Longreads

On the fate of print books in the digital age:

"People of the book, such as I, not only believe that the replacement of the page by the screen will alter human character, thin it out, empty it of depth, but secretly hope this happens. A deterioration in human character consequent upon the demise of the book will be, for the inveterate reader, an apologia pro vita sua. For we who have spent so much of our lives with, and even for books secretly derived a sense of moral superiority from having done so. This is obvious from the fact that no one says “Young people nowadays do not read” in a tone other than of lament or, more usually, moral condemnation. A person who does not read—and for us reading means books—is a mental barbarian, a man who, wittingly or unwittingly, confines himself to his own experience, necessarily an infinitesimal proportion of all possible experiences. He is not only a barbarian, but an egotist."

[Fiction] Julie goes on a midnight ride with her big sister:

"When Tabitha Thatch argued, her little sister Julie always thought about cats. It was rare that Tabitha argued, much more common that she agreed to rules or demands her mother or the world imposed on her, then did the opposite of what she’d agreed to, but when she did argue her jaw relaxed open and her voice, high-pitched and ragged, folded in on itself in a hundred tissue paper layers of connotation, implication, meaning, all of her yowling protest in way you couldn’t ignore. You could listen to Tabitha arguing like a cat for hours; Julie—her own voice like a dog’s, she thought, short and hoarse and barky—had listened to Tabitha for hours. You could listen and you would be struck by how raw and vibrant that voice was, but then you’d realize that Tabitha was just saying she was going to go to the mall and buy Adderall swallow it with beer, then hang around the food court talking about the Misfits with some college kid. In a raw and vibrant and catlike way she’d tell you that and you would believe in her.

"Linda, Tabitha and Julie’s mother, had never been vulnerable to Tabitha’s voice, and Julie had always hated Linda a little for that."