Ten years later, I decided to go for a month without looking in the mirror

It’s close to my “photo face,” but it’s a separate beast

Tourists would stand with their back to the landscape and look at a reflection of it rather than look directly at the landscape they had traveled to see

something that is more pleasing in a mediated representation.

The best hints in “Stories” of actual life in New York come despite Stanton’s stage directions.

Stanton decided it would be artistic to break from his normal style and depicted the arm as an object, out of context, with no body, face, or mind.

nonwhite

, a viewer gets the sense that all New Yorkers are, at their core, kind of… the same

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them.

reensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified

making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concern

To me though, it seems even more uncomfortable to think that we as white Americans should not intervene in a humanitarian disaster because the victims are of a different skin color.

Kony2012 video

And I wanted the story to feel emergent, from a source that no one could have suspected.

The climate demanded stoicism, cool detachment as the default attitude for boys trying not to lose social standing.

They just knew I’d experienced something terrible.”

the more “shameless” an essay, the better.

“I felt like I just shouldn’t have run the piece at all, because I fundamentally misestimated how prepared the writer was for this to go public.”

“She was sure she wanted to build her writing career around this,” Tolentino says.

The writer thus attempts to charm the reader rather than convince him, counting on titillation provided by pseudo-revelation to hold the reader’s interest.”

confessional literature has become a metaphorical striptease, in which more nakedness promises more fame, and the more significant revelatory purposes of literature are lost to the immediate gratification of titillation.

Authenticity becomes a slippery and evasive promise,

And that's the secret of PostSecret. It isn't really a true confessional after all. It is a piece of collaborative art.

"I found these stamps as a child, and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to. I never did have someone."

Mail your secret anonymously on one side of a 4-by-6-inch postcard that you make yourself.

(Already if you want to post anything to a social network, you have to do it early morning or late night, when most people are using the app.)

Ironically enough, states that cooperate with Facebook and Twitter know much more about their citizens than those, like Iran, where the state has a tight grip on the internet but does not have legal access to social media companies.

In many apps, the votes we cast – the likes, the plusses, the stars, the hearts – are actually more related to cute avatars and celebrity status than to the substance of what’s posted.

Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realised how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.

That sparked something that was later called a blogging revolution: soon, hundreds and thousands of Iranians made it one of the top five nations by the number of blogs.

In short, we’ve never cherished being alone, valued introspection, and treasured information disconnection more than we do now.

Forgetting one’s phone causes a sort of existential crisis.