From science to medicine, we’re becoming increasingly convinced that more data equals more access to facts. But what if — at least when it comes to the human brain — the opposite is true? What if our instant access to information is slowly eroding our ability to know fact from fiction? In The New Yorker, Jill Lepore provides a glimpse of what a post-fact life could be like. “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain … Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn — by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes … No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know.” (Hey, it could happen. You’ve probably already forgotten how to find news stories on your own…)

+ And as if we needed a reminder that the Internet is not necessarily the path towards truth: What it’s like to be a hot girl online ( … when you’re a nerdy guy in real life).