"I had stumbled onto the internet in its purest form, the place where the degree to which it seemed useful correlated most directly with its actual uselessness. Is that a bite? All I could do was check another website."
“Bugs” by Elizabeth Gumport

“Some of these photographs linked back to weird communities where people posted their stories and self-appointed bedbug gurus dispensed wisdom.”

"The popularity of domestic fiction—which imagines the house to be the site of our highest human drama—and the mortgage crisis are symptoms of the same thing: the American overvaluation of the home as a token of personal success. Such books perpetuate our faith in our homes’ symbolic worth, even as their economic worth plummets. And so rather than get angry at the crisis-makers and profiteers, we cry alone in our rooms, and read books about other people crying alone in their rooms, because home is where things hap- pen, where our problems, and their solutions, can be found. A house with its door shut, surrounded by other houses, whose doors are shut, too: this is the family, that gated community."
“Fictional Capital” by Elizabeth Gumport in Issue 10: Self-Improvement