To be pregnant for the first time is to be the world’s most anxious, needy, and ignorant consumer all at once. Good luck buying a pile of stuff whose uses are still hypothetical to you! What, for instance, is the best sleep sack? When I was four months pregnant and still barely aware of the existence of sleep sacks, a mom giving recommendations handed me one made of bamboo. “Feel—soooo soft,” she said. I reached out to caress, and it really was soooo soft. This was my introduction to the cult of bamboo.

Over the next several months, gifts of bamboo clothing from more experienced parent friends started to arrive, and I became indoctrinated in its superiority. Bamboo is breathable, I was told, smooth, and so stretchy that it grows with your kid. I heard of moms who exclusively dressed their babies in bamboo. One night after my baby was born, while high on hormones and low on sleep, I wanted to splurge on something nice. Add to cart: $33 for a pair of bamboo pajamas in the color “blush.” Yes, this was more than I’ve spent on my own adult pajamas. But these were bamboo.

Thirty-three dollars, I would later learn, is a relatively, uhh, reasonable price to pay for bamboo baby clothes? The Instagram brands that popularized bamboo for babies have also perfected the art of scarcity-induced demand: Every so often, they drop limited-edition prints that can sell out in minutes. So intense is the competition that moms resell them on Facebook for three, five, even 10 times the retail price; one confessed to reselling a $98 blanket for $1,000.

This all seemed a bit much to me, but let she whose baby is without bamboo cast the first stone. Imagine my surprise, though, when I committed the act of serious investigative journalism that is reading a clothing label. The “magical,” “buttery soft” bamboo fabric that so many moms have been obsessing over? It’s rayon. Yes, rayon, the material best known as what cheap blouses are made of. Rebranded as “bamboo,” rayon has taken on an improbable second life as the stuff of premium, collectible baby clothes.

There is nothing particularly special about rayon made from bamboo. “Bamboo rayon is just rayon,” Ajoy Sarkar, a textiles expert at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told me. And there is no reason this material should inspire so much hoopla. “The world is insane,” said Preeti Gopinath, a textiles expert at the Parsons School of Design, not at all suppressing a laugh when I told her about the hype over bamboo for babies.

And what exactly is rayon? It is neither natural like cotton nor synthetic like polyester. Rayon is in-between, a semisynthetic material made of the cellulose extracted from plants. A century ago, manufacturers used wood as feedstock, but these days they also use bamboo. The basic process used to make most rayon is still the same: The plant material is treated with lye and a chemical called carbon disulfide, which turns any cellulose into a viscous syrup that can be extruded into long, thin strands. Carbon disulfide is especially toxic, known to cause dizziness, vision problems, even psychosis in workers without proper protection (but it shouldn’t remain in the finished product). This entire process of turning bamboo into rayon is energy and chemical intensive, which makes sense. When I see hard stalks of bamboo, I don’t immediately think soft or silky. Bamboo might sound natural, says Maxine Bédat, the founder and director of the sustainable-fashion think tank New Standard Institute, but the fabric is highly processed. The end product is the same regardless of starting material. But no one is out there hawking expensive “wood chip” baby clothing.

These days, manufacturers can make rayon exceptionally soft by finely tuning the way the cellulose fibers are extruded. This feat of engineering turns wood or bamboo into fabric that does, in fact, feel nice enough to lay against baby skin. Some moms seek out the softness of bamboo specifically to keep their babies’ eczema at bay. (Cotton and rayon are both recommended for eczema.) The material is also absorbent and cool, particularly comfortable for warm weather. But rayon is a “weak fiber,” Sarkar told me. When rubbed together, the fibers tend to break and curl—a.k.a. pilling—which explains why bamboo baby clothes come with unrealistically fussy laundry instructions: line dry, lay flat to dry. Who has time when your newborn is pooping on three outfits a day? I tossed it all in the dryer, and sure enough, the bamboo clothing started to pill.

I did, however, continue marveling at the stretch in the bamboo—sorry, I mean rayon—pajamas. I found myself reaching for them over cotton ones because they were simply easier to stuff my baby’s ever-chunkier thighs into. But rayon isn’t inherently that stretchy, Gopinath told me. The stretch in “bamboo” baby clothes comes from the 3 to 5 percent of spandex blended into their fabric; 100 percent cotton clothes obviously contain no spandex. “Manufactured rayon is very cheap”—usually cheaper than cotton—“so you can add a little bit of spandex and it will still be cheaper than a cotton-spandex blend,” Sarkar said. This is not what I wanted to hear after spending $33 on already pilling baby pajamas.

The cost of fabric is, of course, only a small fraction of the price of any garment. When we’re paying for bamboo, we’re not just paying for the bamboo. We’re paying for exclusivity. We’re paying for the feeling that we’ve made the right choice for our helpless little babies. We’re paying for the softness of fabric against sensitive baby skin, even if that means clothing so delicate, it can’t go through standard wash and dry cycles. We’re paying for breathability that keeps babies warm but not too warm, which is a risk factor for the terrifying prospect of SIDS. The stakes can feel very high, and we’re trying our best. Is our best really rayon? Hmm, sounds better to call it bamboo.

The bamboo brands aren’t exactly keeping their use of rayon a deep secret. It’s right there on the clothing labels and on websites touting the superiority of bamboo. But you also wouldn’t necessarily know from a casual perusal of their marketing copy, especially when they use the more obscure name of “viscose.” (Viscose is technically just one kind of rayon, but it’s by far the most common, so the terms are used more or less interchangeably.) You would think bamboo is luxe, exclusive, and so natural. Outside of the world of baby clothes, the Federal Trade Commission last year fined Kohl’s and Walmart $2.5 million and $3 million, respectively, over their “bogus marketing” of so-called bamboo sheets, towels, and rugs. It’s just rayon, the FTC contended, and they had to call it such.  

So, if you’re looking, I have some used rayon baby clothes to sell you.

Whenever I want to avoid work, Google Maps is my go-to. The point is not to hunt for a bite to eat or plan a trip—it’s pure entertainment. I glide over a digital rendering of the Earth, spin it like a globe, and zoom in. Cities and rivers and streets and businesses begin to come into focus, colored with millions of user-uploaded images and reviews. It’s a bit like Where’s Waldo?, but at the world’s scale. Among the treasures to discover are blurry photographs of late nights in dive bars, ratings of obscure colonial-American-life museums, and selfies on a mountain I’ll never visit. There are the juiciest one-star restaurant reviews, such as this one from a café in my neighborhood: “totally unwarranted douche energy from ownership, expired motor oil passed off as coffee, and price-gouged food that is prepared and sourced as terribly as their coffee.” Brutal. In Ecuador, I found half a dozen businesses that appear to be Simpsons-themed.

Google Maps’ main purpose is to enable people to get directions and look up businesses. But along the way, it has become a social space too. Sort of. To fill out the world map it created, Google invited people to add snippets to all the digital places. You upload your photos; you leave your reviews; you look at the artifacts others have left behind. The pictures of a restaurant on Google Maps are often a mismatched succession of interior-design shots, flash photos of messy plates, and outdated menus. There’s plenty of detritus too: irrelevant photos, businesses that don’t exist, three-star reviews without an explanation.

The result is random and messy in a way that is different from the rest of the social web. Instagram and TikTok, after all, are dominated by hyper-curated influencer content, served through feeds geared precisely to specific tastes. Sometimes, pulling up TikTok’s “For You” page and getting sucked in by the app’s selections feels amazing. But especially as algorithmic content has taken over the web, many of the surprises don’t feel fresh. They are our kind of surprises. Google Maps offers something many other platforms no longer can: a hodgepodge of truly unfamiliar stuff that hasn’t been packaged for your taste or mine.

Not that Google necessarily deserves any praise for the delightful weirdness of Google Maps. The platform has become a refuge from the internet that Google itself had a heavy hand in sculpting. By turning its search engine into the internet’s front page—and deciding what appears on it—the company may be the culprit most responsible for ending unexpected encounters. Algorithms are also part of Google Maps: It does plenty of window dressing in its depictions of places, using its Your Match score to present establishments it anticipates you’ll enjoy. “It’s trying to match you with things that it thinks you’re going to like,” Kath Bassett, a sociologist at the University of Bath, in England, who studies map-based media platforms, told me. But “you can get past that.”

Because zooming out and scrolling around are so easy, you can bump into little treasures at every turn that would never land on an Instagram feed. Exploring Google Maps for kicks is not especially common, but I’m not the only one who does it: A community of people keen on these digital impressions has existed for some time. And GeoGuessr, a game in which players are dropped into a random location on Google Maps’ street view and try to guess where they are, has garnered a cult following.

Hopscotching around Google Maps unleashes surprise after surprise. According to one reviewer, the second-largest Union Jack in the British empire is at a museum called Cupids Legacy Centre, in Newfoundland, earning the facility four stars from the user. For only $6, one reviewer claims, you can “take in a tour of the local archeological dig site.” Seems like a steal. Several clicks away is the Tashkent Television Tower, in Uzbekistan’s capital, where scores of users have posted photos from the observation deck, some 300 feet up. The tower is well rated, but the café inside is not. “The service was slow. Our seats were wet,” wrote one visitor.

Thousands of miles west, in the Albanian town of Elbasan, a man in purple poses coolly—hands pocketed, sunglasses activated—by the coat rack at “Supermarket Koli.” A moment later, I am out in the Delaware Bay, many miles away from land, where the Fourteen Foot Bank Lighthouse juts out of the ocean. A few people have been kind enough to upload images of the 136-year-old haunted metal hulk; how else would I possibly encounter this thing? The strange moments you dig up are typically encased in blandness—drab photos, anodyne reviews, useless information that bores—but that contrast is what gives the weird little bits their value, like a diamond enshrined in stone.

Still, Google Maps hardly presents an entirely accurate depiction of our world. Fewer businesses seem to be indexed in rural areas and the global South, and Street View mode becomes more sparse. Reality is sometimes ugly, and to some degree, the platform moderates its content. According to its website, content reflecting more abrasive realities—bigotry, violence, anything sexually explicit—is pulled, often abetted by machine learning. In some cases, Google Maps itself affects reality: The platform has assumed so much power that its decisions about what to name neighborhoods can have major ramifications.

But as a repository of moments, it can offer depth that other sites, and even perhaps reality, cannot. Happenstance moments at my laundromat posted online aren’t the same as the ones I experience when I’m out of socks, but they give the place a greater dimensionality. It becomes more vibrant in my mind—even if by way of confusing, warped photos of rickety dryers. Other sites, such as Reddit and Wikipedia, are also full of odd curiosities, with devoted fans, but none lets such a random potpourri collect with easy visibility for users. Whereas Wikipedia has a base of meticulous contributors fleshing out structures of information, Google Maps is flavored by masses of people from everywhere throwing up ad hoc content—its ubiquity unlocks possibilities. More than 1 billion people use Google Maps every month.

Compare that with the rest of the social web: Any possible travel destination, for example, is now paired with an endless supply of TikTok videos and Instagram foodie listicles. Look and think no further; we have your Mexico City trip all planned out. Such a polished depiction of a place is sometimes genuinely helpful, but predicting what will resonate with us can be difficult. And what does might be too small or unconventional for selection by an algorithm or an influencer. Because it’s so huge, Google Maps has you looking under a lot of rocks for something good—more so than a “For You” feed delivering amusing content into your hands. But when you uncover something special on Google Maps, it’s like finding $100 on the sidewalk. You so easily could have missed it, but you found it. That kind of satisfaction is tough to replicate on social media today. Recently, I spent 20 minutes looking at this picture of a troop of Siberian teenagers in red berets watching an old man ambiguously stand next to an orange hazmat suit. What is happening here?

Most people won’t end up treating Google Maps as a form of unfiltered entertainment. But even using the platform in the most functional way can influence how you perceive the world. Looking up a pharmacy or the nearest rest stop, you can’t help but bump into off-kilter stuff other users have shared. Google Maps remains an open door to “strange places where all kinds of things are still happening,” Christian Sandvig, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information who studies algorithms, told me. “There was a period where everyone was excited about a kind of shaggier internet, where everyone could put stuff up.” For better or for worse, “it was this free-for-all. And it definitely feels like it’s going away,” he said. The site carries on the legacy of an earlier internet tasked with connecting the world to itself rather than pushing all of us into silos. It is among the internet’s last bastions of unfiltered weirdness.

On a recent Google Maps scrolling expedition, I ended up in Westernpark Nemesvita, a cheesy, artificial little cowboy town near the northern shores of Lake Balaton, Hungary’s largest body of water. There’s archery, a small trampoline, and an inflatable water slide labeled Grand Canyon. A peacock appears to walk the grounds. One glowing review reads, “If you are in Hungary you have to stop by there.” Maybe one day.

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The internet of the 2010s was chaotic, delightful, and, most of all, human. What happens to life online as that humanity fades away?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Silicon Valley’s favorite slogan has lost all meaning. Too many Americans are missing out on the best kitchen gadget. Elon Musk revealed what Twitter always was.

Chaotically Human

My colleague Charlie Warzel worked at BuzzFeed News in the 2010s. He identifies those years as a specific era of the internet—one that symbolically died yesterday with the news of the website shutting down. Yesterday, Charlie offered a glimpse of what those years felt like for people working in digital media:

I worked at BuzzFeed News for nearly six years—from March 2013 until January 2019. For most of that time, it felt a bit like standing in the eye of the hurricane that is the internet. Glorious chaos was everywhere around you, yet it felt like the perfect vantage to observe the commercial web grow up. I don’t mean to sound self-aggrandizing, but it is legitimately hard to capture the cultural relevance of BuzzFeed to the media landscape of the mid-2010s, and the excitement and centrality of the organization’s approach to news. There was “The Dress,” a bit of internet ephemera that went so viral, we joked that that day might have been the last good one on the internet.

Charlie goes on, and his essay is worth reading in full, but today I’d like to focus on the point he ends on: that the internet of the 2010s was human in a way that today’s is not. Charlie doesn’t just mean human in the sense of not generated by a machine. He’s referring to chaos, unpredictability, delight—all of the things that made spending time on the internet fun.

Charlie explains how Buzzfeed News’ ethos emphasized paying attention to the joyful and personal elements of life online:

BuzzFeed News was oriented around the mission of finding, celebrating, and chronicling the indelible humanity pouring out of every nook and cranny of the internet, so it makes sense that any iteration that comes next will be more interested in employing machines to create content. The BuzzFeed era of media is now officially over. What comes next in the ChatGPT era is likely to be just as disruptive, but I doubt it’ll be as joyous and chaotic. And I guarantee it’ll feel less human.

The shrinking humanity of the internet is a theme that Charlie’s been thinking about for a while. Last year, he wrote about why many observers feel that Google Search is not as efficient as it used to be—some argue that the tool returns results that are both drier and less useful than they once were. Charlie learned in his reporting that some of the changes the Search tool has rolled out are likely the result of Google’s crackdowns on misinformation and low-quality content. But these changes might also mean that Google Search has stopped delivering interesting results, he argues:

In theory, we crave authoritative information, but authoritative information can be dry and boring. It reads more like a government form or a textbook than a novel. The internet that many people know and love is the opposite—it is messy, chaotic, unpredictable. It is exhausting, unending, and always a little bit dangerous. It is profoundly human.

It’s also worth remembering the downsides of this humanity, Charlie notes: The unpredictability that some people are nostalgic for also gave way to conspiracy theories and hate speech in Google Search results.

The Google Search example raises its own set of complex questions, and I encourage those interested to read Charlie’s essay and the corresponding edition of his newsletter, Galaxy Brain. But the strong reactions to Google Search and the ways it is changing are further evidence that many people crave an old internet that now feels lost.

If the internet is becoming less human, then something related is happening to social media in particular: It’s becoming less familiar. Social-media platforms such as Friendster and Myspace, and then Facebook and Instagram, were built primarily to connect users with friends and family. But in recent years, this goal has given way to an era of “performance” media, as the internet writer Kate Lindsay put it in an Atlantic article last year. Now, she wrote, “we create online primarily to reach people we don’t know instead of the people we do.”

Facebook and Instagram are struggling to attract and retain a younger generation of users, Lindsay notes, because younger users prefer video. They’re on TikTok now, most likely watching content created by people they don’t know. And in this new phase of “performance” media, we lose some humanity too. “There is no longer an online equivalent of the local bar or coffee shop: a place to encounter friends and family and find person-to-person connection,” Lindsay wrote.

I came of age in the Tumblr era of the mid-2010s, and although I was too shy to put anything of myself on display, I found joy in lurking for hours online. Now those of us looking for a place to have low-stakes fun on the internet are struggling to find one. The future of social-media platforms could surprise us: IOS downloads of the Tumblr app were up by 62 percent the week after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, suggesting that the somewhat forgotten platform could see a resurgence as some users leave Twitter.

I may not have personally known the bloggers I was keeping up with on Tumblr, but my time there still felt human in a way that my experiences online have not since. The feeling is tough to find words for, but maybe that’s the point: As the internet grows up, we won’t know what we’ve lost until it’s gone.

Related:

The internet of the 2010s ended today. Instagram is over.

Today’s News

Less than a year after overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court is expected to decide tonight on whether the abortion pill mifepristone should remain widely available while litigation challenging the FDA’s approval of the drug continues. The Russian military stated that one of its fighter jets accidentally bombed Belgorod, a Russian city near the Ukrainian border. Dominic Raab stepped down from his roles as deputy prime minister and justice secretary of Britain after an official inquiry found that he had engaged in intimidating behavior on multiple occasions, one of which involved a misuse of power.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: America has failed the civilization test, writes Derek Thompson. The Books Briefing: Elise Hannum rounds up books about celebrity—and observes how difficult it can be to appear both otherworldly and relatable. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf explores how the gender debate veered off track.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

National Gallery of Art, Widener Collection

Vermeer’s Revelations

By Susan Tallman

Of all the great painters of the golden age when the small, soggy Netherlands arose as an improbable global power, Johannes Vermeer is the most beloved and the most disarming. Rembrandt gives us grandeur and human frailty, Frans Hals gives us brio, Pieter de Hooch gives us busy burghers, but Vermeer issues an invitation. The trompe l’oeil curtain is pulled back, and if the people on the other side don’t turn to greet us, it’s only because we are always expected.

Vermeer’s paintings are few in number and scattered over three continents, and they rarely travel. The 28 gathered in Amsterdam for the Rijksmuseum’s current, dazzling exhibition represent about three-quarters of the surviving work—“a greater number than the artist might have ever seen together himself,” a co-curator, Pieter Roelofs, notes—and make this the largest Vermeer show in history. The previous record holder took place 27 years ago at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and at the Mauritshuis, in The Hague. Prior to that, the only chance to see anything close would have been the Amsterdam auction in May 1696 that dispersed perhaps half of everything he’d painted in his life.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Murders are spiking in Memphis. A memoir about friendship and illness Gavin Newsom is not governing.

Culture Break

Brian Shumway / Gallery Stock

Read. Journey, a wordless picture book, is about the expedition of a girl with a magical red crayon. It’s one of seven books that you should read as a family.

Watch. Ari Aster’s newest movie, Beau Is Afraid, invites you into the director’s anxious fantasies.

Play our daily crossword.

While you’re over on Charlie’s Galaxy Brain page, check out the November newsletter in which he comes up with a great term for our evolving internet age: geriatric social media. (It’s not necessarily a bad thing.)

— Isabel

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

As soon as my kids were born, I began reading to them. They’d gurgle up at me, chewing their adorable fingers, as I chanted the words to The Real Mother Goose or When We Were Very Young. I’d loved books as a child, and I couldn’t wait to share my favorites with my new little family.

Once they could read, however, my boys made clear to me that we didn’t enjoy the same stories. Neither of them had much interest in the fairy tales I loved, and I couldn’t stand most of what they checked out of the library—I struggled to follow their graphic novels and cringed at dense World War I nonfiction, full of descriptions of gory battles and trench foot.

Even so, I was grateful for the time we spent with our books, and loved what it did for us as a family. Sharing what we were reading could give us a common language and a cast of characters we all knew. But how was I to find writing that might entertain everyone? That was the wrong question, I realized. Any given selection was unlikely to thrill the entire group, but a book can do more than entertain—it can also provoke, challenge, educate, or soothe.

What I list here, then, is an assortment of titles that may speak to a wide array of ages and tastes. Will everyone in your family enjoy these the same way? Honestly, that seems unlikely. But each will offer something significant to a variety of readers, in any stage of life.

Yearling

Toys Go Out, by Emily Jenkins

I associate reading together with snuggling at bedtime, when you choose a book that’s comforting enough to bring everyone sweet dreams. And when I consider that experience, Toys Go Out comes immediately to mind. On the surface, it’s a simple story that follows a collection of sentient toys named Stingray (a stingray), Lumphy (a buffalo), and Plastic (we’re not quite sure what Plastic is; that’s a mystery), and the episodic adventures they share in their bedroom. Periodically, they venture beyond its threshold—one excursion involves a human-mandated visit to Frank, the “bumpity washing machine,” who isn’t nearly as scary as Lumphy fears—and every chapter stirs up curiosity and joy. Toys Go Out is gentle enough for a toddler but clever enough to snare a slightly older kid pretending not to listen. And it’s so quietly philosophical about relationships, communication, and the idea of home that I often went to bed still pondering what I’d just read.

Oxford University Press

The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse, edited by Neil Philip

The gift I most frequently send to any new parent is a thick anthology of poems, such as The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse. People are sometimes surprised when they unwrap it, but I never worry, as most kids have an innate love of meter and rhyme; they’re delighted by the daily poetry of cheers and preschool chants. A volume like this one, packed with a wide range of styles and voices, offers something for everyone. Take turns dipping in, and each family member can find poems they’ll relish, whether they respond more to the playfulness of Lewis Carroll or the thoughtful reflections of Langston Hughes. And because poetry has a habit of sticking in the brain, the most satisfying payoff may come years or even decades later: Recently, my now-teenage son posted a few lines of W. B. Yeats on Instagram, and although he may not recall where he first heard the poem, I have fond memories of reading it to him from a big collection just like this one.

[Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading]

Crown

The Cartoon History of the Universe, Volumes 1–7, by Larry Gonick

The Cartoon History of the Universe has probably affected our household more than any other series, though I’m not even sure where our copies came from. The cover promises everything from “the Big Bang to Alexander the Great,” and the first installment is the right place to start. It has a pleasingly wacky premise: A Harvard mathematician loses his temper and quits to build a time machine in his library, powered by the smell of musty books. Life evolves quickly in his cartoon land, and fairly soon humans get straight to work developing cities, armies, and deities. From there, Gonick’s panels run slapdash through geography, art, economics, and faith, combining ridiculous onomatopoeias like “Crakarumblebwooom!” with silly puns, physical humor, and social critique. Each chapter is devoted to a single topic, and they’re organized in a loosely chronological fashion, so you can flip to whatever subjects your family is most likely to enjoy. Part of what made Cartoon History so special to us was that my kids read them first, then found themselves experts in all sorts of subjects I knew nothing about. I’d marvel at their sudden knowledge of Pythagoras or the gigantic mammals of the Eocene epoch—and steal the books as soon as they were finished.

Candlewick Press

Journey, by Aaron Becker

A certain kind of book is well suited to life in the back seat of a car. It has pictures, can be read out of order or paused abruptly when you arrive somewhere, and stands up to repetition. It’s typically purchased for children but can also entertain grown-ups in traffic jams. And Journey is the ultimate car book: It’s the wordless expedition of a bored girl who takes a magical red crayon and, like Harold, draws a universe of her own devising. She escapes into a land of glowing lanterns, primeval forests, hot-air balloons, castles, and flying carpets. It’s a wild, breathless adventure; the visual complexity, which can make you feel like you’re staring at architectural drawings, is dizzying. Readers may spend long stretches simply gazing at a single spread, searching for anything they may have missed the last time. Journey leaves so much to the imagination that, in essence, everyone becomes a storyteller the minute they open it.

[Read: What rereading childhood books teaches adults about themselves]

First Second

This One Summer, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

This One Summer is one of the rare books perfect for middle schoolers, who are often caught in the gap between childhood stories and more self-reflective teen narratives. The Tamakis’ graphic novel follows adolescent Rose as she spends one important season at a lake house her family visits annually. This year, things feel different. Rose’s parents are fighting; meanwhile, she becomes privy to the activities of older teens in the area, who face complex challenges like pregnancy and mental illness. As readers look on, Rose struggles to understand the rapidly changing universe around her, and eventually finds a way to accept her place in it. The plot is so much like real life, it’s almost painful—but it’s a deeply honest depiction of adolescence, and it might help provide families with a basis for difficult-to-navigate conversations. Kids absorb and puzzle over so much about the adult world, and This One Summer acknowledges that brilliantly.

Nancy Paulsen Books

Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson

“Somewhere in my brain / each laugh, tear and lullaby / becomes memory,” Woodson tells us, in “how to listen #1,” an early selection from her memoir-in-poems. Brown Girl Dreaming is full of these kinds of memories—instants tied together carefully so that we feel as though we know the speaker intimately. The book uses Woodson’s deeply personal recollections, and her family lore, to examine the crossroads of America’s recent past: Her story begins in Ohio in 1963, but it moves in and out of time and space, exploring her moves to segregated South Carolina and bustling New York City as well as the histories and political landscapes of these places. The musical, precise verse moves quickly from moment to moment, and is especially tender in portraying the inner life of young Jackie. The way the distinct, quotidian details of Woodson’s biography are woven into the decades reminds the reader that each day, we are all living through history.

[Read: How to show kids the joy of reading]

Harper Perennial

Collected Poems, by Allen Ginsberg

“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing,” Ginsberg writes at the beginning of his celebrated poem “America,” which I first read when I was 14 years old. It baffled me. Did I like it? I wasn’t sure. But it drove me to the encyclopedia, where I’d look up the terms I’d never heard before. (What were “Wobblies”? Who was Vanzetti?) Even though I didn’t understand everything, I was captivated by the relentless force of Ginsberg’s language, his conviction and rage. His work sounded a lot like how I felt at that age—messy, self-righteous, confused. Encountering “America” now, I feel the same way I did 35 years ago. While a family may need a bedtime book for drifting off, they may also need one for waking up, and Ginsberg, the eternal writer of friction, is the perfect poet to struggle with. In these complicated times, he seems like the right poet for the young and the old to share, whether you discuss the challenges in “Howl”’s cry for the marginalized or the personal grief of “Kaddish.” All these years after I first read them, these poems still shock me, and they may well send new readers off to see what else poetry can do.

Charlie McCone has been struggling with the symptoms of long COVID since he was first infected, in March 2020. Most of the time, he is stuck on his couch or in his bed, unable to stand for more than 10 minutes without fatigue, shortness of breath, and other symptoms flaring up. But when I spoke with him on the phone, he seemed cogent and lively. “I can appear completely fine for two hours a day,” he said. No one sees him in the other 22.  He can leave the house to go to medical appointments, but normally struggles to walk around the block. He can work at his computer for an hour a day. “It’s hell, but I have no choice,” he said. Like many long-haulers, McCone is duct-taping himself together to live a life—and few see the tape.

McCone knows 12 people in his pre-pandemic circles who now also have long COVID, most of whom confided in him only because “I’ve posted about this for three years, multiple times a week, on Instagram, and they’ve seen me as a resource,” he said. Some are unwilling to go public, because they fear the stigma and disbelief that have dogged long COVID. “People see very little benefit in talking about this condition publicly,” he told me. “They’ll try to hide it for as long as possible.”

I’ve heard similar sentiments from many of the dozens of long-haulers I’ve talked with, and the hundreds more I’ve heard from, since first reporting on long COVID in June 2020. Almost every aspect of long COVID serves to mask its reality from public view. Its bewilderingly diverse symptoms are hard to see and measure. At its worst, it can leave people bed- or housebound, disconnected from the world. And although milder cases allow patients to appear normal on some days, they extract their price later, in private. For these reasons, many people don’t realize just how sick millions of Americans are—and the invisibility created by long COVID’s symptoms is being quickly compounded by our attitude toward them.

Most Americans simply aren’t thinking about COVID with the same acuity they once did; the White House long ago zeroed in on hospitalizations and deaths as the measures to worry most about. And what was once outright denial of long COVID’s existence has morphed into something subtler: a creeping conviction, seeded by academics and journalists and now common on social media, that long COVID is less common and severe than it has been portrayed—a tragedy for a small group of very sick people, but not a cause for societal concern. This line of thinking points to the absence of disability claims, the inconsistency of biochemical signatures, and the relatively small proportion of severe cases as evidence that long COVID has been overblown. “There’s a shift from ‘Is it real?’ to ‘It is real, but …,’” Lekshmi Santhosh, the medical director of a long-COVID clinic at UC San Francisco, told me.

Yet long COVID is a substantial and ongoing crisis—one that affects millions of people. However inconvenient that fact might be to the current “mission accomplished” rhetoric, the accumulated evidence, alongside the experience of long haulers, makes it clear that the coronavirus is still exacting a heavy societal toll.

As it stands, 11 percent of adults who’ve had COVID are currently experiencing symptoms that have lasted for at least three months, according to data collected by the Census Bureau and the CDC through the national Household Pulse Survey. That equates to more than 15 million long-haulers, or 6 percent of the U.S. adult population. And yet, “I run into people daily who say, ‘I don’t know anyone with long COVID,’” says Priya Duggal, an epidemiologist and a co-lead of the Johns Hopkins COVID Long Study. The implication is that the large survey numbers cannot be correct; given how many people have had COVID, we’d surely know if one in 10 of our contacts was persistently unwell.  

But many factors make that unlikely. Information about COVID’s acute symptoms was plastered across our public spaces, but there was never an equivalent emphasis that even mild infections can lead to lasting and mercurial symptoms; as such, some people who have long COVID don’t even know what they have. This may be especially true for the low-income, rural, and minority groups that have borne the greatest risks of infection. Lisa McCorkell, a long-hauler who is part of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, recently attended a virtual meeting of Bay Area community leaders, and “when I described what it is, some people in the chat said, ‘I just realized I might have it.’”

Admitting that you could have a life-altering and long-lasting condition, even to yourself, involves a seismic shift in identity, which some people are understandably loath to make. “Everyone I know got Omicron and got over it, so I really didn’t want to concede that I didn’t survive this successfully,” Jennifer Senior, a friend and fellow staff writer at The Atlantic, who has written about her experience with long COVID, told me. Duggal mentioned an acquaintance who, after a COVID reinfection, can no longer walk the quarter mile to pick her kids up from school, or cook them dinner. But she has turned down Duggal’s offer of an appointment; instead, she is moving across the country for a fresh start. “That is common: I won’t call it ‘long COVID’; I’ll just change everything in my life,” Duggal told me. People who accept the condition privately may still be silent about it publicly. “Disability is often a secret we keep,” Laura Mauldin, a sociologist who studies disability, told me. One in four Americans has a disability; one in 10 has diabetes; two in five have at least two chronic diseases. In a society where health issues are treated with intense privacy, these prevalence statistics, like the one-in-10 figure for long COVID, might also intuitively feel like overestimates.

Some long-haulers are scared to disclose their condition. They might feel ashamed for still being sick, or wary about hearing from yet another loved one or medical professional that there’s nothing wrong with them. Many long-haulers worry that they’ll be perceived as weak or needy, that their friends will stop seeing them, or that employers will treat them unfairly. Such fears are well founded: A British survey of almost 1,000 long-haulers found that 63 percent experienced overt discrimination because of their illness at least “sometimes,” and 34 percent sometimes regretted telling people that they have long COVID. “So many people in my life have reached out and said, ‘I’m experiencing this,’ but they’re not telling the rest of our friends,” McCorkell said.

Imagine that you interact with 50 people on a regular basis, all of whom got COVID. If 10 percent are long-haulers, that’s five people who are persistently sick. Some might not know what long COVID is or might be unwilling to confront it. The others might have every reason to hide their story. “Numbers like 10 percent are not going to naturally present themselves in front of you,” McCone told me. Instead, “you’ll hear from 45 people that they are completely fine.”

The same factors that stop people from being public about their condition—ignorance, denial, or concerns about stigma—also make them less likely to file for disability benefits. And that process is, to put it mildly, not easy. Applicants need thorough medical documentation; many long-haulers struggle to find doctors who believe their symptoms are real. Even with the right documents, applicants must hack their way through bureaucratic overgrowth, likely while fighting fatigue or brain fog. For these reasons, attempting to measure long COVID through disability claims is a profoundly flawed exercise. Even if people manage to apply, they face an average wait time of seven months and a two-in-three denial rate. McCone took six weeks to put an application together, and, despite having a lawyer and extensive medical documentation, was denied after one day. McCorkell knows many first-wavers—people who’ve had long COVID since March 2020—“who are just getting their approvals now.”

An alternative source of data comes from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, which simply asks working-age Americans if they have any of six forms of disability. Using that data, Richard Deitz, an economics-research adviser at the Federal Research Bank of New York, calculated that about 1.7 million more people now say they do than in mid-2020, reversing a years-long decline. These numbers are lower than expected if one in 10 people who gets COVID really does become a long-hauler, but the survey doesn’t directly capture many of the condition’s most common symptoms, such as fatigue, neurological problems beyond brain fog, and post-exertional malaise, where a patient’s symptoms get dramatically worse after physical or mental exertion. About 900,000 of the newly disabled people are also still working. David Putrino, who leads a long-COVID rehabilitation clinic at Mount Sinai, told me that many of his patients are refused the accommodations required under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Their employers won’t allow them to work remotely or reduce their hours, because, he said, “you look at them and don’t see an obvious disability.”

Long COVID can also seem bafflingly invisible when people look at it with the wrong tools. For example, a 2022 study by National Institutes of Health researchers compared 104 long-haulers with 85 short-term COVID patients and 120 healthy people and found no differences in measures of heart or lung capacities, cognitive tests, or levels of common biomarkers—bloodstream chemicals that might indicate health problems. This study has been repeatedly used as evidence that long COVID might be fictitious or psychosomatic, but in an accompanying editorial, Akulo Hope, the medical director of Oregon Health and Science University’s long-COVID program, noted that the study exactly mirrors what long-haulers commonly experience: They undergo extensive testing that turns up little and are told, “Everything is normal and nothing is wrong.”

The better explanation, Putrino told me, is that “cookie-cutter testing” doesn’t work—a problem that long COVID shares with other neglected complex illnesses, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic-fatigue syndrome and dysautonomia. For example, the NIH study didn’t consider post-exertional malaise, a cardinal symptom of both ME/CFS and long COVID; measuring it requires performing cardiopulmonary tests on two successive days. Most long-haulers also show spiking heart rates when asked to simply stand against a wall for 10 minutes—a sign of problems with their autonomic nervous system. “These things are there if you know where to look,” Putrino told me. “You need to listen to your patients, hear where the virus is affecting them, and test accordingly.”

Contrary to popular belief, researchers have learned a huge amount about the biochemical basis of long COVID, and have identified several potential biomarkers for the disease. But because long COVID is likely a cluster of overlapping conditions, there might never be a singular blood test that “will tell you if you have long COVID 100 percent of the time,” Putrino said. The best way to grasp the scale of the condition, then, is still to ask people about their symptoms.  

Large attempts to do this have been relatively consistent in their findings: The U.S. Household Pulse Survey estimates that one in 10 people who’ve had COVID currently have long COVID; a large Dutch study put that figure at one in eight. The former study also estimated that 6 percent of American adults are long-haulers; a similar British survey by the Office for National Statistics estimated that 3 percent of the general population is. These cases vary widely in severity, and about one in five long-haulers is barely affected by their symptoms—but the remaining majority very much is. Another one in four long-haulers (or 4 million Americans) has symptoms that severely limit their daily activities. The others might, at best, wake every day feeling as if they haven’t had any rest, or feel trapped in an endless hangover. They might work or socialize when their tidal symptoms ebb, but only by making big compromises: “If I work a full day, I can’t also then make dinner or parent without significant suffering,” JD Davids, who has both long COVID and ME/CFS, told me.

Some people do recover. A widely cited Israeli study of 1.9 million people used electronic medical records to show that most lingering COVID symptoms “are resolved within a year from diagnosis,” but such data fail to capture the many long-haulers who give up on the medical system precisely because they aren’t getting better or are done with being disbelieved. Other studies that track groups of long-haulers over time have found less rosy results. A French one found that 85 percent of people who had symptoms two months after their infection were still symptomatic after a year. A Scottish team found that 42 percent of its patients had only partially recovered at 18 months, and 6 percent had not recovered at all. The United Kingdom’s national survey shows that 69 percent of people with long COVID have been dealing with symptoms for at least a year, and 41 percent for at least two.

The most recent data from the U.S. and the U.K. show that the total number of long-haulers has decreased over the past six months, which certainly suggests that people recover in appreciable numbers. But there’s a catch: In the U.K., the number of people who have been sick for more than a year, or who are severely limited by their illness, has gone up. A persistent pool of people is still being pummeled by symptoms—and new long-haulers are still joining the pool. This influx should be slower than ever, because Omicron variants seem to carry a lower risk of triggering long COVID, while vaccines and the drug Paxlovid can lower that risk even further. But though the odds against getting long COVID are now better, more people are taking a gamble, because preventive precautions have been all but abandoned.

Even if prevalence estimates were a tenth as big, that would still mean more than 1 million Americans are dealing with a chronic illness that they didn’t have three years ago. “When long COVID first came on the scene, everyone told us that once we have the prevalence numbers, we can do something about it,” McCorkell told me. “We got those numbers. Now people say, ‘Well, we don’t believe them. Try again.’”

To a degree, I sympathize with some of the skepticism regarding long COVID, because the condition challenges our typical sense of what counts as solid evidence. Blood tests, electronic medical records, and disability claims all feel like rigorous lines of objective data. Their limitations become obvious only when you consider what the average long-hauler goes through—and those details are often cast aside because they are “anecdotal” and, by implication, unreliable. This attitude is backwards: The patients’ stories are the ground truth against which all other data must be understood. Gaps between the data and the stories don’t immediately invalidate the latter; they just as likely show the holes in the former.

Laura Mauldin, the disability sociologist, argues that the U.S. is primed to discount those experiences because the country’s values—exceptionalism, strength, self-reliance—have created what she calls the myth of the able-bodied public. “We cannot accept that our bodies are fallible, or that disability is utterly ordinary and expected,” she told me. “We go to great pains to pretend as though that is not the case.” If we believe that a disabling illness like long COVID is rare or mild, “we protect ourselves from having to look at it.” And looking away is that much easier because chronic illnesses like long COVID are more likely to affect women—“who are more likely to have their symptoms attributed to psychological problems,” Mauldin said—and because the American emphasis on work ethic devalues people who can’t work as much or as hard as their peers.

Other aspects of long COVID make it hard to grasp. Like other similar, neglected chronic illnesses, it defies a simplistic model of infectious disease in which a pathogen causes a predictable set of easily defined symptoms that alleviate when the bug is destroyed. It challenges our belief in our institutions, because truly contending with what long-haulers go through means acknowledging how poorly the health-care system treats chronically ill patients, how inaccessible social support is to them, and how many callous indignities they suffer at the hands of even those closest to them. Long COVID is a mirror on our society, and the image it reflects is deeply unflattering.

Most of all, long COVID is a huge impediment to the normalization of COVID. It’s an insistent indicator that the pandemic is not actually over; that policies allowing the coronavirus to spread freely still carry a cost; that improvements such as better indoor ventilation are still wanting; that the public emergency may have been lifted but an emergency still exists; and that millions cannot return to pre-pandemic life. “Everyone wants to say goodbye to COVID,” Duggal told me, “and if long COVID keeps existing and people keep talking about it, COVID doesn’t go away.” The people who still live with COVID are being ignored so that everyone else can live with ignoring it.

In the future, when teenagers want to sign up for an account on Facebook or Instagram, they may first need to ask their parent or guardian to give their consent to the social media companies.

Thanks to the likes of TikTok and Instagram, young people are experiencing a devastating crisis of attention.