In 2014, Kristine and Matt, the parents of five young children, posted a 15-minute video on YouTube. “24 Hours With 5 Kids on a Rainy Day” was the first vlog to appear on their channel, Family Fun Pack. It splices together snippets of the utterly ordinary and frankly boring activities that make up a kid’s life: eating, getting dressed, playing, practicing piano, more playing, story time before bed.
When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, my parents both died. Like many American children, I had been steeped in stories about orphans for years, but the books I had read and movies I had watched (Jane Eyre, Annie) failed to mirror my experience of parental loss. They also contributed to my mistaken understanding of orphanhood and the makeup of our child-welfare system—misconceptions that many Americans hold today.
The American mall has supposedly been dying for years. The Guardian announced its death in 2014, in an article featuring Seph Lawless’s photography of abandoned malls, their once-lively atriums gone to seed. In 2015, The New York Times published its own photography of eerily empty buildings in Ohio and Maryland.