What we lose when our memories exist entirely in our phones. By Amanda Mole, read by Stephanie Spencer. On New Year's Day twenty twenty three, my friend Matt texted to say he'd bought a Peach Bowl ticket. On the surface, this message would seem to make little sense. The Peach Bowl, a semi final in that year's college football playoff, had been played the night before in Atlanta's Mercedes Benz Stadium. We had spent about five hundred dollars each on last minute tickets to be there in the far end zone as Ohio State's kicker shanked a last second field goal at the stroke of midnight, sending the University of Georgia's Bulldogs to their second national championship game in as many years. Matt and I are both Georgia alums and lifelong fans. The tickets were worth it, but what Matt had bought that morning was purely commemorative. As with almost every live event now, our actual tickets to the game only existed on our phones, and they disappeared along with the waning moments of twenty twenty two. The Peach Bowl had contracted with a vendor to print mementos for the game that could be personalized with your seat assignment, your own longitude and latitude for a moment immediately enshrined in the history of Georgia football. The events organizers had advertised the service twelve dollars for an oversized sheet of glossy card stock, or forty dollars to add in acrylic display case in the order confirmation email for the digital tickets, and Matt had dug it back up the ticket the physical thing of it used to be free, of course, or at least included in the price of admission. In my childhood bedroom a week and a half earlier, I'd come across a thick stack of them for occasions both great and small. My very first concert Bruce Springsteen and the East Street Band during their two thousand reunion tour. Bands I saw live too many times to connect the old tickets to any particular experience. Dashboard Confessional, Marvelous, Three forgotten movies I'd gone to with middle school friends at a theater that had long since been redeveloped into self storage units. Nineteen ninety nine's Teaching Missus tingle as Objects, paper tickets service, proof of past lives long after their brief utility. As proof of payment, I sat with my accidental time capsule for more than an hour, doing precisely what my teenage self had probably hoped I might do one day. I linked each one to a buried memory as best I could. They were tethers to friends I'd lost touch with after moving away, to college, bands that had long since broken up, and a time when sixty eight dollars sounded like an unfathomable amount of money for my dad to be paying for each of us to see Springsteen. But most of the tickets I'd bought myself in person, and almost always with cash, at box offices or the ticketmaster counter at the local grocery store, they looked like they'd been printed on a machine even older and more obsolete than the ticketmaster counter. As a concept, you don't need to be a technopessimist to acknowledge that digital tickets, for all their advantages and transferability and traceability, don't serve this long tail purpose very well. Neither do things like digital photos, even though our phones have allowed us to document the page of time in far more minute detail than would have been possible at any previous point in history. Smartphones provide tons of personal archival functionality, but very little of the random discoverability that can make trawling through old drawers so rewarding tech companies admit these limitations in their own product decisions. Apple regularly bombard's iPhone users with algorithmically compiled nostalgia from the depths of their own camera rolls in the form of slide shows with howling sentimental music. Sometimes the photos are selected because they're from the same month or year, sometimes because they all show beaches, or sometimes because they were all taken in the same place or with the same people, as identified by the phones onboard. AI. Social media platforms meanwhile, surface old posts on anniversaries and prompt you to share any nostalgia you may feel with the broader viewing public. Because our phones are pooling from a huge, contextless pool of saved information, these moments of engineered happenstance can go very wrong. Sometimes you record something in your phone for fear of one day needing it in court, not because it's a wonderful memory, but mostly our phones are full of stuff that doesn't matter. A picture of a mediocre batch of weeknight pasta that you decided against posting to Instagram an outtake from a flurry of photos you took of your dog. The physical archives we have mass in dresser drawers or old shoe boxes aren't free from the threat of bad memories or meaninglessness either. But the act of putting something aside is an intentional one, an exercise in remembering. Most of what lives in my phone is there because I forgot to delete it, making the things I'd actually like to be reminded of even more difficult to stumble across. It's no coincidence. I think that as paper tickets have disappeared, the merch markets for entertainment and live events have boomed, or that event producers have realized that many people will pay extra for a paper ticket printed after the fact, once they're sure the memory is a good one. When people say that our phones alienate us from one another, it brings to my mind such a like this. As much as anything materiality is not fungible. Digital tickets may have practical advantages, but they're not vessels for meaning, which is something that humans who spent millennia imbuing objects with abstract significance before anyone thought to sell souvenirs have always looked for, and as it happens, I was looking for meeting at that football game. Atlanta is my hometown, and I'd gone back for the holidays like I do every year, but had stayed much longer than anticipated. My father, who'd been undergoing what we thought was routine treatment for a low risk type of cancer for a few months, died unexpectedly a few days before Christmas. He was the man who taught me to love the dogs and Bruce Springsteen, and who'd spent much of my childhood campaigning for me to consider following in his collegiate footsteps at Uga, when the palliative care nurse instructed us to reassure him that it was okay to let go, telling us he could probably hear us even if he couldn't respond, I told him that my brother and I both had Springsteen tickets for the upcoming tour, and that college football's early signing day was shaping up to give Georgia the best recruiting class in the country. So when Matt texted me on Christmas Eve to wish me a happy birthday, bad timing for a birthday every year, but particularly that year, I told him I had some good news and some bad news. Dad was gone, but I'd be in Atlanta long enough to go to the Peach Bowl. We hatched our plan quickly, and I wore my dad's favorite Georgia hat to the game. It should go without saying that I bought the commemorative ticket as soon as I knew it existed, as well as the block of clear plastic to keep at pristine. The irritation I felt over having to buy a physical representation of something I'd already spent hundreds of dollars on, was overwhelmed by the grief stricken certainty that I'd regret not having it. When I got back to my apartment in New York, I put the ticket and my dad's hat on a high shelf of my living room bookcase, and got out the shoe box full of other memories i'd packed away since i'd moved to the city more than a decade before, looking from more things I might want to frame. If I'd had any doubts about my own penchant for stashing these kinds of objects, that it was too sentimental or too childish, or that I was too much of a packrat, those were assuaged a few weeks later, at a lavish retrospective on the life and work of the painter Edward Hopper at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hopper, whom legendary New Yorker art critic Peter Scheldahl once called the visual Bard of American solitude, often captured his subjects in quiet moments in modest homes, their solitude suffused with melancholia. It would not be difficult to imagine someone in a Hopper painting, riffling through a shoe box of keepsakes, or paging through a dusty photo album. As I rounded a corner into a room at the heart of the exhibit, I was met not by more paintings, but by ticket stubs. In a long, low display case. More than sixty pairs of tickets spanned nearly the entire length of the room, colorful but simple, charting the life that Hopper and his wife, the painter Josephine Nivesson lived in New York City through their voracious appetite for theater. These tickets, the names of the plays written on their reverse side, and fountain pen for posterity, were every bit as evocative as the artwork on display, and somehow more intimate. There were receipts for Hopper and Nivissen's decades of marriage, and for the kind of life an artists lived a century ago. My ticket to the exhibit had been purchased online and delivered via email. In the gift shop, I bought a tote bag to remember it by

What we lose when our memories exist entirely in our phones. By Amanda Mole, read by Stephanie Spencer. On New Year's Day twenty twenty three, my friend Matt texted to say he'd bought a Peach Bowl ticket. On the surface, this message would seem to make little sense. The Peach Bowl, a semi final in that year's college football playoff, had been played the night before in Atlanta's Mercedes Benz Stadium. We had spent about five hundred dollars each on last minute tickets to be there in the far end zone as Ohio State's kicker shanked a last second field goal at the stroke of midnight, sending the University of Georgia's Bulldogs to their second national championship game in as many years. Matt and I are both Georgia alums and lifelong fans. The tickets were worth it, but what Matt had bought that morning was purely commemorative. As with almost every live event now, our actual tickets to the game only existed on our phones, and they disappeared along with the waning moments of twenty twenty two. The Peach Bowl had contracted with a vendor to print mementos for the game that could be personalized with your seat assignment, your own longitude and latitude for a moment immediately enshrined in the history of Georgia football. The events organizers had advertised the service twelve dollars for an oversized sheet of glossy card stock, or forty dollars to add in acrylic display case in the order confirmation email for the digital tickets, and Matt had dug it back up the ticket the physical thing of it used to be free, of course, or at least included in the price of admission. In my childhood bedroom a week and a half earlier, I'd come across a thick stack of them for occasions both great and small. My very first concert Bruce Springsteen and the East Street Band during their two thousand reunion tour. Bands I saw live too many times to connect the old tickets to any particular experience. Dashboard Confessional, Marvelous, Three forgotten movies I'd gone to with middle school friends at a theater that had long since been redeveloped into self storage units. Nineteen ninety nine's Teaching Missus tingle as Objects, paper tickets service, proof of past lives long after their brief utility. As proof of payment, I sat with my accidental time capsule for more than an hour, doing precisely what my teenage self had probably hoped I might do one day. I linked each one to a buried memory as best I could. They were tethers to friends I'd lost touch with after moving away, to college, bands that had long since broken up, and a time when sixty eight dollars sounded like an unfathomable amount of money for my dad to be paying for each of us to see Springsteen. But most of the tickets I'd bought myself in person, and almost always with cash, at box offices or the ticketmaster counter at the local grocery store, they looked like they'd been printed on a machine even older and more obsolete than the ticketmaster counter. As a concept, you don't need to be a technopessimist to acknowledge that digital tickets, for all their advantages and transferability and traceability, don't serve this long tail purpose very well. Neither do things like digital photos, even though our phones have allowed us to document the page of time in far more minute detail than would have been possible at any previous point in history. Smartphones provide tons of personal archival functionality, but very little of the random discoverability that can make trawling through old drawers so rewarding tech companies admit these limitations in their own product decisions. Apple regularly bombard's iPhone users with algorithmically compiled nostalgia from the depths of their own camera rolls in the form of slide shows with howling sentimental music. Sometimes the photos are selected because they're from the same month or year, sometimes because they all show beaches, or sometimes because they were all taken in the same place or with the same people, as identified by the phones onboard. AI. Social media platforms meanwhile, surface old posts on anniversaries and prompt you to share any nostalgia you may feel with the broader viewing public. Because our phones are pooling from a huge, contextless pool of saved information, these moments of engineered happenstance can go very wrong. Sometimes you record something in your phone for fear of one day needing it in court, not because it's a wonderful memory, but mostly our phones are full of stuff that doesn't matter. A picture of a mediocre batch of weeknight pasta that you decided against posting to Instagram an outtake from a flurry of photos you took of your dog. The physical archives we have mass in dresser drawers or old shoe boxes aren't free from the threat of bad memories or meaninglessness either. But the act of putting something aside is an intentional one, an exercise in remembering. Most of what lives in my phone is there because I forgot to delete it, making the things I'd actually like to be reminded of even more difficult to stumble across. It's no coincidence. I think that as paper tickets have disappeared, the merch markets for entertainment and live events have boomed, or that event producers have realized that many people will pay extra for a paper ticket printed after the fact, once they're sure the memory is a good one. When people say that our phones alienate us from one another, it brings to my mind such a like this. As much as anything materiality is not fungible. Digital tickets may have practical advantages, but they're not vessels for meaning, which is something that humans who spent millennia imbuing objects with abstract significance before anyone thought to sell souvenirs have always looked for, and as it happens, I was looking for meeting at that football game. Atlanta is my hometown, and I'd gone back for the holidays like I do every year, but had stayed much longer than anticipated. My father, who'd been undergoing what we thought was routine treatment for a low risk type of cancer for a few months, died unexpectedly a few days before Christmas. He was the man who taught me to love the dogs and Bruce Springsteen, and who'd spent much of my childhood campaigning for me to consider following in his collegiate footsteps at Uga, when the palliative care nurse instructed us to reassure him that it was okay to let go, telling us he could probably hear us even if he couldn't respond, I told him that my brother and I both had Springsteen tickets for the upcoming tour, and that college football's early signing day was shaping up to give Georgia the best recruiting class in the country. So when Matt texted me on Christmas Eve to wish me a happy birthday, bad timing for a birthday every year, but particularly that year, I told him I had some good news and some bad news. Dad was gone, but I'd be in Atlanta long enough to go to the Peach Bowl. We hatched our plan quickly, and I wore my dad's favorite Georgia hat to the game. It should go without saying that I bought the commemorative ticket as soon as I knew it existed, as well as the block of clear plastic to keep at pristine. The irritation I felt over having to buy a physical representation of something I'd already spent hundreds of dollars on, was overwhelmed by the grief stricken certainty that I'd regret not having it. When I got back to my apartment in New York, I put the ticket and my dad's hat on a high shelf of my living room bookcase, and got out the shoe box full of other memories i'd packed away since i'd moved to the city more than a decade before, looking from more things I might want to frame. If I'd had any doubts about my own penchant for stashing these kinds of objects, that it was too sentimental or too childish, or that I was too much of a packrat, those were assuaged a few weeks later, at a lavish retrospective on the life and work of the painter Edward Hopper at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hopper, whom legendary New Yorker art critic Peter Scheldahl once called the visual Bard of American solitude, often captured his subjects in quiet moments in modest homes, their solitude suffused with melancholia. It would not be difficult to imagine someone in a Hopper painting, riffling through a shoe box of keepsakes, or paging through a dusty photo album. As I rounded a corner into a room at the heart of the exhibit, I was met not by more paintings, but by ticket stubs. In a long, low display case. More than sixty pairs of tickets spanned nearly the entire length of the room, colorful but simple, charting the life that Hopper and his wife, the painter Josephine Nivesson lived in New York City through their voracious appetite for theater. These tickets, the names of the plays written on their reverse side, and fountain pen for posterity, were every bit as evocative as the artwork on display, and somehow more intimate. There were receipts for Hopper and Nivissen's decades of marriage, and for the kind of life an artists lived a century ago. My ticket to the exhibit had been purchased online and delivered via email. In the gift shop, I bought a tote bag to remember it by