Thirty thousand photos in the cloud, and maybe fifty you'd grieve. This episode is about the difference between having and keeping.

Under my bed there's a shoebox that hasn't held shoes in a very long time. Inside: the laughing man from the flea market, a photo-booth strip from a mall that no longer exists, a harbor I've never visited, and one photograph of my grandmother at twenty, laughing at someone outside the frame. The confession isn't that the box exists — it's that when I can't sleep, I take it out and go through it, photograph by photograph, like a dragon counting coins.

Having is what the cloud does: a warehouse, enormous and dark and perfectly organized, that nobody ever visits. Keeping is a verb with your hands in it — this one, out of thirty thousand, promoted from data to belonging. Tonight I make my case for th ...