What’s on Your Home Screen, Taylor Lorenz?
Talking bespoke apps and ‘moon playlists’ with the tech journalist and meme whisperer
This is “What’s on Your Home Screen?” a Q&A column from OneZero. We want to understand more about how people use their smartphones — those life-consuming devices we dump hours into every day — to pave a way toward a better future. Or at least a more reflective one. We’ll add new entries regularly, and each will feature a new interview with a notable person about the apps they use, how they’re organized, and whether those red bubbles drive them nuts.
Taylor Lorenz gets the internet. Her work as a staff writer at the Atlantic routinely pulls the curtain back on strange pockets of online culture, and she’s been known to publish articles that seem engineered to spark their own mini-news cycles on Twitter. (See this week’s viral piece on internet nemeses, for example.)
And so, I had to see how she uses her iPhone.
I was surprised to find a number of what she called “artisanal” apps, which serve very specific purposes, in contrast to the mega-functions of a product like Facebook or Spotify. Less surprising was a now familiar refrain about the worthlessness of notification badges.
