The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 Quotes

“If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017

“Has our enslavement to dopamine—to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak—made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety”
― Sarah Vowell, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017

“Earlier yet, in 1917, an amateur geologist named Albert E. Knapp claimed to have found a fossilized human footprint from the Triassic period—the imprint of a shoe made of stitched dinosaur hide. This led him to believe that humans and dinosaurs had coexisted in Nevada’s Great Basin 200 million years ago. The New York Times took Knapp’s finding somewhat seriously, as did Nobel Prize-winning Oxford scientist Frederick Soddy, who used it to support his pet theory of a superior race of prehistoric humans that destroyed itself after achieving scientific mastery over atomic energy.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017

“the cheapest, most pleasurable way for a country of strangers to get to know each other and the rest of the world is through reading.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017