When you have not but learn the writing of Amanda Hess, you may have been depriving your self of probably the most insightful commentary on our occasions. Hess writes within the New York Instances in regards to the traits and illusions of the web and popular culture: TikToks, wellness, magnificence requirements, global-warming memes, dangerous Christmas films, movie star lookalike contests and arguments on airplanes. She writes, all the time, with element and attentiveness, scrutinizing the photographs and movies that sparkle on our screens, their constructions and the messages they lengthen. Hess has proved that our digital obsessions are worthy of significant examine, that they will reveal the secrets and techniques of ourselves—and she or he has executed this with such consistency that each time she publishes a column, you recognize will probably be good. 

Hess’s first e book, revealed this Could, is even higher than the very best of her columns. In Second Life: Having a Baby within the Digital Age (Doubleday, 2025), she chronicles her passage into motherhood, incorporating interviews, analysis, and a variety of cultural commentary as she proves the e book’s subtitle to be an understatement. “For seven months,” Hess writes early on, “we’d all acted like a child was going to return out of my physique like a rabbit yanked from a hat. The identical physique that ordered mozzarella sticks from the late-night menu and stared into a pc prefer it had a soul.” Within the ensuing pages, Hess exhibits that Second Life isn’t just about having a toddler: it’s in regards to the odyssey of getting a toddler, in regards to the makes an attempt to conceive a toddler, the self-doubts that outcome from making ready to have a toddler, the medical problems of getting a toddler, the businesses that vie to revenue from folks having a toddler, the stereotypes and branding of getting a toddler, and, lastly, the transformations in perspective that come from having a toddler.

Second Life begins with the psychological and bodily challenges of turning into pregnant. Hess explains that “I needed to resolve the query of myself earlier than bringing one other individual into the world, however the reply had not come.” Later, she writes, “I grieved for my vanishing life. I thrashed and sobbed in mattress one afternoon, appearing like a dying animal. I ought to have develop into a greater individual earlier than making a duplicate of me.” She turns to her units for steerage, and she or he downloads a being pregnant monitoring app referred to as Flo that guarantees to “develop into an knowledgeable on you.” At first it appears to supply certainty: whereas “being pregnant had as soon as been an concept drifting in a hazy future, . . . now it was a plot that might be executed by following a number of easy instructions.”

But Hess explores how the app, meant to assist her, additionally collects and sells her information in order that different firms can goal her with commercials. In these early pages, Hess grapples with a duality new to our occasions: her son exists as “the orange vomit rising in my throat at breakfast,” then “squiring rolls that made me really feel like I used to be falling in love”—but additionally as a “bundled” set of knowledge present in “the realm of knowledge.” The language of entrepreneurs comes into battle with Hess’s distinctive voice, which finds a darkish comedy within the absurdity of our occasions. “My child’s due date,” she writes, “represented one of the crucial tantalizing items of private information that I had ever produced.” 

Hess finds a darkish comedy within the absurdity of our occasions.

What do anticipating dad and mom obtain in return for his or her information? Commercials, the presence of influencers, and the stress to purchase units for the always-elusive peace of thoughts. Hess strikes between narrative and evaluation, writing in regards to the implicit messages of merchandise and apps in addition to cultural and technological histories of ultrasounds, menstrual trackers, and child displays. She surveys connotations of C-sections; she weighs the politics of prenatal applied sciences. She close-reads guides to parenting, the symbolism of pregnant mothers in pandemic commercials, and traits of gender-reveal movies (“the aesthetic was America’s Funniest House Movies meets terrorist beheading”). The latter matter offers method to meditations on the passing of lives and time. Hess reads a few man who died due to the bomb he ready for a gender-reveal social gathering, and she or he searches for traces of him on-line. She googles him, reads his obituary, and visits his widow’s Fb web page. There, she writes, she “scrolled again” and “watched her trauma wind slowly in reverse” as she checked out posts of the kid “shrink from a toddler to a child” till she “noticed him disappear, drawn again into his mom, who was pregnant and alone.”

To observe the lifetime of a brand new mom in reverse, and to jot down the story of her personal second life, Hess revisits digital footprints. She attracts on “firsthand experiences with know-how,” “reconstructed based mostly on hundreds of contemporaneous screenshots, textual content messages, and recordings, and my private information archives, medical information, and notes.” A parallel narrative emerges within the e book—the story of write about our digital lives—as Hess describes revisiting apps, podcasts, dialog threads, social media posts, and chat boards. In one of the crucial memorable passages, she narrates her supply within the third individual, citing particulars from “a thousand-page medical file” from the hospital. The result’s one thing near magic: fixing our gaze on the a part of our lives we ponder least, our scrolling and tapping and looking out on-line. 

Hess locations the data of the web into dialog with the data of the medical subject, as she particulars the expertise of receiving medical judgments delivered within the jargon and understatements of medical doctors. After they discover early indicators of her son’s Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, she writes how “the data handed uncomprehendingly by means of me.” One physician writes down the title of the syndrome for Hess and tells her “don’t google it”—an unattainable request. On-line, Hess finds no particular solutions about the way forward for her baby and herself; consequently, her story turns into the story of fantasy within the time of the web, and she or he particulars how she “entered a world past data.” Her “purpose dialed again centuries,” and “whilst I submitted my physique to superior scientific protocols, my thoughts belonged now to the realm of judgment, superstition, and fantasy. Quickly the web would feed me from its financial institution of darkish supplies. Coincidences would string collectively to kind patterns and theories. With the sunshine of my telephone to information me, I descended into the pregnant underworld.” 

The web is a spot we go to, however it’s also a recent god, the nice being we flip to for solutions and the success of desires.

The web is a spot we go to, however it’s also a recent god, the nice being we flip to for solutions and the success of desires. “Clearly,” Hess tells us about turning into pregnant, “I advised the web earlier than I advised my dad and mom.” Hess longs to have her telephone along with her and “google my method out” of uncertainty. She writes that “I may pour my fears into its portal and course of them into solutions,” and “if I searched it good and quick sufficient, the web would save us.” In a single scene she waits in a foyer, “stroking my telephone till I depleted its inventory of inane info.” In one other, she describes the message she receives from an app “after I depleted her choices,” the proper verb for our relationship with our units: not accumulation, not addition, not accretion, however depletion. 

Behind these pages about motherhood, digital footprints, commercials, human fears, and the promise of the net, we discover an historical story in regards to the particular person and the collective. Hess considers how the web erases our identities, promoting us in bundles of knowledge. Within the medical setting, she finds herself diminished to the class of “a particular medical case” and the descriptors on her medical chart: “fetal anomaly,” “superior maternal age,” “nervousness throughout being pregnant.” When Hess turns into pregnant, she grapples along with her change in id and feels “costumed” as the opposite pregnant ladies she sees “lugging heavy water bottles and scrolling lazily by means of their telephones.” Elsewhere she writes: “Earlier than I used to be pregnant, I used to be an individual.” And after she offers delivery, she longs to have “my very own expertise understood,” “my very own sacrifice affirmed.” 

Now’s an acceptable time, as we strategy the tip of this overview, to confess that Second Life’s goal demographic won’t be me—a single, childless maestro of failed love who dedicates extra hours to appraising the atmosphere of cafés and the tactical choices of reality-TV stars on The Traitors than to considering how he can responsibly elevate the following technology of people in a society teetering towards self-annihilation. But Hess’s writing speaks to all. She writes about what it’s wish to develop into a guardian, to fret about medical diagnoses and lift kids, but additionally in regards to the limits of language, the illusions of the web, and the problem of understanding our id as we age. That is the attractive metamorphosis of nice writing: one individual’s story speaks to many, permitting us to know epiphanies about ourselves and our occasions. Hess has executed this in her columns for years now, and her first e book presents us the miracle we search in our stressed scrolling, the sensation she arrives at when, after giving delivery, she finds herself “relieved of my cynicism, gifted with new observational powers.” 

Chicago, Illinois