How to Be Alone

by Jonathan Franzen

Shenk likens the disease to a prism that refracts death into a spectrum of its otherwise tightly conjoined parts—death of autonomy, death of memory, death of self-consciousness, death of personality, death of body—

(It’s the kind of liberty you take with the desk of a child or a dead person.)

salespeople unilaterally address customers by their first name,

annoys me too.

A genuine public space is a place where every citizen is welcome to be present and where the purely private is excluded or restricted.

Anthony Lane, in a pair of recent essays in The New Yorker, has demonstrated that while most of the novels on the contemporary best-seller list are vapid, predictable, and badly written, the best-sellers of fifty years ago were also vapid, predictable, and badly written.

once you enter the world of postal salaries and benefits it’s hard to leave, even if you hate it.

just like government workers in Brazil

“The people who’ve been promoted above us, we’ve been asked by management to train.”

that's pretty common, actually.

twenty thousand pieces of mail

wow

The postal family tells me that the incident was an anomaly.

postal family haha

if the country didn’t generally endorse the idea of corporations whose ultimate responsibility is not to society but to the bottom line.

At the closest good supermarket and the closest mall, both of which are in mixed neighborhoods, you will rarely see a white shopper from Chestnut Hill. When I shopped at these places I was struck by the exemplary warmth and courtesy with which I was treated. Knowing that a black male shopper at a predominantly white mall or supermarket would probably have had quite a different experience, I couldn’t help wondering whether the courtesy wasn’t meant to be literally exemplary.

the most reliable measure of a city’s vitality is whether rich people are willing to live in the center of it. Once

It may be true that each of the individuals in our nation’s prisons represents a story of personal irresponsibility. But the whole of a million and a half of these stories is greater than the sum of its parts. The whole is political, and Levasseur and Shakur are the voice of the statistics. They are saying, Let’s think about what a million and a half men in jail might imply about the way we do business.

its only aesthetic weakness, really, is that much of it is repetitive, incoherent, and insanely boring.

funny

literary difficulty can operate as a smoke screen for an author who has nothing interesting, wise, or entertaining to say.

harsh!