Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I See Why Am I, or in case you missed it, Slate's podcast about internet culture.

And today on the show, I am joined by Charlie Sosnik.

Welcome, Charlie.

Hello.

Charlie is a writer whose work focuses on internet subcultures and masculinity.

He is also, according to his website, someone with a six-year streak on the New York Times crossword.

Is this still true?

Yeah, it'll be six years Saturday, I think.

That was one thing I was wondering is how up-to-date do you keep that?

I just changed my website yesterday.

Really?

Six years this week.

Wow, okay, yeah. So we have, like, hot off the press, six-year streak.

Well, that makes me even more curious to ask you the question that we ask all first time guess,

which is, what is your first internet memory?

I was thinking a lot about this, and I think the answer is loading up the cart on websites with crap I wanted.

Yeah. So when I was like third grade, fourth grade-ish, I like loved pranks.

I used to go to sleepway camp and we were always pranking each other.

And so I would go on my mom's Amazon account and just add like hundreds of like whoopee cushions and like cups

with holes in it and like stuff like that. And then one day my mom was like you have to stop.

I can't really like live my life with like a thousand dollars of pranks in the cart.

So you wouldn't hit buy. I would just add it to the cart, I guess, under like, the delusion that, like, it would stay there until my birthday. And I'd be able to, like, land the plane, like, mom, like, what if you just order the whole massive $1,000 cart of pranks? No, that's my, I mean, you're basically bookmarking. Yeah, exactly. And you're putting it, you're making it so convenient for her. Yeah, I mean, it's so funny, Amazon remembers. And so I'm picturing, like, her opening it up to, like, buy towels or something, big paper towels and seeing that there's, like, 400 items and this much cart. Oh, yeah, like the... I don't know if she ever fully deleted it. She might have just moved it to, like, save later. So I think it's all in there, and there's still little banners at the top that are, like, the price of the exploding golf ball has changed. Wow, that's something I mean, like, maybe, like, I don't know, like a wedding or some big milestone.

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