The Guardian’s Carter Sherman fondly remembers being terrified by Ocarina of Time
Carter Sherman reflects on her reporting, her book about sex and relationships, and the comforts she relies on, including coffee and old games.
Intelligence analysis by GPT-5.4 Mini
In The Verge’s Weekend Questionnaire, Guardian cohost and author Carter Sherman talks about the sources of her work and her habits. The answers are personal, but they also point back to the internet-era forces behind her reporting on sex, gender, and politics.
Carter Sherman is a reporter who writes about how the internet and politics change people’s private lives. In this interview, she also shares little personal things, like loving coffee and remembering a scary game level from *Zelda*.
Analysis
A Profile Built Around Internet Age Intimacy
Carter Sherman’s answers are light, but the shape of the interview is more revealing than the individual prompts. Her book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future, is framed as reporting on how the internet and polarized politics have reshaped sex and relationships. That places her work in the broad tech-adjacent lane The Verge often likes to explore: not software or hardware directly, but the social systems technology helps accelerate.
The interview also shows how personal identity and beat coverage can overlap. Sherman talks about covering reproductive health, gender, and sexuality for years, and the book sounds like a culmination of that reporting. The important point is not just that she wrote about these topics, but that the digital environment changed the conditions around them, from school-board fights to abortion access.
Why Ocarina of Time Still Works as a Memory Hook
The most memorable answer in the piece is probably the one about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Sherman says she was terrified by the music in the Deku Tree dungeon, which is a familiar kind of nostalgia: a game remembered not for its mechanics alone, but for the mood it created. That detail matters because it shows how media memories often lodge in emotion first and medium second.
For a Verge feature, that kind of answer serves a purpose. It turns a working journalist into a person with a lived media history, someone whose cultural memory runs through games, music, and the internet age. The interview format depends on that mix of specificity and relatability, and this one uses a classic game to make the subject feel immediate without needing a formal profile structure.
What the Questionnaire Reveals About Modern Reporting
Sherman’s favorite tools and habits also hint at how writing work actually happens now. She keeps evocative phrases in Notes, scrolls them when she feels stuck, and looks for inspiration in other people’s lines. That is a very contemporary writing workflow: digital, fragmentary, and dependent on an archive that lives in a phone rather than a notebook.
The piece is small, but it reinforces a larger Verge pattern. The publication often uses casual interviews to show how people in media, tech, and culture think about their tools, habits, and influences. Here, the result is a portrait of a reporter whose work is about the internet’s effects on private life, even as her own routine is shaped by the same digital habits she studies.
Key points
- Carter Sherman discusses her book about sex, relationships, and the internet age.
- She says *Ocarina of Time* is a fond childhood memory, even though it scared her.
- Her writing process includes saving evocative phrases in the Notes app.
- The interview frames her work as part of a broader culture shaped by online life and polarized politics.
The piece helps readers understand how digital culture seeps into relationships, politics, and reporting itself. It also gives Sherman a clear public voice around a book that connects online life to real-world social change.
Because the article is a short questionnaire, it does not add much new reporting beyond personality and anecdote. Readers looking for deeper context on her book or the subjects she covers will need to go elsewhere.
