I recently re-watched the entire original Sex and the City series. In my defense, I have a three-month-old; I needed a familiar show in the background during the six-plus hours per day of breastfeeding. As many viewers in the increasingly bleak media professions have pointed out, perhaps the least relatable part of the show is that Carrie makes a living writing one (ONE!) article per week. And yet, it was the early 2000s; the media on the show matched the moment, even if the financial side still rings untrue.
Through all six seasons, Carrie stays relevant because her column does; she speaks to the moment. By contrast, in the third season of the new series, And Just Like That, Carrie is working on a historical romance novel. Instead of the familiar voiceover from Carrie’s column, each episode is framed by the text of this novel, depicting Carrie as a Victorian woman choosing between suitors. She jumped back in time: a modern woman immersed in old media.
But it’s not just on television. A number of high-profile 2025 novels pick up on this same theme: a longing for an older form of media. How many times did we hear that 2024 was the “podcast election.” How many times have we heard Cable is dead in the face of TikTok, how many times have we been told to switch to paperless communication? I’m a New Yorker, and in the weeks before the primary, I was shocked at how many paper mailers I received. Does anyone still do that? I couldn’t help but wonder. And—spoiler— the candidate sending the most mailers ended up losing. We’ve fully digitized; there’s no going back.
They’re novels for those of us who feel like digital natives, but still remember a time before the internet. They’re novels for those of us who want to remember that there’s something other than TikTok out there.
Except, of course, in fiction. The use of older media in modern novels can give characters permission to step back in time for a moment. In some cases, this means a return to old, destructive behaviors. In Amy Silverberg’s phenomenal debut, First Time, Long Time, the protagonist Allison falls for a radio personality, Reid Steinman. Here, the nostalgia is built into the plot—her father is a massive fan of Steinman’s, and the familiarity of her new beau keeps her mired in family dynamics she desperately wants to leave behind. As she says upon meeting Steinman,
He was the most famous radio personality in the world, the most famous radio DJ to have ever lived…He changed the form, everyone said that. Also, this man served as my father’s conscience, the cricket on his shoulder forever whispering rights and wrongs. The Problem’s hero. The god of my house.
Steinman functions as a symbol of her issues with her father, so what better way to encapsulate that than through a form of a media beloved by our parents’ generation? The radio may make the reader nostalgic, but in the story, it goes beyond that and functions to highlight her daddy issues. In choosing a master of an older form of media, she’s also choosing the exact partner who keeps her stuck in an older version of herself.
In Vantage Point, Sara Sliger’s spicy family-drama-meets-political-thriller, a candidate’s campaign is derailed by a sex tape. As the protagonist Clara writes, after her sex tape is leaked: “I googled how to get rid of a sex tape and fell down rabbit holes about revenge porn cases, women who lost jobs over leaked sex tapes, women whose press interviews stalled when their ‘eyes glistened with tears,’ women who built their leaked videos into promising porn careers.”
As counterintuitive as it sounds, something about her losing her livelihood over a sex tape felt nostalgic. I found myself almost wistful for a time when a sex tape could make news, let alone derail an entire campaign. Of course, we still have sex tapes, but when I think of one breaking through in a massive way, I think of a 2007 Kim Kardashian. And yet, in Vantage Point, it works, because it’s a modern book that centers on characters stuck in the past: the sex tape exists beyond nostalgia, and instead links the protagonist to her troubled past. T
he reader doesn’t struggle to believe that it causes them so much distress, and—no spoilers—there turns out to be quite a lot more to it than we initially suspect. The sex tape as a device is both a commentary on media and politics: Donald Trump may have killed the market for discrediting a candidate because of a messy personal life. In 2025, I almost wonder if a candidate who’s never filmed themselves having sex might be too old to run for office (or perhaps they should be). And it’s a commentary on how fast the modern media landscape moves: a sex tape wouldn’t stay in our social media feeds long, but in the slower pace of a novel, it has time to simmer and fester.
Ultimately, the sex tape is more than nostalgia for the reader. It’s also the catalyst by which the protagonist, Clara, is catapulted back in time. She’s working to heal from a long-term eating disorder, and the sex tape rewinds the clock to a time when she was much sicker. The media keeps her trapped in time.
In Show Don’t Tell, Curtis Sittenfeld’s excellent new collection, one of the best stories centers around a self-help book that the protagonist is trying to option as a romcom. The story is set in 2015, but even that ten-year gap invokes a wistfulness of an easier media landscape. As the character says, while pitching trying to option the book:
We want to make a wonderful romantic comedy out of your book, a new classic. That’s ambitious, but we have an A-list director, an A-list writer for the script, and we’re talking to some of the very biggest actresses and actors. I never want to overpromise, but I think we can make the kind of movie that becomes part of people’s lives, that they watch over and over with their families, or on Christmas, or when they’re sick or just feeling low.
As I read it, I thought back to the Nora Ephron movies of my youth. If I were to watch When Harry Met Sally now, I have no doubts I could be mentally hurtled back to a lazy Sunday afternoon watching TV with my mom. And having just as good of a time, too, because of how well the movie holds up. Today, with every conversation about modern Hollywood devolving into speculation about its imminent, streaming-induced demise, I worry we aren’t making movies that become part of people’s lives. The character’s pitch isn’t as unrealistic as it would seem today; already, a hit rom-com feels like an older form of media.
Rom-coms, sex tapes, and radio aren’t the telegram. These novels aren’t historical, and the characters live in the modern world and engage in forms of media still very much present today. But they’re not the most modern forms of media. They’re novels for those of us who feel like digital natives, but still remember a time before the internet. They’re novels for those of us who want to remember that there’s something other than TikTok out there. But of course our novelists would be drawn to these themes—they’re novelists.
The enduring nature of the book business is testament to the fact that we’re not willing to submit entirely to the age of social media and podcasts. But in these books, the characters don’t simply engage with the media as a form of nostalgia: they play an important role in the plots. The authors are able to bring back the older forms of media into the present day to link the characters to their pasts. Our protagonists aren’t ready to leave behind the media of several decades ago, and neither are we.