Tech

A Gmail Séance with Anthony Shadid

By Abraham Riesman

As soon as the news of journalist Anthony Shadid’s awful and untimely death started crashing through the Twittersphere last night, I was hit with a creeping dread. It was not unlike the feeling a little boy has when he’s certain that a ghoul is tiptoeing toward him from behind. Quite near me, there was something I didn’t want to see. And yet I had to look, however terrifying it might be.

I had a dead man’s email in my inbox.

As I typed “shadid” into my Gmail search bar, I couldn’t help feeling that there was something uniquely awful about possessing a digital communication from a person who’s passed. But I couldn’t put my finger on why. As I paged through the search results, looking for the digital object—which was now imbued with something sucking and tragic—I tried to figure out this 21st-century vertigo.

In the meantime, after paging through some New York Times top-headlines digests with his byline, I found what I was looking for: “me, Anthony (2)” read the text at the left hand side of the result. Subject line: “Your magazine piece is amazing.”

Read the rest at Motherboard.