Wellness Nathan Hill Quotes

She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also somehow deeply comforting. It was both soul-devouring and soul-filling.

reality could be created by the stories you believed, and thus it was important to pick the right stories.

What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.

It is an odd feeling, to sense one’s aliveness, for perhaps the very first time, to understand that life up until this point was not being lived, exactly; it was being endured.

And the only thing she was certain of was this: that between ourselves and the world are a million stories, and if we don’t know which among them are true, we might as well try out those that are most humane, most generous, most beautiful, most loving.

Every couple has a story they tell themselves about themselves, a story that hums beneath them as a kind of engine, motoring them through trouble and into the future.

And other people’s attention feels exhausting because their expectations come across as an impossible obligation.

So if nothing is real, if certainty is just an illusion, what do we do? Believe in nothing?” “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.

All I understand for sure is that people have a very strong need to explain the world in ways that make them feel better, or safer, or more powerful, or more well liked, or more in control, but not necessarily in ways that are true. Alas, the truth is of very low importance, psychologically speaking.

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.

Maybe the human heart was just that messy, and all romance was deeply precarious, and the future was unresolved, and that was fine. Maybe that’s what true love actually was: an embrace of the chaotic unfolding. And maybe the only stories that had neat and certain conclusions were lies and fables and conspiracies. Maybe it was like Dr. Sanborne said: certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain, or you could choose to be alive.

Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility.

the perfect placebo, she suddenly understood, was choice. If you chose to do something, you would endure all manner of mistreatment and still tell yourself: This was the right choice.

Beyond all the poetry, beyond all the songs, love is this, my dear: it’s an expansion of the self. It’s when the boundaries of the self spread out to include someone else, and what used to be them now becomes you.

people revealed themselves constantly, but unconsciously, and in the very smallest of ways.

When I see people on Facebook express their loud inflexible certainty about some political thing, what I believe they’re actually saying is I am in great pain, and nobody is paying attention. This is also true for people who believe deeply in soulmates, like, say, your husband. What Jack really needs is the illusion of certainty, the illusion that he will never be hurt again.

This, it turned out, was the most savage, most hurtful thing about being a parent: it wasn’t just coming face-to-face with all your own shortcomings and inadequacies, but it was also seeing those shortcomings embodied in your child.

And now people were watching other people watching other people play video games. It was like a Darwin fish parade of sloth.

And what you do when you are making big mistakes is find other people to make them with you.

His mourning was so fully woven into him that he wasn’t entirely sure who he was without it. It was an everyday weight, pulling him down to this one awful fact anytime he strayed too far from it:

And didn’t Jack do the same thing? He needed Elizabeth so much, and that need was plainly suffocating her. He was so fearful of losing her that he’d choked the life right out of their marriage. Evelyn had tried to teach him this very lesson, a long time ago. She’d told him: When you cling too hard to what you want, you miss what’s really there.

Marriage, my dear, is a condition whereby you find so many qualities within another person that you want to have within you that you’re willing to take on their flaws, which will, by extension, also be within you, for life.

They are both in Chicago to become orphans

Behind curtains, this, he thinks, is what lovers do—they are alchemists and architects; pioneers and fabulists; they make one thing another; they invent the world around them. So he says, ‘Yes I believe you,’ and she smiles. She stretches. She touches his face, and makes it splendid.

The people he loved, he thought, were visitors, and waiting inside them was the possibility of someone better or someone worse, someone good or someone wretched, someone intimate or someone strange. His wife, son, friends, coworkers—he could not count on any of them to be consistently themselves. And this saddened him. He

Here, Elizabeth thought, was an answer for her strange new client. How could United Airlines make its customers happy with a below-average experience? By making the experience much, much worse, and making people voluntarily choose to endure it. This was the solution! Make the seats even narrower, the lines even longer, the competition for overhead space even more cutthroat—make it all famously bad and then tell people that they could avoid all of it and have a more or less normally below-average experience for a modest fee. Thus, if they knew beforehand that the experience would be dreadful but they didn’t pay the fee to avoid it, they would be less unhappy about the dreadful experience because, ultimately, they chose to have it. They did it to themselves. It

It's an altogether manic and ceaseless conversation, a conversation that feels sometimes like falling down stairs, barely keeping upright, taken by gravity, skipping, grasping, and then somehow landing, magically on one's feet, intact and triumphant.

This weird and precious and private family thing becomes something altogether new when alchemized by Facebook—it gains a second, uglier entendre. It becomes instrumental. Toby becomes a prop. The whole thing turns into an ad. Such is the inexorable mathematics of Facebook: whatever goes on Facebook just becomes more like Facebook.

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 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. ... Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime

It was not comfortable, this feeling, but it was more comfortable than being alone. His psyche eagerly deformed reality to avoid that which it found intolerable.

Beauty, he tells his students, is a constructed, not intrinsic, condition.

Mostly I’m just tenacious,” she says. “I have a good brain supplemented by a better work ethic.

everything she and Jack had done wrong in their long relationship. They did not solve their problems; they merely became accustomed to them.

Information overload is the new hungry lion.

This is a complicated web, Maria. We're tangled in it." "Then I suppose we'll continue to need a spider who can navigate the threads. You're the only person I can trust right now.

It is an important lesson. If you cling too hard to what you want to see, you miss what's really there.

When I see people on Facebook express their loud inflexible certainty about some political thing, what I believe they’re actually saying is I am in great pain, and nobody is paying attention

That’s the thing about assholes—they are assholes unreflectively. No asshole thinks to himself: Yeah, that was a quality asshole move. No, they just are. They go around just being, in perfect clueless bliss.

But marriage promises consistency, certainty: you will be loved forever. And the moment we become certain of this is the moment it begins to slip away from us. Our certainty blinds us to how the world changes and changes and changes.” “So if nothing is real, if certainty is just an illusion, what do we do? Believe in nothing?” “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.

...certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain or you could choose to be alive.

And this happened all over, in every working group, idiosyncratic professors from two dozen academic departments all fighting for explicit mission-statement representation. So, in the end, it was pretty easy to understand why the mission statement came out looking the way it did: a compound-complex, multi-semicoloned, many-branching grammatical nightmare that forced the English department to stage a collective symbolic walkout when the faculty senate approved it. Since

Those explorers,” Evelyn said, “were looking for the one thing that didn’t grow, and so they didn’t notice all the things that did grow. It’s an important lesson. If you cling too hard to what you want to see, you miss what’s really there.

The stories were different, but the dominant aesthetic seemed about the same: both the church and the farmers market longed for a more pristine Earth, one as either God or nature originally intended, before humanity came along and fouled it all up.

The song was of that dance music subgenre that might as well be called “Look at Me I’m in a Club!” It was music that you heard in the club, about the club, on the subject of being seen in the club—basically up-tempo drunken solipsism, with sporadic sexual depravity.

I want to update it. I want to beta test new models. I want to break it and start all over. The way I think of it is: marriage is just a technology that was never quite future-proof. Like, it may have been a good tool in Victorian England or whatever. But for us? Now? Not so much. We have these twenty-first-century relationships running eighteenth-century software. So it’s glitchy and it crashes all the time. Typically with any technology we try to innovate and update and improve it, but with marriage we seem to refuse all progress. We’ve convinced ourselves that, actually, we like all those glitches.

There’s a term used to describe the microsecond after the big bang when the known universe grew from a microscopically small speck to an infinitely large expanse—the term is cosmic inflation, and that’s the expression they use to describe what their heads do on whippits, and what their hearts do when they’re together.

The trick, she knew, was being able to live more fully in your imagination. To reduce the mental gap between you and the person you would soon become. To tell a story about the future that was more compelling than the present, which was something Elizabeth seemed to have a special knack for. It was one of her superpowers.

There was so much you could decode about people if you watched them closely enough. This was what Elizabeth learned as she passed the time during so many lonely childhood lunches and recesses and study halls and solo homecoming dances: people revealed themselves constantly, but unconsciously, and in the very smallest of ways.

It was the ritual that was important—the acupuncturist’s thorough examination, the couple’s elaborate date, the mother’s comforting home remedy, the ceremonial mixing of the absinthe. It was in these observances that the placebo effect activated and materialized: the transubstantiation of belief into reality, of story into truth, a metaphor made flesh.

Marriage is a technology. And some technologies amplify human abilities, while other technologies restrict them. A lever is a technology that amplifies, while a lock is one that restricts. And all I want to do is turn marriage from a lock into a lever. I want it to enable me to occasionally experience that romantic NRE rush without feeling like a failed spouse.

immediately, how any task other than keeping Toby safe, keeping Toby healthy, seemed like a diversion, or an interruption. She understood with some remorse that if one of her childless friends insisted on coming over during bedtime for martinis and conversation, it wouldn’t feel exactly unwelcome, but it would feel a little irrelevant. Like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain but then stopping for tea. She realized that her old friends had not abandoned her, or at least had not done so in any volitional way; it was just that their attention had been seized, their love redirected, the purpose of each day reoriented, unavoidably and involuntarily. She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also somehow deeply comforting. It was both soul-devouring and soul-filling.

Jack lay in bed wondering what he’d done wrong. Was it the “abandoned” comment? Was it the way he so aggressively defended himself after making the “abandoned” comment? Maybe it had nothing to do with the comment at all. Maybe he’d been too flirty with Kate, or too rude to Kyle. He played back the evening in his mind, reviewed everything he had said, searched for something to apologize for. He must have been in bed a full hour thinking about this before deciding that in the morning he would offer a sort of broad-based unspecific catchall apology and then use Elizabeth’s reaction to deduce what she was upset about in particular.

People are not experiencing the world with peace and tranquility. Our lives have never before been so free of immediate physical threats, and yet we’ve never felt so threatened. And that’s because, in the course of our normal everyday lives, with all the responsibilities of work and family, amid the churn of information and news and trends and spin, with the millions of choices available to us, with all the horrors of the world served up to us every second on TV and computers and phones, we mostly just feel anxious, worried, precarious, vulnerable—basically the same emotions we would feel if there really was a famine, or if we really were being hunted.

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,

THE SIX-HOUR SEMINAR that Jack was forced to attend at the beginning of each new semester had been called Orientation until a few years ago, when the university changed the seminar’s name to Onboarding. The name change coincided with a revamp of the orientation curriculum, which had bloated into this all-day human resources horror during which members of the HR team attempted, at unmerciful length, to “socialize the mission statement’s DNA,” is how they put it. They were referring to the many-planked mission statement the university had spent two years and countless consultant dollars developing in a campus-wide effort to express everything the university did in just one sentence. This was the brainchild of the university’s new CFO, who told the faculty in all seriousness that developing a mission statement that captured everything the university did in just one sentence was akin to their “moonshot,” and he asked for their help in this endeavor “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” Why the university needed to corral its collective intelligence and creativity and energy for the task of expressing everything it did in just one sentence was a mystery to most faculty, but this did not stop their administrator bosses from enthusiastically assigning them to “mission statement working groups” so that they could have a voice (unpaid) in developing this one magical sentence, this one statement that would distill everything everyone did into a phrase ideally small enough for letterhead.

He does not know that Facebook is monitoring him and spying on him and even listening to him more or less constantly, nor does he believe it when he’s told this very thing by Jack, that he is being secretly watched by Facebook. This comes in the form of a long private letter that Jack has composed pleading with his father to stop spending so much time with all these conspiracies, that none of them are true, that Lawrence is getting unnecessarily worked up and angry about nothing, that there are no shadowy cabals secretly plotting against the world, and what’s happening here is actually just that a small group of engineers in Silicon Valley have built moneymaking algorithms that are now optimizing, that what Lawrence is seeing is not reality but rather an algorithmic abstraction of reality that sits invisibly atop reality like a kind of distortion field.

Most of their discussions centred on how people were generally, universally crazy. Or a whole lot crazier than her classes in economics had led Elizabeth to believe. In the world of economics, humans were rational agents, doggedly and intelligently pursuing their own self-interest. In Sanborne's world, humans were insane, suffering all sorts of delusions, prey to the smallest stimuli, easily tricked, contradictory, self-sabotaging, untrustworthy, malleable, impulsive, acting according to motivations unknown even to themselves, making everyone miserable. The world described in a microeconomics textbook was a rational and organized pursuit of maximized happiness. What Sanborne offered was a world in which happiness was a satisfying fiction set atop the mind's darker motivations, which accorded pretty well with Elizabeth's own observations, her bafflement at people's messy, careless, inconsistent affections.

A book is a real object, sure, but the form of the book is artifice, a product of industrial mercantile nations nurturing good little middle-class consumers, sheep who learned to do what they were told: turn the page, turn the page, turn the page. Hypertext, on the other hand, presents an antiauthoritarian alternative. Readers of hypertext aren’t passive consumers. They’re creators.” “And what do they create?” “Meaning. People can do what they want in a hypertext. There isn’t an overbearing author telling them what to think. They have the freedom to think what they will. What you have to understand is that information technologies are really just vessels for ideology. Print books are authoritarian and fascist. Hypertexts are liberating and empowering. I’m telling you, dude, traditional storytelling is dying. In the future, all the important literature will be hypertext.” “And this is what the World Wide Web is for?” Jack said. “Hypertext?” “The web seems good for two primary things, and the second is hypertext.” “What’s the first?” “Pornography.” “There’s pornography on the web?

If you cling too hard to what you want to see, you miss what is already there.

sitting leprously alone or asking to join a group—“Can I sit here?”—thereby risking public rejection and eternal humiliation. The feeling of this—it was so easy to summon it, in her body, it was still so close to the surface—the feeling was like that of her car hydroplaning on a wet road, that sensation when you first lose control and all your muscles tighten and harden and hunch up

Describe the first object you ever loved,” she asks. And then: “Tell me about a time when you were laughed at in public.” And: “When did you last cry in front of another person?” And so on: “Describe the moment in your life when you were most afraid.” “Do you have a hunch about how you’re going to die?” “If you died tonight, what would be your biggest regret?” “Describe exactly what you find most physically attractive about me.

But why even get married in the first place? If you’re so against it?” “Because we have two competing impulses alive within us: the need for novelty and the need for stability. It’s this constant push-pull. When I have too many hookups, I crave stability. When I have too many nights chilling on the couch, I crave novelty. The key is to celebrate the contradiction.

between ourselves and the world are a million stories, and if we don’t know which among them are true, we might as well try out those that are most humane, most generous, most beautiful, most loving.

Their whole project seemed snotty to her. Arrogant. Sanctimonious. Even sort of grossly entitled: that was a pre-globalized world, a pre-9/11 world, a pre–housing bubble world, a world before the Great Recession, when they all sort of understood implicitly that however much they resented and resisted the mass economy, they would also have little trouble eventually finding a job and a livelihood within it. It made Elizabeth think that maybe those friends who’d migrated to the suburbs were in fact the most enlightened ones. They’d been the first to see through the delusion.

Cutie van der Waals, Mr. Smooth Boots, and the names of her four favorite bone-white minerals: pandermite, carnallite, aphrodite, and pearl. They connect their last names and applaud the performance of the hyphen, then add even more names to their names, toss on things like “Madame” and “Esquire,” toss on weird phrases like “Her Regal Excellency” and “Chancellor of the Exchequer

That love is both part of the body and separate from the body. It’s intrinsic to us but also divisible from us.

So when you’re dreaming, what you’re actually seeing is your soul out wandering. Sometimes your soul is a bird, flying around, or sometimes it’s a mouse. It takes the form of an animal and explores.

It will be a kind of glue between them, the fellowship of shared experience, the camaraderie of so many late nights,

She was aware that one’s self could change and evolve like that, and so it was not unimaginable that she was now evolving again, becoming someone new: a parent, maybe, a mother.

when in fact the placebo effect was elicited by the strong sense of significance and substance surrounding the placebo itself: the context, story, ritual, metaphor, and beliefs associated with the placebo. The placebo effect was, in fact, the brain’s response to finding meaning.

they weren’t creating love, but rather creating the conditions that allowed its expression.

people expressed all sorts of tiny, subconscious behaviors when in the presence of a personality they perceived as larger or more important or more powerful than their own: they angled their shoulders differently, mimicked body language, raised the frequency of their voice by a few hertz, tilted their head down a couple of degrees

the most effective way to approach people with an irrational belief was to rebut that belief from both inside and outside its own frame.

reoriented, unavoidably and involuntarily. She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also

Hypoactive marital attachment disorder.

Things change. That is a given. The real question is how much change is bearable. What you have to ask yourself is how much can your marriage change before it’s no longer fundamentally itself.

Kairos, which is the subjective felt experience of time. Like, a turning point in your life, a moment of truth, an important change, an opportunity, the feeling of the past bursting through to the present. When history slams into the now, that’s a moment of kairos. It’s a communion between the present and the past.

People usually look for new relationships that are antidotes to whatever problems they had in previous relationships,” Kyle said, “but in so doing we often end up, paradoxically, in relationships that have exactly those same problems.

And he wasn’t merely looking at her eyes but actually more like into her eyes or within her eyes, like he was appreciating both the surface of the ocean and the ocean’s floor, simultaneously, such was the quality of his attention.

When you cling too hard to what you want, you miss what’s really there.

She began a mental inventory of all the supporting evidence, all the things she’d done to make life harder:

when there’s an informational vacuum, the mind will naturally rush in to fill it.

High, high in the Chinese hills, there was once a monastery where a distinguished Taoist guru lived with his disciples. In the evenings the monks would gather in the Great Hall to listen to their leader’s teachings and to meditate. But there was a stray cat that had adopted the monastery, and each evening it would follow the monks into the hall. It would mewl, scratch, and generally be annoying throughout their silent meditation. It did this every night until the great teacher became so irritated by it that he told his followers to put a collar on the cat and tether it on the far side of the monastery each evening. This worked well and, for a while, teacher, cat and monks all went through their nightly routine. One day, the learned teacher died. But the monks continued to tie up the cat each evening. More years passed. And eventually the cat died. So the monks went down to the nearest village, found a replacement cat, and tied it up each evening instead. Two centuries later, religious scholars write learned essays on the importance of tying up a cat prior to evening meditation. This is how much of cricket works.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

It became a sort of metaphor for everything she and Jack had done wrong in their long relationship. They did not solve their problems; they merely became accustomed to them.

Yes, of course, the U-shaped curve—she’d been mentioning that a lot lately, whenever Jack prodded her in this way. It was a phenomenon well known among certain economists and behavioral psychologists, that happiness, in general, over a lifetime, tended to follow a familiar pattern: people were most happy when they were young and when they were old, and least happy in the middle. It seemed that happiness spiked around age twenty, spiked again around age sixty, but bottomed out in between, which was where Jack and Elizabeth now found themselves, at the bottom of that curve, in midlife, a period that was notable not for its well-publicized “crisis” (actually a pretty rare phenomenon—only 10 percent of people reported having one) but for its slow ebb into a quiet and often befuddling restlessness and dissatisfaction. This was, Elizabeth insisted, a universal constant: the U-shaped curve pertained to both men and women, both the married and unmarried, the rich and poor, the employed and unemployed, the educated and uneducated, the parents and the child-free, in every country, every culture, every ethnicity, for all the decades that researchers had done this work—the science showed that people in midlife were carrying around with them, all the time, a feeling that was, statistically speaking, the equivalent of someone close to them having recently died. That’s how it felt, she said, that’s how far you were from your early-twenties peak, according to objective measures of well-being. Elizabeth suspected it had something to do with biology, natural selection, evolutionary pressures millions of years ago, as it had been recently shown by primatologists that great apes also experienced the exact same happiness curve, which suggested that this particular midlife sadness must have provided some kind of prehistoric advantage, must have helped our ancient primate ancestors survive. Perhaps, Elizabeth hypothesized, it was because the most vulnerable members of any troop were the young and the old, and so it was important

The assigned activity during lunch was a getting-to-know-you game where each person had to describe their “life’s work,” and describe it in the way they would describe it to a normal, nonacademic “regular guy on the street,” is how it was explained by the university’s CFO, a man with a degree in, seriously, just “Business,” who thought it was really important that academics step out of their ivory towers and connect with nonelite, normal, salt-of-the-earth-type folks.

it was just that their attention had been seized, their love redirected, the purpose of each day reoriented, unavoidably and involuntarily. She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also somehow deeply comforting. It was both soul-devouring and soul-filling.

Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.

Eventually he agreed, and when Toby was born, Elizabeth came to finally understand exactly where all her friends had gone. She was astounded by how her priorities shifted, all at once, immediately, how any task other than keeping Toby safe, keeping Toby healthy, seemed like a diversion, or an interruption. She understood with some remorse that if one of her childless friends insisted on coming over during bedtime for martinis and conversation, it wouldn’t feel exactly unwelcome, but it would feel a little irrelevant. Like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain but then stopping for tea. She realized that her old friends had not abandoned her, or at least had not done so in any volitional way; it was just that their attention had been seized, their love redirected, the purpose of each day reoriented, unavoidably and involuntarily. She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also somehow deeply comforting. It was both soul-devouring and soul-filling.

But he couldn’t catch anyone’s eye because, he had noticed, when people were at the gym, they did not tarry. They were not sociable, nor approachable. The women especially, who, when they walked from station to station, stared so hard at the floor it was like they were trying to crack the concrete with their minds. When people at the gym exercised, they did so with expressions of deep inner focus and concentration. When they rested, they looked at their devices. And the entire time they were in the gym, they wore headphones, some of them DJ-huge.

showed that placebos sometimes had actual physical manifestations. For example, people exposed to fake poison ivy developed real rashes (Barber, 1978). And people given fake caffeine experienced real heart-rate jolts (Flaten & Blumenthal, 1999). And if you told blue-collar workers that what they did at their jobs counted as “intensive exercise,” the workers would begin to slim down and get stronger without actually changing one thing about their lifestyle (Crum & Langer, 2007). And while the neurobiological mechanism for all this was still a bit murky, everyone understood that the key to placebo’s strange and remarkable effectiveness was belief.

Don’t forget to subscribe,” she whispered softly, near his ear.

Hüsker Dü—pronouncing this last one so exactingly that she could actually hear the umlauts

epistemic

the future was unresolved, and that was fine. Maybe that’s what true love actually was: an embrace of the chaotic unfolding. And

listicles

No, the way she said goodbye to him each night was the way everyone signed off on all of the YouTube channels he followed, which Toby found weirdly comforting: “Don’t forget to subscribe,” she whispered softly, near his ear. “Don’t forget to subscribe,” he said, facedown, his words muffled

Beauty, he tells his students, is a constructed, not intrinsic, condition. The things we think are beautiful are only the things that have been depicted beautifully.

hypertext didn’t disrupt literature. No, it disrupted reality. That’s what Jack thinks when he sees his father’s lunacy: The actual world has become one big hypertext, and nobody knows how to read it. It’s a free-for-all where people build whatever story they want out of the world’s innumerable available scraps.