Sophie Haigney
RIP Good Times | On the Future of Big Tech
Sophie Haigney
The trouble in Silicon Valley goes far beyond the tumult at Twitter and the implosion of FTX; in the sixteen months since Facebook rebranded as Meta, the company has shed thousands of employees, including 11,000 in a single round of layoffs, and has extended its hiring freeze. Across DoorDash, Stripe, Lyft, Salesforce, and other companies, more than 150,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2022 alone, and stocks have taken...
Running Like Ticker Tape
Sophie Haigney
I’m on Twitter all day every day, which doesn’t mean I’m looking at it all the time, but that it’s a kind of burbling backdrop to everything else going on in my life — all the reading and writing and thinking and talking. “Backdrop” isn’t quite right, though, because Twitter is also integrated into whatever it is I’m doing, feeding and sometimes poisoning it. By which I mean I don’t...
Persistence Pays | A Young Readers' Report
Sophie Haigney
“Harriet Tubman was born a slave, and her story could have ended there. Instead, she persisted, escaping from slavery and becoming the most famous ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad,” begins the first section of Chelsea Clinton’s baffling 2017 children’s book, She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World, illustrated by Alexandra Boiger. True to its subtitle, the book marches on through thirteen stories of women persisting. Helen Keller persisted,...
Fiction Detective | On Literary Citation and Search Engine Sleuthing
Sophie Haigney
At the end of Miranda Popkey’s novel Topics of Conversation, there is a short section titled “Works (Not) Cited.”1 She writes, “This manuscript emerged in part from an engagement with and in some cases refers elliptically to the following texts, televisions shows, films, web series, works of art, songs, e-mail newsletters, and podcasts.” The list of these works is roughly four pages long. I read it like a sleuth, trying...
“Speak to the Moment” | Art and Culture under Trump
Sophie Haigney
In 2016, grand predictions were issued about the fate of art under the new regime. The culture would suffer, dragged into the morass of Trump’s gaudy, ’80s flair — his ill-fitting suits, overlong ties, and overcooked steaks. Or no — it would usher in an artistic renaissance, a flourishing, heady underground. Comedy might be dead, but things were looking up for punk. Four(ish) years later, it’s time to prematurely diagnose the...
