It was equally distressing for Mooallem not to know everything. He wasn’t a historian; he was a reporter. Normally, he learned about people by talking to them and observing their lives for himself, often for days at a time. Now he was forced to cobble together a portrait of Genie, and a timeline of those first three days after the quake, from an array of discrete and disjointed perspectives, all preserved, statically, on paper. He had no way to ask those people questions, couldn’t always flesh out the context connecting their stories or probe any inferences or contradictions that arose in
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Deep play
