What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen

by Kate Fagan

In December 2016, The New Yorker posted an article by Jia Tolentino, “The Worst Year Ever, Until Next Year.” In it, Tolentino addresses the potential, yet still unknowable, problems created by digital consumption. “There is no limit to the amount of misfortune a person can take in via the Internet,” she writes. “And there’s no easy way to properly calibrate it—no guidebook for how to expand your heart to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience; no way to train your heart to separate the banal from the profound. Our ability to change things is not increasing at the same rate as our ability to know about them. No, 2016 is not the worst year ever, but it’s the year I started feeling like the Internet would only ever induce the sense of powerlessness that comes when the sphere of what a person can influence remains static, while the sphere of what can influence us seems to expand without limit, allowing no respite at all.”