“The thinnest tendrils of dawn are creeping in from the east. People in New York are softly starting to tweet.”

“The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk.”

“Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.”

“So I switch to my MacBook and make my rounds: news sites, blogs, tweets. I scroll back to find the conversations that happened without me during the day. When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it’s actually you that’s time-shifted?”

“Then: I google "time-series visualization" and start work on a new version of my model, thinking that maybe I can impress her with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.”

“You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.”

“...I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.”