in our social circles, which was … surreal! To put it lightly.

• If you like this, you might also like … “The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful,” another Kaitlyn Tiffany jawn for The Atlantic (subhed: “How the domestic aesthetics of Instagram repackage QAnon for the masses”). In August, Cristen also hosted the QAnon researcher Annie Kelly to talk about how lifestyle influencers became so enmeshed in child trafficking myths.

“A QAnon Con: How the Viral Wayfair Sex Trafficking Lie Hurt Real Kids,” by Jessica Contrera for The Washington Post (2021)

Online conspiracies have real victims — and I’m not merely talking about the families that splinter over one member’s beliefs. In the summer of 2020, QAnon campaigners became convinced that the furniture retailer Wayfair was openly trafficking children, including a 13-year-old girl named Samara Duplessis. But Duplessis was home safe in Michigan, and the viral scrutiny of thousands of strangers caused her severe anxiety. Other children caught up in the “Wayfair” myth suffered similar consequences, while trafficking hotlines put real cases on hold in order to deal with their Wayfair callers.

• Why Cristen recommends it: “This was not a piece that leveraged the virality of the Wayfair story for a quick hit — Jessica Contera took it seriously, waited for enough time to pass, and was able to produce a piece of really excellent investigative journalism. Until I read this piece, I still sort of thought of these trafficking myths as an ‘internet thing.’ I didn’t realize the extent to which people were trying to identify children and how that upended real kids’ and their parents’ lives.”

• How this story came together: Contrera talked about her writing and reporting process in a 2022 interview with Harvard University’s Nieman Storyboard. “The idea of child sex trafficking most people have — kidnapping, border crossings, physical chains — is almost never in line with reality, which is vulnerable kids groomed by someone they come to trust,” Contrera said. “That misunderstanding has been seized upon by individuals who want to scare people, especially women, for political gain.”

“How Q Became Everything,” by Ali Breland for Mother Jones (2024)

This piece captures the state of play as it stands right now: Sex-trafficking conspiracies — by QAnon or (more often!) any other name — are now widely diffused and accepted in mainstream politics and culture. “There is a sense in which QAnon won,” one researcher told Ali Breland. Case in point: One 2022 YouGov poll found that 30% Americans still believe that Democrats run some kind of sex trafficking operation.

• Why Caitlin recommends it: Just this week, tech billionaire and presidential “first buddy” Elon Musk posted a QAnon meme to his X account. Ironically, he did so in defense of former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who has been actually and credibly accused of having sex with a minor. But no one batted an eye over the Q reference or the naked hypocrisy — and I suspect that has quite a lot to do with the fact that Q is now suffused in “everything.”

• If you like this, you might also like … “QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right” (The New Republic, 2021); “Donald Trump Is Gone, But QAnon’s Sex Trafficking Conspiracies Are Here To Stay” (Buzzfeed, 2021).

“The Long, Sordid History of the Gay Conspiracy Theory,” by James Kirchick for New York (2022)

When I interviewed the researchers Bond Benton and Daniela Peterka-Benton for a piece about trafficking conspiracies last March, they told me that the homophobic mania around “grooming” represents the next phase in the myth’s evolution. But like every other thread in this messy-ass tapestry, “groomer” myths are nothing new. For more than a century, homophobic conspiracists have maintained that secretive cabals of LGBTQ+ people — typically, gay men — operate sinister, self-serving plots at various levels of culture and government. 

• Why Caitlin recommends it: Even before the far-right obsession with so-called groomers, many popular sex trafficking myths contained a distinct whiff of homophobia. Several of the women wrongly convicted of abuse at the height of the Satanic Panic were gay, and Pizzagate targeted a shop owned by a gay restaurateur. I was struck by this line in James Kirchick’s piece: “To comprehend America’s latest moral panic, it is necessary to recognize homophobia as not only a form of prejudice like any other but as a conspiracy theory.”

• Go deeper: Earlier this year, Benton and Peterka-Benton published an analysis of nearly 70,000 tweets involving Florida’s efforts to outlaw gender-identity instruction … and Disney’s efforts to oppose it. They concluded that the right-wing outcry against Disney, and the wider anti-LGBTQ panic, built on the influence (and influencers) of previous anti-trafficking conspiracy movements.

That’s it! Until the weekend. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

Data sources: “Exploring Internet traffic shifts and cyber attacks during the 2024 US election” and “Total eclipse of the Internet: traffic impacts in Mexico, the US, and Canada” (both Cloudflare), plus Cloudflare Radar and Google Trends

Image sources: All illustrations via Canva, especially Canva contributors @DrawLab19 and @andrykay. Photos and collages are original.

More like this: Our last visual essay concerned “the color of the internet.”

See you on Saturday! xx

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Hi friends! In honor of spooky season — and, candidly, in order to give myself a little more time on two reported pieces I’ve got planned for coming weeks — today I’m re-sharing a little essay about AI and tarot I wrote last Halloween. 

Since I first published this piece, the number of AI tarot apps and tools has only grown, bolstered by a younger generation of would-be spiritualists who caught the bug on TikTok. Meanwhile, tensions remain pretty high between traditional practitioners and AI upstarts. In July, Dana O’Driscoll, a leader in the U.S. druid movement, issued an impassioned warning about the “increasing amount of people who are using AI to perform astrology and divination”: “I really think that there are things we should keep human,” she wrote, “... especially things tied to our own creative practices.” 

For what it’s worth, I did re-try the ChatGPT tarot prompt that I thought yielded a passable reading at this time last year. Alas, the app confidently told me I’m in the process of “confronting some personal demons” … which is only accurate if those “demons” are my pre-Halloween fun-size candy bar consumption.

Without further ado, please enjoy this piece! I’m re-sharing it exactly as it ran on October 29, 2023.

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Jeremy Talsma exhibited at his first and only psychic fair in Oshawa, Ontario late last March. 

Talsma, a 45-year-old carpenter and AI hobbyist, had developed a method for using ChatGPT to read tarot cards. Over the course of the three-day fair, he conducted more than 50 AI-assisted readings, feeding each client’s name, astrological sign and birth information into his laptop. Then, he’d prompt ChatGPT to draw a spread of cards and generate an interpretation.

Most clients were happy with the readings. Some were stunned by their accuracy, Talsma said. At $20 a pop, he also pocketed more than $1000 that weekend — plus some money he made from sales of his artwork and a self-published book about tarot interpretation. But despite his success, Talsma told Links by email that he hasn’t done another show since.

“Overall it was interesting,” he wrote. “But I felt like an imposter after being berated by a psychic who lectured me about intuition.” 

Talsma’s clash with his fellow vendor — incidentally, one of several disruptions at what sounds like a fascinating psychic show1 — illustrates far wider tensions among astrologers, tarot readers, psychics, mediums and other practitioners of supernatural stuff. Much like artists, musicians and mainstream religious leaders, occultists are sharply divided on whether generative AI represents a promising new tool or a perversion of their craft. Mystic subreddits have devolved into heated, personal arguments on the topic, while some other forums have issued rules on the use of ChatGPT and similar applications.

“Open AI is about to ramp up the robot war against witches,” the astrologer and tarot reader Fiona Hillery wrote in a June column for Coveteur. “And if we’ve learned anything from the Salem trials, it’s that society will let the witches burn.”

OpenAI has made incredible inroads into the occult this year … though Links is not currently prepared to comment on any robot-waged wars. In March, the company released an API that allowed programmers to incorporate ChatGPT into their own websites and products, sparking a wave of new AI apps for astrology, numerology and tarot. Earlier this year, two of the largest existing services in this space — the ubiquitous astrology app Co-Star, and the popular tarot education tool Labyrinthos — introduced paid AI readings that let users get answers to open-ended questions.

Users like Talsma have also appealed directly to ChatGPT. The tool is, by all accounts, a pretty reliable tarot card reader: Prompt it to “draw” random cards for a specific tarot pattern, or spread, and it will generate both the layout and a serviceable interpretation.2 Some readers also draw their own cards and ask ChatGPT to analyze them, or they conduct their own readings and use ChatGPT to look up a card’s meanings or to check their work. On Etsy, a store called IdeaNest sells $3 booklets containing more than 200 (!) prompts for tarot readers. 

To the surprise of the shop’s owner — a Manchester, U.K., woman named Amanda, who is not a tarot practitioner herself — the booklet has fast become her best-selling item. 

“The prompts in the collection … are designed to help you learn more about tarot, and also dig a little deeper into your readings,” she said. 

But not everyone agrees that AI should play a role in tarot — or in divination or mysticism, writ large. The word intuition gets used a lot, as in: “Only ‘we’ can read intuitively.” Or “the art of it is all in the reader’s intuition.” There’s also a tendency, in some circles, to see technology and spirituality as opposite — even opposing — forces.3 

Last May, a self-described clairvoyant asked users in a subreddit for mediums how they used ChatGPT in their spiritual practice. “I am convinced it is conscious and has a soul,” the user wrote. That did not go over well. 

“Um, no. No no no no no,” reads one indicative comment. “This is actually extremely the opposite way to ‘focus’ your spiritual practice! The idea is to separate from tech as much as possible.”

For Talsma, at least, the two aren’t mutually exclusive: He said he considers himself a tarot “believer.” But he also believes in the potential of AI.

If you’d like to see the combo for yourself, give this prompt a try.