Letter From the Editor
When Everything Feels Broken
Don’t be resigned: look to the future
There’s nothing more frustrating than when something stops working and you can’t do anything about it. I was fiddling with a busted Switch controller this weekend and watched helplessly as the calibration program showed the joystick pushing to the top of the screen without my direction; a little green ghost in the machine that I couldn’t exorcise.
A lot of things feel like this right now. August has been a long haul: It’s hot and slow; the president is blowing up the post office (!!!); Joyce Carol Oates, the 82-year-old author and five-time Pulitzer finalist, is revitalizing the soul of goatse on Twitter feeds worldwide with a nightmarish photograph of her extremely messed-up foot (just… don’t Google it, honestly); and the coronavirus pandemic is ongoing and getting worse in places. Life is out of control.
I sometimes feel a temptation to resign myself to all of this — folks, I really can’t overemphasize how Oates’ foot broke me — but that’s not really our style at OneZero. A cornerstone of our tech and science storytelling is that it points readers to a better future: You should walk away from our publication having learned something new, or thought about something differently. Yes, there are big problems (and we write…
