Exposure to the internet did not make us into a nation of yeoman mind-farmers (unless you count Minecraft). That people in the billions would self-assemble, and that these assemblies could operate in their own best interests, was … optimistic.
The true believers won’t stop until they’ve remade the world.
A father’s attempt to combat the wage gap.
"How do we give Ivy the same opportunities as Abe? Do we praise her 21.7 percent more? Hug her 21.7 percent harder?"
A 38,000-word answer.
Behind the nation’s closed doors, with YouTube.
In appreciation of meaningful, ubiquitous, enduring applications.
Previously: Paul Ford on the Longform Podcast.
On a parent’s relationship with unused embryos.
An essay about phone dials and a response to the end of blogging.
On the shifting nature of time.
An essay on a pregnancy attempted:
When I tell people what we are doing, they want to hear about the room where you produce. I tell them that there is a lot of paperwork. That they take your picture and look at your license. Then they walk you back to the room. You are handed a list of instructions and some stickers and a plastic cup. The cup has a forest-green lid. In the room is a VCR. I like to write down the names of the videos so I can share them with my wife and friends: Ass Angels #4, Original Black Queens of Porn (Afro-Centrix #113), and Chock Full of Asians. The latter features a woman with enlarged breasts so swollen they look luminous, like the sense apparatus of a recently discovered deep-sea fish.
But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is: Why wasn't I consulted?
