The answers were maddeningly absent—it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.

The music industry is an interesting lens through which to look at change, because it has had such a difficult time adjusting to the digital age.

some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.

Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.

I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, I'm going to ace this. It's just not who I am.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?