What a flex, to have curious readers!

Anne Helen Petersen · 17 Aug 2025

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
There are very few places on the internet where one can engage in deep, long-form cultural work for a large public audience.

Their wordsThere are vanishingly few places on the internet where you do that for a large public audience.
Our reading
Years of social media use have conditioned people to view online communication primarily as a space for conflict or political policing.

Their wordsAnd while I hoped for something approximating that, we had all been directly and indirectly warped by years of Twitter, conditioned to understand the primary purpose of online communication as fight club or political purity policing.

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