In her new book, Finding Normal: Sex, Love, and Taboo in Our Hyperconnected World , author Alexa Tsoulis-Reay explores what, if anything, it means to be “normal” when it comes to sexuality and desire and how the Internet (and other media technologies) are involved in the way people come to know who they are in the world today. Based on her interview column “What It’s Like” — in which she conducted in-depth conversations with outliers for New York Magazine from 2014-2018 — the first half of the book celebrates what she calls the “hyperconnected media era” a period she argues is characterized by an increased ability to connect with people “we might never have encountered in our everyday lives, share information, form community, and give birth to new identities or templates for normality.”
The stories in the second half of the book, which revisit some of…
