The New Yorker:

By Andrew Marantz

Yesterday, like every day, I woke up, tried not to look at my phone, and then, a few minutes later, looked at my phone. Amid the normal disorienting din was a message with a link to an Instagram post. “Dhs illegally arrested me,” the post read, over a snapshot of a person’s legs in the back of a car. “Please help.”

The post was by a woman named Ellie Aghayeva, a neuroscience student at Columbia—and also, I saw, scrolling quickly through her Instagram, some sort of life-style influencer. One of her videos (“5:30 AM Columbia Student Morning Routine”) showed her brushing her teeth, stretching, and then getting down to work. I watched another of her videos (“Unrotting My Brain,” sponsored by Audible), wondering if I was rotting my brain or doing my job. We are living in a moment when it’s not unreasonable to worry about masked federal agents barging into your dorm room, or shooting you in the street, or sending you to a foreign torture prison, or arresting you as retribution for an op-ed you once wrote in a student newspaper, or for no reason at all. We also live in a moment when a lot of daily life feels eerily normal, and when any online image might turn out to be a viral marketing ploy, or an A.I. apparition. Was Ellie Aghayeva even real? Was this a prank, an autocratic emergency, or something else?

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