Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet

In today’s newsletter, The Weekend Essay, and then:
•Clarissa Ward’s war coverage in Gaza
•The departures of three great football coaches
•HBO’s “True Detective” revival

Like so many millennials,I entered the online world through AOL Instant Messenger. I created an account one unremarkable day in the late nineteen-nineties, sitting in the basement of my childhood home at our chunky white desktop computer, which connected to the Internet via a patchy dial-up modem. I picked a username, “Silk,” based on a character from my favorite series of fantasy novels, with asterisks and squiggles tacked on to differentiate my account from others who’d chosen to be Silks as well. The character in the books was a charismatic thief with a confidence that I, an awkward middle schooler, could only aspire to at the time. But the name was not intended as a cloak of anonymity, because most of the people I corresponded with onAIMwere school friends whom I saw every day. Each evening, during my parentally allotted hour of screen time, I’d keep several different chats going simultaneously in separate windows, toggling between them when one person or another went AFK—“away from keyboard.” This was unavoidable in the age of dial-up, when the Internet connection would get disrupted any time a parent had to use the phone line. Being online wasn’t yet a default state of existence. You were either present onAIM, immersed in real time, or you weren’t.

American Zion,by Benjamin E. Park (Norton). Park, a historian, traces Mormonism from its inception in New York, in 1830, to its struggle amid persecution in the mid-nineteenth century, to its present status as a global empire of more than seventeen million adherents.Buy now onAmazonorBookshop.

Unshrinking,by Kate Manne (Crown). Fatphobia, as defined by the author of this polemic, is a “set of false beliefs and inflated theories” about fat people which inform both health care and culture at large. Manne’s argument draws on personal experiences—she relates having gone on drastic diets and engaging in “dangerous, exploitative” relationships as a teen-ager—and on trenchant analyses of the ways in which fatness has been regarded throughout history.Buy now onAmazonorBookshop.

Termush,by Sven Holm, translated from the Danish by Sylvia Clayton (FSG Originals). This hypnotic novella, written in the nineteen-sixties but appearing only now in the U.S., takes place after a nuclear cataclysm, and is narrated by a man living in a luxury resort that has been converted into a sanctuary for the rich. “We bought the commodity called survival,” he dryly notes, but, as the story unfolds and refugees stricken by radiation sickness pour in, the delusional nature of that notion becomes clear.Buy now onAmazonorBookshop.

Cross-Stitch,by Jazmina Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Two Lines). The words “text” and “textile” contain a common Latin root, a teacher tells Mila, the narrator of this skillful début novel about female friendship. Mila and Citlali meet as schoolchildren in Mexico City, and bond over a love of embroidery. For Mila, embroidering is both an aesthetic pursuit and an act of political resistance. Years later, Citlali’s sudden death leads Mila to reflect on their past.Buy now onAmazonorBookshop.