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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Ian Bogost has lived through more than a few hype cycles on the internet. The Atlantic contributing writer has been online, and building websites, since the early days of the World Wide Web. I spoke with him about what happens when new technologies age into the mainstream, how the web has in some ways been a victim of its own success, and the parts of the internet that still delight him.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The spat that made Congress even worse The “America First” chaos caucus is forcing a moment of truth. Your childhood home might never stop haunting you. The Web Is FineLora Kelley: Is it fair to say everything online is deteriorating? Or is that too dramatic?Ian Bogost: It’s easy to focus on the stuff that seems bad or broken, because it is noticeable and also because the internet is built for complaining about things. And it’s natural that one of the things we like to complain about the most on the internet is the internet itself. But there’s a lot of stuff online that’s really amazing, and we should be careful to keep that in mind.The things that feel like deterioration are the result of a saturated market. There’s no longer any incentive for tech products to be as good for consumers as they once were. That’s in part a cost issue—a lot of tech was effectively subsidized for years. But also, the delightful or even just straightforwardly functional services created years ago don’t have to be quite so friendly and usable. Because of their success, there’s not as much of a need to satisfy people anymore.These products are now like a lot of other things in our offline lives—fine. When you go to buy a car or a mattress or whatever, it’s just kind of the way it is. We’ve reached that level of cultural ubiquity with computers.Lora: Is it inevitable that products will become boring once they become the mainstream? Is there any way around that, or are we stuck in a cycle of novelty to boredom?Ian: That’s the cycle, and it’s good. Boredom means that something is successful. When things are new, they feel wild and exciting. We don’t know what they mean yet, and there’s a lot of promise—maybe even fear.But for something to truly become successful at a massive scale—for millions or billions of people to develop a relationship with a product or service—the product has to recede into the background again and become ordinary. And once it reaches that point, you stop thinking about it quite so much. You take it for granted.Lora: You have written about your experience using, and building websites on, the internet in the ’90s. What parallels do you see between the early web and this current moment of generative AI?Ian: I remember living through the early days of the web, and we never had any idea that millions and billions of people would be using these data-extraction services. None of that occurred to us at the time. I don’t think there’s a very strong cultural memory of the early days of the web. We have a lot of stories about the excesses of the dot-com era, but the more ordinary stuff didn’t get recorded in the same way.Everything that we did, we had to convince some old-world business that it was worth doing. It was a process of bringing the offline world online. In the decades since, technologists have started disrupting the legacy businesses and sectors through innovation. And that worked really well from the perspective of building markets and building wealth. But it didn’t necessarily make the world better.Generative AI feels more like those early days of the web than social media or the Web 2.0 era did. It’s my hope that maybe we’ll go about this in a way that draws from the lessons learned over the past 30 years—which, of course, we probably won’t. Technologists shouldn’t be trying to blow things up; rather, they should make use of what technology allows in order to do things better, more equitably, and more effectively.Lora: In 2024, do you still find the web to be a site of wonder?Ian: Being able to talk to family and friends as much as I want, for free, is still historically unusual and delightful. The fundamental feature of the internet still exists: I can look out and get a little buzz of delight just from seeing something new.Related: The web became a strip mall. Social media is not what killed the web. Today’s News A New York Times report found that an upside-down flag, a “Stop the Steal” symbol, flew at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house in January 2021, when the Supreme Court was considering whether to hear a 2020 election case. The man who bludgeoned Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022 was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. He is awaiting a state trial later this month. Daniel Perry, a former Army sergeant who was convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020, was released from prison yesterday after Texas Governor Greg Abbott granted him a pardon. Dispatches The Books Briefing: Alice Munro’s death was an occasion to praise her life as a writer as much as her actual work, Gal Beckerman writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by Max Guther The One Place in Airports People Actually Want to BeBy Amanda Mull On a bright, chilly Thursday in February, most of the people inside the Chase Sapphire Lounge at LaGuardia Airport appeared to be doing something largely absent from modern air travel: They were having fun. I arrived at Terminal B before 9:30 a.m., but the lounge had already been in full swing for hours. Most of the velvet-upholstered stools surrounding the circular, marble-topped bar were filled. Travelers who looked like they were heading to couples’ getaways or girls’ weekends clustered in twos or threes, waiting for their mimosas or Bloody Marys … While I ate my breakfast—a brussels-sprout-and-potato hash with bacon and a poached egg ordered using a QR code, which also offered me the opportunity to book a gratis half-hour mini-facial in the lounge’s wellness area—I listened to the 30-somethings at the next table marveling about how nice this whole thing was. That’s not a sentiment you’d necessarily expect to hear about the contrived luxury of an airport lounge. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic Graeme Wood: The UN’s Gaza statistics make no sense. Many Indians don’t trust their elections anymore. Giant heaps of plastic are helping vegetables grow. Culture Break Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. RIP. The dream of streaming is dead, Jacob Stern writes. The bundles are back.Pick apart. The sad desk salad, a meal that is synonymous with young, overworked white-collar professionals, is getting sadder, Yasmin Tayag writes.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Spat That Made Congress Even Worse

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Three high-profile women in Congress got into it last night during a meeting of the House Oversight Committee, in what some outlets have described as a “heated exchange.” But that label feels too dignified. Instead, the whole scene played out like a Saturday Night Live sketch: a cringeworthy five-minute commentary on the miserable state of American politics.Unless you are perpetually online, you may have missed the drama. I’ll recap: The scene unfolded during a meeting held to consider a Republican motion to—what else?—hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to release audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur. So things were already off to a wild start. Then, after her line of questioning went off the rails, Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene took a jab at Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas: “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”The personal remark was rude and certainly lacked decorum, which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rightly pointed out: “How dare you attack the appearance of another person?” And she demanded that the words be struck from the record. Greene, of course, was not chastened.“Aww, are your feelings hurt?” the Georgia Republican shot back at Ocasio-Cortez, in a pitch-perfect impression of a schoolyard bully.“Oh, girl. Baby girl, you do not want to play,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, letting decorum slip on her side. It looked as if the committee was about to witness fisticuffs. Moments later, Crockett chimed in with a question for the committee’s Republican chairman, Jim Comer of Kentucky, that was actually an idiosyncratic barb directed toward Greene. “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”Comer was clearly confused, “A what now?”The exchange felt like a bizarro session of British Parliament’s famously combative, point-scoring Prime Minister’s Questions, only the accents were worse, the insults were at least 50 percent less clever, and instead of congressional business as usual, it felt like watching business fall apart.At first, admittedly, seeing people stand up to Greene’s bullying was heartening. An unabashed troll, she pulled the stunt of wearing a MAGA cap and heckling President Joe Biden at his State of the Union address. And mocking the eyelashes of a colleague at a congressional hearing? That’s next-level mean-girl garbage.Unfortunately, the unedifying display in the House Oversight Committee only produced more incentives for bad political behavior. Progressive posters on X praised Crockett’s alliterative insult. Even LeVar Burton, the former host of the children’s TV series Reading Rainbow, applauded her: “Words of the day; bleach, blond, bad, built, butch and body …” Burton wrote on X.Really, no one comes off looking good here. This may sound sanctimonious, but: Members of Congress should be better than personal insults and body-shaming commentary. And both Ocasio-Cortez and Crockett have to know by now that, as the idiom goes, wrestling with pigs makes everyone look sloppy. What would Michelle Obama—patron saint of Democrats, who famously instructed Democrats to high when Republicans go low—think about Crockett’s response?Zoomed out, this unseemly episode is just one more sad example of partisanship and performance politics, two forces that continue to rile Americans up and drive us apart. Our politicians are not exactly covering themselves in glory right now. Back in 2009, Joe Wilson shocked the country when he yelled “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during his State of the Union address. Cut to January of this year, when Republicans heckled Biden, and he swapped jibes with them like a comedian at a low-rent comedy club.While the leader of the Republican Party is on trial in New York, GOP lawmakers have been on a weeklong prostration tour, flying from all corners of the country to gather like eager groupies outside the courtroom, desperate for a chance to impress the boss. In addition, a Senate Democrat from New Jersey is on trial for taking bribes and acting as a foreign agent, and a Democratic congressman from Texas is facing his own charges of corruption.Biden, an institutionalist, likes to appeal to our better angels and assure Americans, This is not who we are. Maybe not. But this is definitely who we elected.Illustration Sources: Nathan Howard / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty.

The Toilet Theory of the Internet

Google is serving an audience that wants quick and easy results. That may lead to disaster.

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An Insurrectionist on the Supreme Court?

Justice Alito blamed his wife for the upside-down flag that flew outside his home just days after January 6. But he did not disavow it.

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theatlantic.com

The Gaza Death Toll Is Confusing and Unreliable

These numbers matter—first, because of the dignity of those killed or still living.

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Giant Heaps of Plastic Are Helping Vegetables Grow

Plastic allows farmers to use less water and fertilizer. But at the end of each season, they’re left with a pile of waste.

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The Airport-Lounge Arms Race

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Illustrations by Max GutherOn a bright, chilly Thursday in February, most of the people inside the Chase Sapphire Lounge at LaGuardia Airport appeared to be doing something largely absent from modern air travel: They were having fun. I arrived at Terminal B before 9:30 a.m., but the lounge had already been in full swing for hours. Most of the velvet-upholstered stools surrounding the circular, marble-topped bar were filled. Travelers who looked like they were heading to couples’ getaways or girls’ weekends clustered in twos or threes, waiting for their mimosas or Bloody Marys or the bar’s signature cocktail—a gin concoction turned a vibrant shade of violet by macerated blueberries, served in a champagne coupe.Other loungers in the golden-lit, plant-lined, 21,800-square-foot space chatted over their breakfast, boozy or otherwise. At the elaborate main drink station that formed one wall of the lounge’s dining room, I chose the tap that promised cold brew, though spa water and a mysterious third spigot labeled only as “seasonal” beckoned. When I reached for what I thought was a straw, I pulled back a glistening tube of individually portioned honey, ready to be snapped into a hot cup of tea.While I ate my breakfast—a brussels-sprout-and-potato hash with bacon and a poached egg ordered using a QR code, which also offered me the opportunity to book a gratis half-hour mini-facial in the lounge’s wellness area—I listened to the 30-somethings at the next table marveling about how nice this whole thing was. That’s not a sentiment you’d necessarily expect to hear about the contrived luxury of an airport lounge. In the context of air travel, nice has usually meant nice relative to the experience outside the lounge’s confines, where most of your choices for a meal are marked-up fast food eaten at a crowded gate, or the undignified menu truncation of a Chili’s Too.American Airlines opened the world’s first airport lounge, then an invite-only affair for VIPs, in 1939. By the end of the 20th century, lounges had cemented their reputation as the domain of road warriors—mostly solo travelers headed to, say, medical-device sales conventions or engineering-job-site visits. The experience was less brussels-sprout hash and champagne and more “cheese and crackers and $5 beers,” Brian Kelly, the titular guy behind the Points Guy website (and arguably the most influential person in the travel-status game), told me. But behind those generously staffed check-in desks, things have been changing. Private-lounge networks have rapidly expanded over the past decade, as scores of new travelers have begun demanding entry. What awaits inside is changing, too.Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the modern airport lounge is that it is busy. According to one estimate, the number of fliers visiting lounges hit an all-time high in the summer of 2023, and this year’s vacation season appears likely to top it. As Americans have rushed back into travel after a pandemic lull, they’ve also rushed to apply for new credit cards, the fanciest of which promise bounties of travel-related perks, including lounge access. Now a broader cohort of fliers is squeezing in alongside the usual business travelers. This new group might be described as work-from-home travelers: people tapping away on laptops, trying to wedge in a few more emails or Zoom meetings around pleasure travel.In the past year, for reasons both journalistic and personal, I’ve visited seven lounges across five cities. These rooms held the expected corporate types in company-issued quarter-zips, but also 20-something women in Taylor Swift tour merch, bros with tennis rackets protruding from their carry-on, and lots of young people with one AirPod in and their Zoom camera turned off.The lounge’s booming popularity complicates its premise. This expanding group of high-spending customers is valuable to airlines, which operate most lounges, and to credit-card issuers, who have joined the lounge market with their own club networks. (High-fee credit cards, Kelly told me, have become the most common way for airline-perk neophytes to access lounges, no matter whether they’re run by airlines or banks.) But to attract these customers, lounge operators need to uphold the impression that lounges are exclusive—a special place far from the airport cattle call, not one crammed with too many other valued customers. The operators’ solution to this dilemma has been to build fast and build big, putting up huge, extravagant new clubs as quickly as the vagaries of airport construction will allow. Globally, more than 3,000 airport lounges are now open, with most major operators promising to add at least a few new locations this year.Most of the existing lounges max out somewhere around the ambience of a Panera, with booze instead of lemonade. The food and drinks are free, and that’s usually their main selling point. With the new mega-lounges, though, airlines and credit cards alike talk a big game about their culinary acumen, cocktail programs, and spa amenities, which include massages, private showers, and manicures. In United Airlines’ new 35,000-square-foot, three-story lounge in Denver, one of its two bars evokes a brewery, complete with tasting flights from Colorado brewers. Delta is opening the first in a series of ultra-premium clubs in June: a 38,000-square-foot mega-lounge at New York’s JFK airport containing, among other things, a full-service French bistro. American Express’s largest-ever lounge, which opened recently in Atlanta, has a backroom whiskey bar, a menu designed by a celebrated local chef, and 4,000 square feet of outdoor space from which loungers can watch planes roll by.You could dismiss the amenities arms race as an absurd exercise in flattering wealth’s vanity—it is. But that flattery is so effective because lounges offer a solution to a real set of problems. In the past few decades, air travel in the United States has become notably worse. Airlines have shrunk seats, increased fees, and pushed a larger proportion of passengers toward expensive tickets that offer more room and better service. At the same time, tickets at the back of the plane have become much less expensive, which has increased overall demand. Americans took 665 million flights in 2000, and by 2019, that number had increased to more than 925 million. On top of this, American airports are pretty old, and many need serious upgrades to handle the passenger volume more comfortably.Airlines profit from these conditions, but they still have to keep their most profitable customers happy. Lounges go a long way toward placating frequent fliers. They are, on some level, a decent deal for all involved: Private companies shoulder the cost of building them. They cater to people who endure the indignities of air travel most often. For many of those people, the pricey fees probably do save money over time, relative to how often they’d otherwise buy astronomically marked-up food from airport vendors. And the clubs tend to get put in inconvenient spots, which should theoretically help ease overcrowding at the gate, or at least move some of the fussiest passengers to their own containment area.[Read: Flying is weird right now]More curious is the fact that credit-card companies are making the effort to launch entire lounges themselves, competing against airlines when they already partner with airlines to get cardholders into existing lounges. A lounge is, by all accounts, a huge money sink—even besides the cost and red tape of building within an airport, making people feel special requires an army of workers available 18 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Everyone I spoke with at companies that run lounge networks said some version of We do not view the lounges as revenue opportunities. Illustration by Max Guther Lounges are, however, a great incentive to sign up for credit cards. As people’s day-to-day financial lives become more cashless, credit-card issuers are battling one another to win over customers and encourage them to swipe as much as possible, Joseph Nunes, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California, told me. One big reason: interchange fees. Card issuers take a cut of the purchase price from sellers every time a card is used, and that cut tends to be larger for more premium cards. Frequent pleasure travelers are a creditor’s dream: They are wealthier than the average American, they do a lot of discretionary spending, and they pay their bills on time. Lounges have already succeeded at enticing this group to sign up for airline-specific credit cards, so card issuers have taken the next logical step: lounges for people who aren’t quite road warriors and who may not be devoted to any particular airline, but who want perks all the same.Controlling an entire lounge, stamped with an enormous company logo, is a play for what marketers call brand affinity. “It solidifies our relationship with our customers,” Audrey Hendley, the president of American Express Travel, told me. Those customers might visit a lounge only a few times a year. But if everything goes according to plan, those visits are one of the reasons they love their Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire card and use it for everything, even though they’ve got three or four others they could pull out of their wallet.Of course, the genuinely wealthy still need to be convinced that they’re more special than the rest of us. Credit-card companies have been ready to oblige with even more layers of exclusivity. Chase’s LaGuardia lounge is open to anyone who pays a $550 annual fee for the right credit card, but the private suites inside, which include a palatial bathroom and all the seafood towers you can eat, cost up to $3,000 for a three-hour visit. This is part of what Nunes called the further tiering of society, fueled by the incredibly granular financial-data profiles that companies can now make of their customers. “We really say, ‘Where are consumers spending, who are the consumers that are the most profitable for me, and how should I treat them?’” Nunes told me. “We’re going to see further and further discrimination by firms, I think, in treating their most profitable customers the best.”Credit-card perks have proved such an effective way to lure high-income customers that the airport lounge has begun to make its way outside the airport. Card issuers now commonly sponsor VIP areas at concerts and sporting events, especially those that appeal to high spenders. American Express and Chase offer members-only lounges at the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York. The Sundance Film Festival has had a Chase Sapphire lounge for years. And although it can seem silly to get excited about entry to a VIP area, few people are immune to the charms of more places to sit down, shorter lines for cleaner bathrooms, and a couple of free drinks.[From the April 2020 issue: It’s all so … premiocre]Even if you never have entered or never will enter an airport lounge, the perks arms race affects your daily life. More premium-card use means higher fees for retailers, and those fees then get baked into the prices everyone pays—an easier task for large sellers, who usually pay less for their goods than mom-and-pop stores. (A recent settlement in a class-action suit against Visa and Mastercard could lower and cap these fees while allowing retailers to charge customers with premium cards extra.) Meanwhile, many card issuers have also begun to experiment with opening places that target other tiers of customers too. Capital One now operates more than 50 cafés that are open to the public, which seem aimed at the kind of young, laptop-lugging workers who might someday be high earners but for now just need a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi. In addition to baristas, these spaces have “ambassadors” and “mentors” available to guide patrons through the bank’s range of services while they sip their lattes. These cafés, like the airport lounges, are money sinks. But Kelly told me that it’s a mistake to think about banks the way we think about other consumer-facing businesses. “Look at the earnings reports of any of the credit-card companies,” he said. “This is a drop in the bucket.”In February, I visited American Express’s Centurion New York club in Midtown Manhattan. The space, which uses the entire 55th floor (and one dedicated express elevator) of the new One Vanderbilt skyscraper on 42nd Street, is the first of its kind for the company. It is, in some sense, a Capital One café for people already very comfortable with the services offered by their preferred financial institutions. A few tables in some of its spaces can be reserved by the general public, but no one there will sell you a new credit card or recommend a loan for your small business. The club’s best nooks and crannies, including a large corner table with clear views of much of the city’s skyline, are reserved for those who carry the company’s invite-only Centurion Card, which is rumored to require at least $500,000 in annual charges for membership. One Centurion-exclusive bar gives you a view from heaven down onto the Art Deco curves of the Chrysler Building below, as though you are a god yourself.This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Airport-Lounge Arms Race.”

The Particular Melancholy of Visiting Your Childhood Home

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In a drawer in the living room of my childhood home, you can find the drumsticks I got in elementary school, the calculator I used in middle school, and a to-do list I wrote in high school. (“Shoes—tell mom,” it reads, and, in all caps: “CUT NAILS.”) In my bedroom are prom pictures, concert posters, a photo of my round-faced teen self printed for a fake ID I never got. In the bathroom: expired acne medication; crunchy, dried-up mascara; an old retainer. My mother, who still lives in the house, would like me to clear out my stuff. I keep stalling.The funny thing is, I’m not all that attached to these objects. I could throw most of them away after a few moments of bemused recollection; the pictures, I could take back with me to Brooklyn. But that would make it possible for my mom to sell the house, which she’s been trying to do for years. I can’t seem to stop standing in the way.Why? If home is “where the heart is” or “wherever I’m with you,” I should be fine with my mom moving anywhere—especially to a nearby apartment, as she plans to, where she’ll doubtless have a place for me to sleep whenever I want. Instead, any mention of a future sale prompts an ache akin to the homesickness I felt as a kid at summer camp—except that now I ache for my future self. I imagine her standing outside that suburban New Jersey house, pacing back and forth, insisting that some piece of her remains in this one edifice on a certain corner of a specific street, even though she hasn’t lived there for decades.[Read: What the suburb haters don’t understand]It’s a weird, anticipatory grief—but it’s not unfounded. For his 2011 book, Returning Home: Reconnecting With Our Childhoods, Jerry M. Burger, a Santa Clara University psychologist, interviewed hundreds of people and found that about a third had traveled as adults to visit a childhood home; another third hoped to. The subjects who’d made the trip largely no longer had parents in the house; in many cases, they arrived unannounced, ready to knock and ask the residing strangers to let them in. Others discovered that their old home physically no longer existed. Giving up such a formative space, Burger told me, is “like a dancer losing a leg. It’s a really important part of you. And now it’s gone.” So many people cried during interviews that Burger started arriving with tissues.You might think that only people with rosy childhood memories would feel compelled home, perhaps to relive their golden days or try to regain some of the comfort of being young. But that’s not true—some of Burger’s subjects had experienced such trauma at home that going back was probably a terrible idea; one person turned and ran out of the space immediately after setting foot inside it. Rather, Burger found, people with all kinds of relationships to where they grew up shared another motivation: They felt like a stranger to their old selves. And they wanted to reconnect.Attempting to pull a thread between past and present is a common human impulse, what the Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams calls a search for “narrative identity”—this life story we draft as we go, trying to make sense of who we are and why. Marya Schechtman, a philosopher at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me that humans are constantly negotiating a contradiction: On the one hand, “it’s just sort of taken as a given that you’re a single individual from roughly cradle to grave.” On the other hand, this isn’t really how we experience life. Certain parts of our history resonate more than others, and some former selves don’t feel like us at all. (“I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old,” Joan Didion wrote. “It would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford.”)Many of us actively try to “make our pasts and our futures real to us,” Shechtman said. So although we eagerly make plans and envision ourselves in new places, with new people, we also flip through photo albums and reread our old journals. (Didion on keeping a notebook: “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”) But sometimes, those methods aren’t enough to really take us back. Burger kept hearing a similar story: Subjects would find photos of themselves as kids, but “they’re feeling like they can’t relate to this person in the picture,” he told me. “And it’s important to kind of get that sense of wholeness, to keep that part of yourself alive.”Going home can be a much more effective way to time travel. Our past isn’t just preserved in knickknacks and memorabilia; it lingers in the spaces we once occupied. When we talk about our experiences, we often focus, understandably, on the people who’ve shaped us, and we “treat the physical environment like a backdrop,” Lynne Manzo, a landscape-architecture professor at the University of Washington, told me. But setting can be its own character; it colors our day-to-day, and we endow it with agency and meaning. If social interactions and relationships are the bricks constructing our identities, our surroundings are the scaffolding.Setting is also central to how we remember. Recalling events (as opposed to information) involves “episodic memory,” which is deeply tied to location. Many researchers, in fact, believe that episodic memory evolved to help us physically orient ourselves in the world. (One very sad study—partial title: “Implications for Strandings”—found that some sea lions with damage to the hippocampus, the hub of episodic memory, get lost and wander ashore.) When you’re in a given space, your brain tends to “pull up the relevant memories” that happened there—even ones that have long been dormant, Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist and the author of Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold On to What Matters, told me. People remembering a specific moment can even demonstrate what Ranganath called a “reboot” of the brain-activity patterns they showed during the original event.But without the physical space to visit, it can be hard to mentally transport yourself back. When the 19th-century French writer Stendhal wrote his memoir The Life of Henry Brulard, detailing a difficult and lonely childhood, he drew the places of his youth again and again, in an obsessive attempt to spur his memory. “Winding staircase—Large, cheerless courtyard—Magnificent inlaid chest-of-drawers surmounted by a clock,” he scrawled under a sketch, as if the incantation might apparate him to his grandfather’s imposing Grenoble townhouse. Yet his recollection remained, as he put it, like a fresco, solid for stretches and elsewhere crumbling apart.[Read: Nostalgia is a shield against unhappiness]I can relate to the yearning for preservation: If my mom leaves my childhood home, I’ll lose the particular sweet smell—I can’t even describe it—that wafts through the living room on hot days. And the pinch of acorns under my bare feet in the yard. And the specific lilt of the birdsong in the early mornings, so different from what I hear now, just over 15 miles away. I’m scared that without those sensations, the filing cabinet deep in my mind, holding all these everyday snippets of memory, will get pushed just out of my reach.Visiting home doesn’t always clarify or heal; it won’t necessarily make the scattered fragments of your story click into place. Sometimes, it just leaves you confused. For most people, what comes up is thorny—not only because good and bad events alike occurred at home, but because as much as you might long for your old and current selves to collide, it’s strange when they do.Going back can highlight how faulty your recollections were in the first place—and how subjective your perceptions still are. Anne Wilson, a Wilfrid Laurier University psychologist who studies identity, gave me an example: You might remember your old bedroom as large, the hallway from it running on and on, not just because the memory is from a child’s perspective but also because you associate it with enchantment—or with powerlessness. If you return to the house and find a short hallway, a tiny bedroom, it can feel disturbing. That’s not to mention material changes that might have been made to the house, which Burger said his participants reliably hated. To encounter such a familiar space transformed, and without your consent—as if someone has snuck into your memories and moved things around—is an affront. Your version doesn’t exist anymore.Even if family still lives in your old home, returning can be unnerving. Several people have told me, in casual conversation, that they’ve felt themselves regressing on visits back—they let their mom do their laundry or address their parents like a bratty 15-year-old. That tendency has to do with relationships as much as with physical space; our habits of interaction can be stubborn. But the setting itself can cue you to act a certain way. Just think about it evolutionarily, Schechtman told me: “If you’re a bunny, and you’re in the location where the hawk was last time, you should start feeling scared”—and get out of there. When a place triggers a rush of episodic memories, you might feel the frustration, the helplessness, the loneliness you did when you were young, and lapse into old behaviors.[Read: Welcome to kidulthood]All of this can feel odd, maybe even a little heartbreaking. Confronting change requires confronting loss. And confronting loss, of course, means acknowledging our mortality: If our old selves have slipped beyond our grasp, our current self will too. “The moment you stop to reflect, even on the present, that moment is gone,” Ranganath told me. “Everything is in the world of memory.”But if you can let the melancholy of that truth wash over you, you might find that it’s beautiful too. So often, I feel stranded in the present or the recent past—stricken by the dumb thing I said yesterday but unable to conjure what it felt like to be 6, or 12, or 20. It’s hard to really feel that right now is one point in a larger life trajectory, even if I know it on some level. Going home is one of the rare times I can glimpse the larger perspective. One of these days—after I’ve emptied the living-room drawer of the paper scraps and almost-spent gift cards—returning will be harder for me. But I can imagine my future self joining the ranks of Burger’s pilgrims, arriving on my old street looking for meaning, some story to tell about the past. That might sound sad, but such a visit isn’t just about holding on. It’s also about letting go—that thing I’ve been struggling to do.Manzo, the landscape-architecture professor, suggested that I enact a ritual to bid farewell to my mom’s house: walk through the rooms, take pictures, pocket a stone. I could sketch like Stendahl, try to capture all the angles. I will lose some memories, but maybe I’ll come away with some sense of the wholeness that Burger said so many people seek. I keep thinking about the woman who ran out of her old home—she wanted wholeness too. Eventually, her brother bought the place and bulldozed it to the ground. She had just one more request: Where the house once stood, she asked him to plant some flowers.When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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