About this site
There are a couple of different ways to read this piece.
You can bounce back and forth between the front page and the individual sections, starting with the first section (the site does read top-to-bottom instead of reverse chronological) and using the internal section links to move along, or you can use the link in the sidebar (at the bottom of the Sections list) to read it all in one page.
This essay was originally conceived as an interactive presentation, where readers could comment on individual sections. Although the comments are now closed, I've gone ahead and retained those reader contributions. The numbers in parentheses after each section refer to that section's comments.