Lucy Rand News Today

By Lovia Gyarkye Kevin Systrom, a founder of Instagram, recently confessed that the platform he helped create had lost its soul. Gone are the days when friends and family shared photos with earnest and eager passion. Now, influencers reign supreme. No one is real. It’s “terrifying,” Systrom said on the journalist Kara Swisher’s podcast. “It’s this race to the bottom of who can be the most perfect.”

In “The Other Profile,” a struggling grad school dropout starts to work for, and then becomes obsessed with and consumed by, a semi-famous content creator.

The staff of Chapter One Book Store share books we love, books that bent our minds, books that illuminated our souls and the books that kept us up at night.

New & Noteworthy, From Jazz-Age Cairo to a Catholic Memoir Published March 16, 2021Updated March 21, 2021 Recent titles of interest: ZABOR, or The Psalms, by Kamel Daoud. Translated by Emma Ramadan. (Other Press, paper, $17.99.) An ode to storytelling with shades of Scheherazade, this novel by the author of “The Meursault Investigation” features a hero convinced that his journal writing keeps those he loves alive. THE PHONE BOOTH AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, by Laura Imai Messina. Translated b...