Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Celebrity worship syndrome is a phrase that tends to end conversations before they begin. It sounds like a diagnosis, which makes people defensive, and it carries an implicit judgment that the people...
Read article →The relationship between anonymity and honesty online is more complicated than it first appears, and I want to try to do justice to the complication rather than resolve it too quickly in either direct...
Read article →The question of why we trust influencers is one that smart people tend to answer badly, usually because they frame it as a question about gullibility — about some failure of critical thinking in an au...
Read article →The online disinhibition effect is one of the more consequential phenomena in contemporary psychology, and it deserves more rigorous attention than it typically receives in public discourse. The obser...
Read article →There is a subgenre of crime fiction in which nobody important dies, the detective solves everything by chapter twenty, and the most stressful scene involves a misplaced pie. Cozy mysteries are freque...
Read article →I fell down a rabbit hole once — a proper one, five hours long, beginning with a Wikipedia article about a minor historical figure and ending, somehow, with me reading about the industrial history of...
Read article →I have been thinking a lot lately about the particular anxiety that attaches to cancel culture discourse, and I want to try to name something that I think gets missed in most conversations about it. T...
Read article →Age gap fiction has always occupied a peculiar corner of the romance shelf. Readers who gravitate toward it rarely do so by accident — there is something deliberate, even a little defiant, about reach...
Read article →I want to be precise about what I mean when I say your taste in thriller fiction tells you something about yourself, because I am not interested in the pop psychology version of this conversation. I a...
Read article →The question of who you are online is not as simple as it sounds, and I want to resist the framing that treats digital identity as either fake or as a transparent window onto the real self. The truth...
Read article →The fake dating trope asks readers to accept a specific premise: two people agree to pretend to be in a romantic relationship for external reasons, and then, inevitably, the pretense becomes something...
Read article →There is a particular kind of communication that happens in meme format that simply cannot be replicated by direct statement. If I tell you in a sentence that I am tired in a way that goes beyond slee...
Read article →I will be honest with you: the first time I noticed I was drawn to dark academia, I was standing in a used bookshop at eleven in the morning, holding a battered copy of a novel I had already read thre...
Read article →The grumpy sunshine trope follows a predictable shape that readers have found consistently irresistible. One character is guarded, terse, prone to dark moods or sharp observations, the kind of person...
Read article →Second chance romance is exactly what it sounds like: two people who once had something, lost it, and find their way back to each other. It is one of the most durable structures in romantic fiction, w...
Read article →There is a pillow shaped like a character from a game I love that I have had for four years. I could describe, in embarrassing detail, the specific process by which it ended up in my apartment. I know...
Read article →Stories about found family, about people who become each other's family not through birth or law but through choice and circumstance and sustained care, have never been more prevalent in popular ficti...
Read article →Character death in fiction has always produced strong responses. What has changed is that we can now observe and study those responses in real time, across millions of people, as they happen. What the...
Read article →The first thing to understand about cosplay is that it is not pretending to be someone else. That framing misses what is actually happening. People who cosplay are not trying to disappear into a chara...
Read article →Stories about forbidden love have been told for as long as there has been storytelling. The obstacles vary, social class, family enmity, political allegiance, professional ethics, species in speculati...
Read article →People have been writing unauthorized stories about characters they love for as long as storytelling has existed. What changed recently is that those stories now circulate in visible, networked commun...
Read article →The enemies to lovers trope is everywhere. It appears in literary fiction, genre romance, fan fiction, film, television, and the kind of stories people tell each other about their own relationships. I...
Read article →There is a photograph that has not been taken yet, of a meal that has not been ordered, at a place that was chosen partly because the lighting looked good in other people's posts. This is not a carica...
Read article →Fandom has a harassment problem. That sentence is not a judgment of fandom as a whole. It is an observation that most people who have spent time in fan communities already know to be true, and that th...
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