Leslie Jamison: “In the years since [the user-generated virtual world’s] peak in the mid 2000s, Second Life has become something more like a magnet for mockery. When I told friends that I was working on a story about it, their faces almost always followed the same trajectory of reactions: a blank expression, a brief flash of recognition, and then a mildly bemused look. Is that still around?” Yet in these crazy days, writes Leslie Jamison, who talks to the platform’s creator and some still-devoted users, “the appeal of that alternate world keeps deepening, along with our doubts about what it means to find ourselves drawn to it.”