277 lines
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277 lines
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Plaintext
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[50]Technology
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A Second Life for My Beloved Dog
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A simple iPhone feature unexpectedly changed how I grieved.
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By [51]Charlie Warzel
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Illustration of a man walking his dog
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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Zero Creatives / Getty.
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January 5, 2024
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Share
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Save
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Illustration of a man walking his dog
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Listen to this article
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[54][0 ]
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00:00
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09:16
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Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.
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Peggy was my first dog—the dog I waited 28 patient years for. I finally met her
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on August 15, 2015. She was eight weeks old, covered in filth after a 14-hour
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ride from Georgia to New York, and inexplicably still adorable. Floppy ears.
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Jet-black muzzle. Meaty little forepaws. We didn’t plan it this way, but my
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partner and I rescued her on the same day we moved in together. Peggy
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represented a new phase of my life: the beginning of my chosen family.
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As soon as I brought the chubby, squirming ball of fur home, I felt compelled
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to capture, however clumsily, the joy she brought into our lives. You can see
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the change in my iPhone’s camera roll: Two-thirds of the way through 2015, the
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mosaic of images shifts away from the drab tones of a poorly lit Brooklyn
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apartment and is infused with a new vitality. She was a junkyard dog—a stubborn
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scrapper that loved eating garbage off the street, and one that had a
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supernatural ability to charm humans. Once, in South Brooklyn, I left her tied
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up for an instant to purchase a coffee and came out to find she’d seduced an
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old Italian pastry chef to procure some breadcrumbs. People remarked that her
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face felt familiar, like an old friend was in there somewhere. Her mystique was
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compounded early on, when an unfortunate accident left her with three legs, for
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which she compensated by becoming comically muscular. Of course I was obsessed
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with documenting Peggy’s life.
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She was a constant, as any dog would be, through cross-country moves,
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quarter-life crises, career changes, new presidential administrations, and a
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pandemic. Then, one day last May, quite unexpectedly, she was gone.
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We let her go in the middle of the night, so quickly that we weren’t able to
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say goodbye. Until then, I’d been lucky enough to avoid this type of tragic,
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sudden loss. My grief in those early moments felt like the emergency exit on an
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airplane had opened mid-flight, the sudden loss of cabin pressure violently
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sucking everything out of the hull that isn’t bolted down. For days, my
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fuselage was empty, the contents scattered and falling from the sky. I went on
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walks, laughed and cried at random, and tried to stay busy. But all I really
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wanted to do—the only thing that felt appropriate and sustaining—was [58]look
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at pictures of Peggy on my phone. I lost hours inside my camera roll staring at
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her reddish-brown fur centered in the frame, while watching us become a family
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in the background. My device, normally a wasteland, became a refuge.
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[59]Read: There are no “five stages” of grief
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On the day she died, I set my phone’s wallpaper to my favorite photo of
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Peggy—appearing to smile on a ridgeline trail in Missoula, Montana, the
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bright-yellow balsamroot flowers in bloom behind her. But a month later, I told
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myself that it was time to stop wallowing. Instead of a memorial photo of
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Peggy, I opted to try a newer, “dynamic” wallpaper feature called “Photo
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Shuffle.” Every so often, my iPhone would change my wallpaper and home screen
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to an image it had grabbed from my camera roll. To help it along, I could offer
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parameters for the photo choice. Knowing that Apple’s Photos app uses
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image-recognition software to identify cats and dogs in the camera roll, I
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chose a “Pets” filter.
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Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle. Over the next few months, I
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watched the photos change in and out at random—always with a dog in focus. Many
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of the stills were pictures I didn’t remember taking, ones I’d passed over or
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missed in my melancholic, late-night scrolling. So many were chaotic, blurred
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streaks of fur and tongues curiously sniffing a lens or bounding out of frame;
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a lot were objectively bad photos, which I found made them especially funny as
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iPhone wallpaper. Peggy wasn’t the only subject—our other dog, Steve, a winsome
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and serious-faced cattle dog, shared screen time—but being First Dog meant that
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Peggy had been photographed much more. She took on a starring role: Peggy wet
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from a beach swim, regal Peggy posing under the Christmas tree, puppy Peggy,
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manic post-fetch Peggy with a yard’s length of tongue sticking out of her
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mouth. Sad photos inevitably cropped up: Peggy in the hospital, Peggy’s last
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car ride, Peggy and Steve side by side on our lawn, enjoying what would be
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their last sunset together.
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My partner turned on Photo Shuffle, too, and we developed a new ritual. Look at
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this new Peggy, one of us would say, holding a phone up to the other’s face.
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We’d usually laugh or smile; occasionally one of us would tear up. Sweet girl.
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Miss you, Pegs. Mostly, though, we’d take a moment and orient the photo in our
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lives, remembering a trip or a random ordinary Wednesday on a trail or at the
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dog park. The photos opened up little windows of reflection and a moment to
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express some gratitude—for Peggy, and for our lives together.
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Devotees of note-taking apps such as Notion and Evernote have a term for the
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mass of musings, links, documents, and projects they store on the cloud: the “
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[60]second brain.” If you organize your data the right way, these programs will
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allow you to recall an extraordinary amount of information, in the same way
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your mind might. I’ve never been very good at using these apps, but I’ve found
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that my camera roll functions similarly. It is like a digital appendage of my
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mind, functioning in a complementary, Proustian way—triggering and dredging up
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memories that have been long filed away. My camera roll is a diary, a mood
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board. Thanks to the ability to screenshot, it is also a place for sundry notes
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and clippings. When I scroll through my photos over a long enough period, I
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find they are a pretty decent archive of my life.
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[61]Read: Please get me out of dead-dog TikTok
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The dynamic wallpaper, however, adds a new layer to this experience. It is a
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curator, maybe even a biographer. And, however inadvertently, the feature has
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become a counselor, allowing me to grieve on my own timeline. Right now, Peggy
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is the dominant face on my screen, but, over time, I imagine the ratio of Peggy
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pictures to others will change. I will get older, get new dogs, do new things,
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and take more pictures. Peggy will still be there, popping up when I least
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expect it, but her presence will gently recede as I learn to live without her.
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This complex universe of grief and moving on is playing out on my phone screen,
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but also in my own behaviors. This summer, we added Beverly, a new puppy, to
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our family. I’m not sure why but, since the pandemic, I’ve been less inclined
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to take photos than I was in Peggy’s halcyon days. But recently I’ve found
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myself consciously pausing and grabbing my phone to document Bev’s adolescence.
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My renewed interest is simple: I need photos of Beverly so that she may join
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the wallpaper rotation with frequency.
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A photograph of the author's dog in front of flowersPeggy resting in Missoula
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The more I scrutinize this small feature on my device and the way it became a
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load-bearing part of the past year of my life, the more I encounter some
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resistance from myself. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to think too
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hard about what this all means, because doing so forces me to wrestle with just
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how important this brick of ceramic glass really is. We can snark about being
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addicted to our phones or worry about inflated screen-time numbers or the way
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we pull out our cameras to document moments we should instead be present for,
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but acknowledging the positives is equally disorienting—to do so suggests a
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certain unknowability about a technology we live with every day. What are our
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phones doing to us? A lot, it seems. Perhaps more than we realize.
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So much of the information I consume through my phone is jarring, presented in
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an overwhelming, intrusive fashion—via push notifications and design tricks,
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all vying for my attention. The dynamic wallpaper offers something else: quiet
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moments in my day that stop me in my tracks and promote reflection, rather than
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engagement. My phone’s operating system has taught me how to grieve.
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That doesn’t mean it’s been easy. It’s always the little things—the memory of
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the crimped hair behind her velvety ears, the image of her panting softly while
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sunning herself on the porch on a crisp summer morning, or the phantom feeling
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of the heft of her body, pressed against mine as I read before bed. These
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memories used to be painful; now they bring gratitude. Perhaps that’s because
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they’re not static—they’re alive, both in me and on the silly little device I
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take with me everywhere. There’s a three-legged hole in my heart, but I see
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Peggy every day.
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[62]Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its
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newsletter [63]Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big ideas. He can be
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reached via [64]email.
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References:
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[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/iphone-grief-dynamic-wallpaper/677034/#main-content
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[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/
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[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/most-popular/
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[6] https://www.theatlantic.com/latest/
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[7] https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/
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[8] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/
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[9] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/
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[10] https://www.theatlantic.com/category/fiction/
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[11] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/
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[12] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/
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[13] https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/
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[14] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/
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[15] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/
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[16] https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/planet/
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[17] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/
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[18] https://www.theatlantic.com/books/
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[22] https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/
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[23] https://www.theatlantic.com/category/features/
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[24] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/
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[25] https://www.theatlantic.com/events/
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[26] https://www.theatlantic.com/category/washington-week-atlantic/
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[27] https://www.theatlantic.com/progress/
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[28] https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/
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[29] https://www.theatlantic.com/archive/
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[30] https://www.theatlantic.com/free-daily-crossword-puzzle/
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[31] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
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[32] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
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[33] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/backissues/
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[34] https://accounts.theatlantic.com/products/gift
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[38] https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/dear-therapist/
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[39] https://www.theatlantic.com/free-daily-crossword-puzzle/
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[40] https://www.theatlantic.com/archive/
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[43] https://www.theatlantic.com/most-popular/
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[45] https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/
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[50] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/
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[51] https://www.theatlantic.com/author/charlie-warzel/
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[58] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/10/smartphone-camera-ai-photo-editing-fakery/675710/
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[59] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/10/five-stages-complicated-grief-wrong/671710/
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[60] https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/
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[61] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/dead-dog-tiktok-algorithm-pet-loss-grief/673445/
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[62] https://www.theatlantic.com/author/charlie-warzel/
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[63] https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/galaxy-brain/
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[64] mailto:cwarzel@theatlantic.com
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