About Tox Report
The internet made everyone go mad. I don’t mean that it gave us anxiety or drove social contagion (though it probably didn’t hurt those things). I mean that the move to mass online existence from the late 1990s to the 2010s caused a collective breakdown in social, cultural and political life — and even in the way we feel about ourselves as physical beings.
This newsletter is about learning to live in the wreckage.
Free subscribers get a new post every Tuesday. If you’re new here, these are some of my favourite posts from the archive:
Tox Report 62. On not going mad on the internet
On BarPod, Katie asked me a good question: why do some people who get cancelled go mad, and some don’t? By “go mad”, I mean they become fixated on their own victimhood. They become obsessive about the issue that led to their cancellation, and unable to disassociate the injustice they feel they’ve suffered from the justice of their cause. And they grow e…
11. The last gasp of the celebrity sex tape
In September 2014, I got an email from an editor at Look magazine. Look had launched in 2007, following the then-successful Grazia model of mixing fashion and beauty with celebrity coverage for an aspirational readership of professional young women…
Tox Report 60. The rules do not apply
I wrote for UnHerd last week about the controversy over the Olympics’ failure to screen for sex eligibility in boxing, but it turned out I had more to say. If you’re interested in the science and policy issues, the Real Science of Sport podcast has been covering this in excellent detail.
There’s no paid tier of Tox Report, but if you’d like to pledge your support for a future version, I would find that very validating. And it will mean you’ll be the first to know about new and exciting plans.
You can also listen to me cohost an episode of BarPod (about people going mad on the internet, ofc):
About me
I’m Sarah Ditum, a British journalist who writes for the Times, the Sunday Times, UnHerd and the Critic. I’m also the author of the book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties, now optioned by Paris Hilton’s 11:11 production company for development as a docuseries. (She listened to the audiobook! Which I read!)
Some people have called me problematic, but I’m really just an averagely damaged geriatric millennial.
