| Search engines may change, but bad breakups are eternal. In “Webstalker,” from 2004, the poet and essayist Katha Pollitt recounts the aftermath of a split from her partner of seven years—a man who, she learned too late, had cheated on her regularly. Nowadays, the temptation to keep tabs on an ex might lead to Instagram or Facebook; in the pre-social-media period recalled by Pollitt, search engines such as AltaVista had to suffice. But, whatever the available technology, the piece makes clear that certain impulses are timeless, particularly the desire to understand why a breakup has occurred, and what it says about both dumper and dumped. Pollitt doesn’t shy away from details that others might hesitate to share: the vast amount of time she spent digitally surveilling her ex; how that search led her to Webstalk a long list of others, including his therapist and additional girlfriends; and what those activities might suggest about her own state of mind. Yet there were limits, Pollitt notes, even when she was at her lowest. “I knew what courses she taught and in what month her term on the faculty senate would expire,” she writes, referring to her former lover’s new partner. “I followed the fortunes of her books on Amazon, where I did not post nasty anonymous readers’ reviews. . . . That would be dishonorable, and, besides, what if she figured out it was me?” | 
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