The ubiquity of the internet. It is part of our everyday lives, like it or not. Over the past quarter-century, the online explosion has radically altered the world and the way we move through it.

For many of you, that has always been the world. If you were born anytime after 1990 or so, you likely have no memories of a world without the internet. Sure, you might recall the frustrating early days of dial-up modems and slow-loading websites, a time when your entire afternoon might be spent downloading a single song. But the internet is and has always been omnipresent.

However, those of us who are older have clear and distinct memories of a different time and place. A time and place where the internet felt more like science fiction than simple reality. We’ve said good-bye to a lot of things from those bygone days – some of them minor, some incredibly significant – but the one factor they all have in common is that they don’t appear to be coming back.

Thus we get “100 Things We've Lost to the Internet” (Crown, $27). Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, offers up a collection of snapshots from the before times, quick-hit glimpses at a vast array of items and experiences that are simply … gone. They exist only in old photographs (remember those?) or increasingly dusty memories. These habits and learned behaviors, these compulsions and desires – vanished, never to be experienced by those who came after.

These short essays explore the vast array of alterations wrought by the internet, all of them presented with a combination of wistfulness and self-effacing humor. Because here’s the thing – while we might miss a lot of this stuff, we also have to concede that in a lot of ways, we’re better off … even if we perhaps don’t want to admit it. And some of it? Well … some of it we sure would like to have back.