Patrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best…
Erykah Badu met up with okayplayer.’s program The Questions and the result is a meditation on what participation means in the digital age, among many other things. Watch the interview after the…
Jacob Wren discusses his newest novel, Polyamorous Love Song, the relationship between art and ethics, and whether Kanye West is a force for good in the art and music world.
The personal computer may have revolutionized the way writers write, but distractions from the Internet and social media may not make it the ideal tool for writing. Designer Adam Leeb has…
It’s hard to go a day without the question, does poetry matter? crop up somewhere, and if you’re in the mood for a longread, David Lehman has written an excellent…
Common wisdom has it that the Internet has disconnected people from their sense of empathy—but maybe it’s just exposed society at large to greater numbers of people who were already…
When Graeme Wood saw an ultra-wealthy college classmate’s name popping up on weird, perfunctory websites, he suspected something was up. After some diligent sleuthing, he discovered he was right—the classmate…
Very gradually, this frantic activity ceased to be simply an expression of emotional distress—what the grief experts call “searching behaviour”—and started evolving into a digital, extended elegiac project.
It was a time in my life when I was frequently “tagged,” along with other Netizens who seemed to keep in touch and do good works. I did no good works, but I tried to keep in touch.
However crude, social media today allows us to cut and paste our world into a space (mostly) under our control. Whether we’re posting on Pinterest (an action likened to tearing…