Artwork by Adrian Lu. 

Analogue #1: Nostalgia 

A few months ago, I spent a wintry Friday evening watching Disney’s 1940 film, Pinocchio, a favorite of one of my closest friends. Every few scenes, across from me on our plushy pink couch, she’d pause and marvel at the film’s finely hewn worldbuilding: wooden interiors awash in warm candlelight, sweeping aerial shots of villages and landscapes alike, figures simplistically drawn but crafted with dazzling care and nuance. Sometime during each pause, our conversation would reach a familiar theme: “This is so beautiful. I miss feeling like this. Why don’t they make things like this anymore?”

After the movie ended, and after an obligatory tearful sigh, we started talking about why, exactly, the film’s animation felt so poignant and refreshing, especially in comparison with the contemporary industry’s ubiquitous googly-eyed characters, sleek surfaces, and exaggerated movements. The film’s quiet beauty, both groundbreakingly complex and flawed in its execution, captured an imperfect humanness, one we associated with the fuzzy memories of our childhood. Our fascination had to do with nostalgia: something, it seems, that is on everyone’s mind.

In 1688, the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the term in his medical dissertation, drawing from the Greek nostos—to return home—and algia—meaning suffering or grief—to describe a disease similar to paranoia or melancholia. The afflicted was subject to an acute longing tied to a specific object or place and was prescribed a dose of opium and summarily sent on a journey to the Alps. Written accounts of the psychopathological disease appeared even earlier. During the Thirty Years War, which began in Central Europe in 1618, at least six soldiers were discharged from the Spanish Army of Flanders with el mal de corazón, meaning “the evil of the heart.”

But by the 20th century, nostalgia had become the poeticized longing we know it as today, an incurable coping mechanism used to fend off modern anxieties about our increasingly fractured world. Sventlana Boym, in her 2001 book The Future of Nostalgia, defines the term as “a longing for a home that no longer exists or never existed… another time, a better life.” The innate allure of nostalgia has to do with continuity, she writes, the linear nature of a “romance with one’s own fantasy.”

The idea of looking back holds perennial temptation: we will always find ways to revisit the past with rose-colored glasses. In contemporary popular culture, we’re often sold the idea in saccharine, simplistic terms: in the glittery glorification of Y2K-era crop tops and low-rise jeans, in golden-age Netflix soaps, in the car commercial marketing of a rugged Americana, or in the trad bliss of cottagecore. These depictions glaze over the complexity of existence by peddling a false reality, palliating the nostalgic’s yearning for simpler, “righter” times with a sugar-coated, often consumable, fiction. Nostalgia, especially in a political context, can be wielded to sinister ends, in the creation of a weaponized mythology manufactured to get you to buy into an ideal, hate someone or something, and love someone or something else. Looking back can be poisonous, but it can also serve as an important indicator: what about the past is calling to us so vividly in the present?

For the purposes of this monthly column, Analogue, I’d like to isolate one type of nostalgia, one that I see cropping in art, in film, in music, in my algorithm: a longing for a mythical return to pre-Internet life, a rejection of our current pace of existence, consumption, and cynicism. Faced with a cultural landscape driven by the inundation of newness and self-optimization, I see a burgeoning desire to meaningfully create and consume media that's driven by a sincere desire for presence. I’m thinking of Justin Bieber at Coachella, where audience members and streamers alike were asked to collectively pause and engage in a communal, intimate reminiscence on the passage of time, or the anti-influencer influence of Errands, an Instagram series which first aired in late 2025 and asks us to accompany guests through the humdrum rituals of being a person. Instead of just asking you to remember, although this type of nostalgia does that too, it asks you to revisit the lost art of noticing, as if saying something like this: “Your experience of time doesn’t have to be like this. Slow down and pay attention.”

What draws me to this brand of nostalgia is precisely its engagement with the notion of time itself. Boym sees this too, writing (notably in pre-smart phone 2001) that nostalgia often gives voice to the “slower rhythms of our dreams… [a reflection of our] new understanding of time and space.” Now, in our Internet age, where we create entirely new realities online and mourn hours lost to scrolling (doom or otherwise), this feels even more true. Nostalgia has become a vehicle we use to arrest time, an attempt to separate ourselves from a world on an ever-forward march.

Perhaps this desire to stop time comes from what The Cut’s Andrea González-Ramírez recently termed “The Great Numbing Out,” the idea that powerlessness has seeped into the very core of our culture. González-Ramírez is writing about political apathy and burnout, about how unfettered access to pain and suffering have rendered us feeling desensitized and immobile, but this extends beyond civic participation. The near constant onslaught of information, good and bad, has left us adrift, maybe even traumatized, and certainly unable to center ourselves in the present moment.

The nostalgia I’m interested in asks us to reengage our senses, not in a mind-glazingly comfortable way, but in an almost confrontational way. Not that I think Pinocchio or Justin Bieber’s Coachella performance ask us directly to consider the unsustainable pace of modern life—but they exhibit an earnest want of humanness, of egoless observation, of peace.

Analogue will be structured around the work of thinkers, writers, and artists who use nostalgia to disregard ambivalence and instead give in to feeling. The question then becomes: where will it lead us?