The Nix by Nathan Hill, r. Mar. 2026

p. 98 It always went like this. The kids who were victims of the Nix always felt, at first, fear. Then luck. Then possession. Then pride. Then terror. ... "The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst."

p. 153 Example: At recess, he left. He simply marched away. He walked toward the most distant swing set and then walked on. He just didn’t stop. It had never occurred to him before that he could not stop. Everyone stopped. But in the face of his mother’s goneness, all the world’s normal rules fell away. If she could leave, why couldn’t he? So he did. He walked away and was surprised how easy it was. He walked along the sidewalk, didn’t even attempt to run or hide. He walked in plain view and nobody stopped him. Nobody said a word. He floated away. It was a whole new reality. Maybe, he thought, his mother also found it this easy. To go. What kept people where they were, in their normal orbits? Nothing, he realized for the first time. There was nothing to stop anyone from, on any given day, vanishing.

p. 274 Time heals many things because it sets us on trajectories that make the past seem impossible.

p. 344 The human body is so fragile. It’s ruined by the smallest things. You can put twenty bullets into a camel and it will just keep coming for you, but half an inch of shrapnel is enough to kill us plain little people. Our bodies are the thin knife’s edge separating us from oblivion.

p. 469 Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.

p. 500 All of this so reflexive and automatic and habituated and slow that the travelers were a little zoned out and playing with their phones and just simply enduring this uniquely modern, first world ordeal that is not per se “difficult” but is definitely exhausting. Spiritually debilitating. Everyone feeling a small ache of regret, suspecting that, as a people, we could do better. But we don’t. The line for a McRib was quiet and solemn and twenty people deep.

p. 506 “Sometimes the country thinks it deserves a spanking, sometimes it wants a hug,” Periwinkle said. “When it wants a hug, it votes Democrat. I’m hedging on it’s a spanking moment right now.”

p. 543 The shutter clicks. Ginsberg stands and smiles sadly. He moves on, swallowed by the vast crowd, the incandescent day.

p. 560 The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate.

p. 563 She wants to prove that she’s gone through the terror of the day and now she’s stronger and better, even though she doesn’t know if she really is. How can one tell when one becomes a stronger and better person? Through action, she decides.

p. 564 In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what’s usually ignored is the fact that each man’s description was correct. What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind—it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.

p. 618 Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.

p. 619 But Faye’s opinion is that sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all—just a new beginning. Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.

The Missing Ink by Philip Hensher, r. Mar. 2026

p. 49 It's perfectly possible to enjoy unattainable aspiration while practising a basic version of the art form.

p. 153 The wonderful transformation of writing with a reliable ink reservoir, or transportable bottles of ink, would have been accompanied by a jettisoning of the writing companions of decades – sometimes without the faintest regret, sometimes with a tinge of sadness that things had changed. We gaze at these things, now so useless, and try to garner the faintest sense of the human investment which once went into them.

p. 201 [Proust] is from one of the first generations of thinkers to stress that handwriting is utterly individual, saying that 'everyone, however humble, is a master of those familiar little household creatures whose life lies as it were suspended on the paper, that is, the unique characters of his handwriting which he alone possesses.'

p. 255 Some part of the writer's spirit had passed into the handwriting, and had stayed there. Her humanity and her hand overlapped, and something remained, indelibly, in these physical traces.

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, r. Feb. 2026

 p. 6 Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternate universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and – as I will show – unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness – perpetually – to managing what became their online brand.

p. 73 As the Stoics and Buddhists taught long ago, happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all "triggers" from life; rather, happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you.

p. 120 In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "The cost of a thing is the amount of ... life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." So what was the opportunity cost to children and adolescents when they started spending six, or eight, or perhaps even 16 hours each day interacting with their devices? Might they have exchanged any parts of life that were necessary for healthy human development?

p. 139 The opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood refers to everything that children do less of once they get unlimited round-the-clock access to the internet.

p. 152 Part of defining the self comes from successfully integrating into groups; part of being attractive to groups is demonstrating one's value as an individual with unique skills. Researchers have long found that boys and men are more focused on agency [striving to individuate and expand the self] while girls and women are more focused on communion [striving to integrate the self in a larger social unit through caring for others]

p. 194 A central concept for Durkheim was anomie, or normlessness – an absence of stable and widely shared norms and rules. Durkheim was concerned that modernity, with its rapid and disorienting changes and its tendency to weaken the grip of traditional religions, fostered anomie and thus suicide. He wrote that when we feel the social order weakening or dissolving, we don't feel liberated; we feel lost and anxious. That, I believe, is what has happened to Gen Z. They are less able than any generation in history to put down roots in real-world communities populated by known individuals who will still be there a year later [rather than a network with "a daily tornado of memes, fads, and ephemeral mircrodramas, played out among a rotating cast of millions of bit players].

p. 203 "collective effervescence"

p. 204 family rituals such as a digital Sabbath (one day per week with reduced or no digital technology, combined with enjoyable in-person activities)

p. 206 Screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter.

p. 207 If we want to experience stillness and silence, and if we want to develop focus and a sense of unified consciousness, we must reduce the flow of stimulation into our eyes and ears. We must find ample opportunities to sit quietly, whether that is in meditation, or by spending more time in nature, or just by looking out a car window and thinking on a long drive, rather than always listening to something, or (for children in the back seat) watching videos the whole way.

p. 209 Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world's wisdom traditions: Think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers. Many users may believe that the implicit carrots and sticks built into platforms like Instagram don't affect them, but it's hard not to be affected unconsciously.

p. 253 Unstructured free play addresses – head-on – making friends, learning empathy, learning emotional regulation, learning interpersonal skills, and greatly empowers students by helping them find a healthy place in their school community – all while teaching them life's most important skills like creativity, innovation, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, self-direction, perseverance, and social skills.  

p. 260 Human childhood evolved in savannas and forests, alongside streams and lakes. When you put children into natural settings, they instinctively explore and spontaneously invent games. Abundant research shows that time in natural settings benefits children's social, cognitive, and emotional development, and these benefits matter even more as young people are increasingly ensconced in the virtual world and as their anxiety levels continued to rise.

p. 269 As for your own interactions with your child, they don't have to be "optimized." You don't have to make every second special or educational. It's a relationship, not a class. But what you do often matters far more than what you say, so watch your own phone habits. Be a good role model who is not giving continuous partial attention to both the phone and the child.

p. 274 Bonus points for any [monthlong teen summer camp] that promises to not post pictures every day on its website. Summer camp is a great opportunity for parents and children to get out of the habit of constant contact and, especially for parents, constant reassurance that their kids are okay.

p. 280 6. Talk with your preteen about the risks [of social media], and listen to their thoughts. Even without a social media account, all children will encounter age-inappropriate content online. Exposure to pornography is virtually certain. Talk with your preteens about the risks inherent in posting public content or sharing personal information online, including sexting and cyberbullying. Ask them what problems they see in their peers' online habits, and ask them how they think they can avoid such problems themselves. 

p. 281 You have to let go online eventually. But if you can keep the quantity of online time lower and the quality higher in this long period of childhood and early adolescence (ages 6-13), you'll make room for more real-world engagement, and you'll buy time for your child's brain to develop better self-control and less fragmented attention.

p. 281 FOR PARENTS OF TEENS AGES 13-18 (HIGH SCHOOL) [a list of ] More (and Better) Experience in the Real World: 1. Increase their mobility. 2. Rely more on your teen at home. 3. Encourage your teen to find a part-time job. 4. Find ways for them to nurture and lead. 5. Consider a high school exchange program. 6. Better thrills in nature.

p. 287 As your children get older, increase their mobility and encourage them to find part-time jobs and ways to learn from older adults. Consider an exchange program, a summer wilderness program, and a gap year.

p. 289 ...the radical transformation of childhood into something inhuman: a phone-based existence.

p. 290 In part 4, I offered dozens of suggestions, but the four foundational reforms are: 1. No smartphones before high school. 2. No social media before 16. 3. Phone-free schools. 4. Far mare unsupervised play and childhood independence.

Flesh by David Szalay, r. Feb. 2026

p. 128 "So you need to fit in. You need to fit in with everything else in their lives. That's what they want. They're people with serious money and they want someone who fits in with everything else in their lives."

p. 83 He realizes that the thing that are so important to him – the things that happened, and that he saw there, the things that left him feeling that nothing would ever be the same again – they just aren't important here. [as he looks out the window of the train, dusk becoming night and thus his own reflection, leaving the war in the Middle East and heading back home]

p. ??? Without that hour in the afternoon to look forward to, there is nothing to give the days any sense of purpose or meaning.

p. 162 There are those London summer days when summer seems muffled somehow, when a cool, humid grayness hangs in the park as he runs. Statues hold their positions.

p. 172 He lies there for another minute or two against the pillows, looking at the ceiling, which is discreetly studded with smoke detectors and other things, and wondering what will happen now.

p. 214 The difference is maybe that when he’s drunk he doesn’t care that he’s disconnected from things, it doesn’t seem to be a problem, whereas when he’s stoned it somehow does.

p. 256 On Christmas Eve he meets some Oxford friends for lunch in London. Afterward they go to a pub in Knightsbridge with an open fire. It’s one of those winter afternoon drinking sessions that merge into evening in a way that’s almost imperceptible as it’s happening. It’s just suddenly nine o’clock.

p. 278 There’s the distinctive quiet that follows the end of one of these [video calls], the restoration of a solitude that was anyway only partly dispelled by the presence of someone else on the laptop screen.

p. 289 The idea that his son is afraid of something, that he’s suffering in some way, and that there’s not much he can do about it is very hard for him to deal with. It’s just very painful to think about.

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting by Anne Trubek, r. Jan. 2026

p. 60 Handwriting, [Trithemius] said, was a spiritual act, a form of religious devotion that putting blocks into a press could never be.

p. 95 The media and public were fascinated by the spectacle of typing contests. Going fast was becoming a cultural phenomenon in an increasing industrialized America, and typing speed contests fit perfectly into this general speedup.

p. 97 Only once typing became the de facto method to conduct business correspondence and keep records did handwriting assume the associations we have with it today: a way to express one's uniqueness and personality. It is only in the twentieth century that handwriting becomes evidence of – and a way to analyze – the individual psyche.

p. 105 "This philosophy of the manifestation of the soul through graphic signs is based on the intimate connection which exists between each sign... which emanates from the human personality, and the soul, which is the substance of that personality. Who can doubt that every word is as spontaneous and immediate a translation of thought as speech? All handwriting, like all language, is the immediate manifestation of the intimate, intellectual and moral being." –Michon

Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff, r. Dec. 2025

p. ?? Even before she graduated to sentences, even before she learned to read, the love affair with Homer began. "Homer was not a man, but a god," figured among the early penmanship lessons, as did the first cantos of the Iliad. No text more thoroughly penetrated Cleopatra's world. In an age infatuated with history and calibrated in glory, Homer's work was the Bible of the day. He was the "prince of literature"; his 15,693 lines provided the moral, political, historical, and religious context, the great deeds and the ruling principles, the intellectual atlas and moral compass. The educated man cited him, paraphrased him, alluded to him. It was entirely fair to say that children like Cleopatra were —as a near contemporary had it— "nursed in their learning by Homer, and swaddled in his verses." Alexander the Great was believed to have slept always with a copy of Homer under his pillow; any cultivated Greek, Cleopatra included, could recite some part of the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart. The former was more popular in Cleopatra's Egypt —it may have seemed a more pertinent tale for a turbulent time —but from an early age she would have known literarily what she at twenty-one discovered empirically: there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home.

p. 37 It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced. It was in Alexandria that Euclid had codified geometry. If all the wisdoms of the ancient world could be said to have been collected in one place, that place was Alexandria. Cleopatra was its direct beneficiary. She knew that the moon had an effect on tides, that the Earth was spherical and revolved around the sun. She knew of the existence of the equator, the value of pi, the latitude of Marseilles, the behavior of linear perspective, the utility of a lightning conductor. She knew that one could sail from Spain to India, a voyage that was not to be made for another 1,500 years, though she herself would consider making it, in reverse.

p. 73 Both Cleopatra and Caesar manifested the intellectual curiosity that was the trademark of their age, a lightheartedness and a humor that set them apart from their peers, insofar as either had peers. Such an unsociable, solitary thing is power, notes Plutarch; generally those around Caesar and Cleopatra could be relied upon to fawn or plot. Both knew, as Caesar put it, that success came at a price, that "everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses jealousy." Theirs was an exclusive brand of social isolation.

p. 113 [Cleopatra] lived these months in Latin; whatever her proficiency in that language, she discovered that certain concepts did not translate. Even the ironic sense of humor was different, broad and salty in Rome where it was ironic and allusive in Alexandria. Literal-minded, the Romans took themselves seriously. Alexandrian irreverence and exuberance were in scant supply.

p. 142 It is notable that when she is not condemned for being too bold and masculine, Cleopatra is taken to task for being unduly frail and feminine.

p. 286 "The truth of the matter," Plutarch announces, to centuries of deaf ears, "no one knows."

p. 296 [Octavian] had too cause to note "that no high position is ever free from envy or treachery, and least of all a monarchy." The enemies were bad but the friends arguably worse. The office, he concluded, was utterly dreadful.

Working by Studs Terkel and adapted by Harvey Pekar, r. Dec. 2025

 p. xxi Nora Watson may have said it most succinctly. "I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people."

p. 99 "I get up about noon. I would only consider myself outside the norm because of the way other people live. They're constantly reminding me I'm abnormal. I could never bear to live the dull lives that most people live, locked up in offices. I live in absolute freedom. I do what I do because I want to do it. What's wrong with making a living doing something interesting?" (jazz musician)

p. 101 "Hundreds of times I've gone to work thinking, oh my God, I hate to think of playing tonight. It's going to be awful. But something on that given night takes place and I'm excited before it's over. Does that make sense? If you have that kind of night, you're not aware of the time, because of this thing that hits you." (jazz musician)

p. 104 "Real talent takes a long time to mature, to learn how to bring what character you have into sound, into your playing, not the instrument, but the style of music you're trying to create should be an extension of you. And this takes a whole life." (jazz musician)

p. 160 "Peace and quiet and privacy have meant a great deal to me since I made my escape. Of course I'm a has-been. Radio itself is a has-been. But the quiz kids achieved history and I'm proud to have been part of it. ...The reason I like this job is that my mind is at ease all day long..." (greenhouse worker and former child genius)

p. 162 He dropped out of high school. "It's a good way to go. Take what you can stand and don't take any more than that. It's what God put the tongue in your mouth for. If it don't taste right, you spit it out." (carpenter)

p. 163 "Any work, you kneel down – it's a kind of worship. It's part of the holiness of things, work, yes. Just like drawing breath is. It's necessary. If you don't breathe, you're dead. It's kind of a sacrament, too." (carpenter)