October 20, 2026 On the Internet The Uncanny Catharsis of the AI Emomercial By Jean Garnett All photographs courtesy of Jean Garnett. The tears are the first tell, and what stops my scrolling: that’s not how tears work. The tears gather in wide, frightened eyes and spill over into droplets, but instead of sliding down the cheek and being absorbed into the skin or dripping off the face, these droplets dangle like snot from the eyes, transparent swells dragging down mucous threads. The eyes belong to a woman, a Pixaresque figure with a large head on a hunched body, who is crying in her cubicle. In subsequent versions she may be crying in the bathroom, or at the wheel of her car, or at her son’s soccer game or her daughter’s rehearsal dinner, but the cause of the tears is always the same: the woman is sad because she is aging, and she is aging because she is sad. She is a rumpled Möbius strip of cause and effect, agedness the total fact of her life. Naturally, the woman has failed, or is failing, to hang onto her husband: “You used to light up,” he says in one video. “You just don’t look like yourself anymore.” Or she overhears him telling a friend that she has “let herself go.” Or he has already left her for a much younger woman. Or he’s having an affair with a colleague who has not “let herself go.” Read More
May 6, 2026 On the Internet Rotten Dot Com By Dena Yago Henri-Charles Guérard, Composite print of Japanese masks and a death’s-head (1888), from the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Public domain. “Wanna see a dead body?” Milo asks from the back seat. The 5 is a white blade under the Valley sun, everything bleached flat, overexposed as we fly toward Fry’s Electronics. It’s 1999. The Acura’s sweating leather sticks to my thighs. My skin feels amphibian, a tween-age Geico gecko blinking too hard, raw in the new light of too much consciousness. Even at eleven, Milo likes to pull out provocations sourced from some dark aquifer on the internet not yet known to me. Unlike Milo, I don’t have a PC in my bedroom. But we’re on our way to fix that. Now Milo pivots, unzipping his backpack like a schoolyard dealer to flash two CD jewel cases. Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe (1998): an X carved into his gristly forehead flesh, chrome flames across the plastic. Busta Rhymes’s Extinction Level Event (1998): a world on fire, his mouth mid-detonation. “Which one?” he asks. I don’t answer, reluctant to admit I know neither. Noah, my brother, at the wheel, picks Busta in the rearview. “If you want it, let me hear you say it (gimme some more),” Busta belts. I, too, am eleven. A child of a recent bicoastal divorce, spending the summer in the Pacific Palisades, being driven to Fry’s to assemble my first desktop PC—my twenty-three-year-old brother’s gift in the key of fraternal benevolence, pedagogical duty, and Californian techno-optimism. A deal struck with my dad: if we can build it, I can keep it in my room. Milo—my surf-tanned, platinum-blond, Point Dume–living, feral best friend with an Insane Clown Posse fixation and a household parrot that mimics his mother’s laugh—is along for the ride. He’s beautiful and hectic. I want to live in his house. I want to live in his brain, his skin. I’m high on his confidence the way only a young girl without much of her own can be. So yes, sure: I want to see a dead body. Read More