“I didn’t shake hands for like three years because I figured out that people were disgusting. And I just could not touch people. Most normal people in the world are just f-cking weirdos. I was disgusted by humanity when I left there. So many of my peers, same thing. We all left with horrible views of humanity.” It’s hard to argue that ugliness on the internet can still surprise us at this point. But it did feel like the lowest forms of discourse crossed a chasm this year. And that’s just what end-users saw. The really terrible stuff is intercepted by human content moderators before it gets in front of our eyeballs. And those moderators don’t escape unscathed. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal on The Basic Grossness of Humans. (That wouldn’t be a bad title for a review of 2017.)