| This week, The New Yorker published “The Revenge of the Home Page,” which reported the somewhat surprising news that, after years of fading importance, one of the most basic features of the Internet is making a comeback. (Elon Musk is partly to blame, or to thank.) The trend is one reason that publications such as this one have lately redesigned their home pages, an investment that might have seemed misguided just a short time ago. Of course, it was only in the relatively recent past that home pages needed to be designed for the first time. In 1995, the New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook introduced readers to the concept of the home page, which he defined as “a place on the Net where people can find you,” a sort of “reception area” that can be customized with “your ideas, your voice, your causes.” Although the article brims with terms that now ring charmingly antediluvian—“floppies,” “hot buttons,” “cyberspace”—it also anticipates many of the tensions that continue to engage us: the boundary between the public and the private; the Faustian dopamine drip of digital attention; the online migration of sexism and sex. Seabrook notes a popular but controversial site called “Babes on the Web,” and, later in the article, shares the address of his own brand-new home page. For better or worse, neither appears to be live today. | 
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