Fill in the blank / Guess what's torrenting

Today we have two stellar Flaming Hydra debuts. Emily Bell, Professor and Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Journalism School and Director, Guardian Media Group; and Felipe De La Hoz, journalism lecturer at NYU and member of the NY Daily News Editorial Board. Welcome, Hydras!

Issue No. 137

Runaway Brain
Emily Bell

The Great Game of Chance That Was LimeWire
Felipe De La Hoz

Runaway Brain

by Emily Bell

I cannot remember how it started. Which is not surprising. The business of losing your mind, even temporarily, is the business of picking up a smashed mirror, unraveling tangled wool with boxing gloves on.

Was there something to do with boxing that started it? Was that it? Had I been punched unnaturally hard in the head?

Or maybe a disturbance in the street? Rioter? Was it a loud march, hot and angry? Or the sound of heavy machinery ripping up the road, beeping yellow and red lights six floors below? Or did it start in Yemen? Evan Gershkovich was freed, I think. Or maybe not. A fever dream of planes, and headlines. Was that it? A news-induced stroke? Or had I hit my head at the swimming pool? Had I swum?

I didn’t know how I had lost my mind but last Friday morning it was gone. I woke up and I did not know anything. I did not know even IF I had woken up at all. But I did know that something very wrong had happened. Wrong enough to interrupt my husband Ed’s 8:00 a.m. zoom call with direct instructions: “I am having a stroke, take me to hospital.”

Here I was, a hypochondriac with an internet connection, finally experiencing one of the things I had most dreaded: a sudden terrifying health failure, an impairment with the additional ironic twist of making it impossible for me to either Google anything, or remember the results if I had.

As I am an even more unreliable witness from this point onward for the next four hours, I am relying on the accounts of those who saw it firsthand: Ed, and the doctors who wrote up my observational notes. For me the fragments of an understanding of what happened beginning at 8:30 a.m. Friday morning give way to a black memory hole. I just about recall we got an Uber not an ambulance, I recall it being stiflingly hot but raining. I don’t remember the very swift passage through the emergency room, which is maybe the only upside of arriving at a hospital declaring that you might be having a stroke.