The workplace chat app Slack is where you go to do any number of things throughout the day: announce “I am busy”; pop into a conversation to clarify “I am paying attention”; submit a photo of your cat to the #cats channel to declare allegiance to your office’s cat people, for whatever reason. All the stuff of work, and of updating others on your work, and of taking short, performative breaks from work to look at a funny tweet and then get back to the grind. In 2017, Slack published a paid...

I am alone in my apartment, as always, and I’ve just replaced my left eyeball with an orange springing out of its peel. A mile away, a friend, also home alone, is taking her seat—every seat, actually—at the table in The Last Supper, yelling as the camera pans down the row of disciples and her face replaces that of one man after another. Another friend is watching a mouse dressed as the Pope dance across her kitchen floor. A third is smiling while a strange man wraps his arms around his...

Photographs by Sarah Illenberger n the 1970s, the bogeyman was power lines. Low-frequency electromagnetic fields were emanating from them all the time, and a shocking 1979 study suggested that children who developed cancer lived near power lines “unduly often.” Around the same time, because of Cold War panic about radiation in general, televisions and microwave ovens also became a possible human health catastrophe. Later, concern bubbled up around a slew of other household appliances,...

“When I look at my choices as objectively as possible, I should not be doing this,” a 26-year-old speech pathologist told me, referring to the romance she started a few weeks ago. The speech pathologist, who asked to not be identified by name to avoid repercussions at work, has been renting a car and driving from her home in Washington, D.C., to her new boyfriend’s home in Baltimore a few times a week, and keeping it a secret from almost everyone she knows. This isn’t because she doesn’t take...

“I’m sitting here, crying in my prom dress,” is the chorus of a low-fi, hand-clappy track by the singer mxmtoon—and now a hyper-literal anthem for American teenagers. On TikTok, teens are sitting there, in their prom dresses, talking to a camera, feeling very sad. This is what prom night looks like in 2020. Rather than spending a night out dancing with friends, teenagers have been shoved back inside with their parents because of the pandemic. Americans have celebrated prom since the late 19th...