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SPECIAL ISSUES Transcendence

Real Life is on winter break. We’ve put together eight SPECIAL ISSUES for your consideration. We’ll publish one a day, each selected by an editor and based on a thematic topic. Click the image below for a pdf. And please enjoy these mid-season reruns until we return to our usual scheduled program.


As a kid bored on a car ride or a teen stoned in afternoon class I imagined zones of psychic communion, immaterial common rooms where everyone I knew lived a second life. These spaces are now mundane, although, if anything, the internet proves that mundanity is an illusion and that everything is shot through with magic, or whatever you want to call it. Online doesn’t feel new at all. It feels like the home version of a concept that used to be esoteric. Online is a layer of reality, a dimension of life. It doesn’t solve or replace any great mysteries, but it turns them under the light. If the spark of an individual is the part of you that decides, your self will outlast you online, as an artifact, or a program. You can leave it there. —Alexandra Molotkow, Editor

Featuring:

“Every Place at Once,” by Crystal Abidin

“Remote Control,” by Linda Besner

“Seeing Stars,” by Alex Ronan

“Advanced Search” by Franceska Rouzard

Alexandra Molotkow is a senior editor at Real Life magazine. She was a founding editor of Hazlitt and an editor at the Hairpin. She has written for the Believer, the New York Times Magazine, the Cut and the New Republic.