She knew precisely who she was and how best to express that self. This was her purpose. Readers adored her because she appeared impervious to insecurity and doubt. Ephron owned her story, then and now. Life gives you a car wreck of a breakup. Here, enjoy my novel. The three potato recipes are gratis.
What is software if not the most consequential form of creation of our time? In fact, it's possible that we cannot come to a full understanding of our time without certain pieces of software. (Can you explain the early 20th century without Tin Lizzie?) I recoil at this phrase, but software—like it or not—has been eating the world. And large language models are coming to eat your lunch.
Hence a critical understanding of software products—ones you spend more time every day on than calling your parents every week—is vital.
You can easily picture yourself riding a bicycle across the sky even though that’s not something that can actually happen. You can envision yourself doing something you’ve never done before – like water skiing – and maybe even imagine a better way to do it than anyone else.
Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that is not present for your senses to detect, or even something that isn’t out there in reality somewhere. Imagination is one of the key abilities that make us human. But where did it come from?
In 1982, San Francisco resident Jane Cryan was looking for a home for herself and her grand piano when she stumbled upon a tiny cottage along 24th Avenue, in the city’s Outer Sunset neighborhood. “There was a refrigerator in the front yard,” says Cryan, “and a feral cat living there with umpteen kittens.” The paint on the cottage’s barn red with white trim exterior was peeling. “It was a disaster,” she says, “and everything I had ever wanted.” Cryan signed the lease that same day. It wasn’t until a month later that Cryan found out she was living in three cobbled-together refugee shacks, the same ones originally built to house displaced San Franciscans after the city’s devastating 1906 earthquake and fire.
How to Be Remembered is an ambitious first novel from the journalist and podcaster Michael Thompson. Its big-hearted conceit is constructed around Tommy, a boy whose entire existence is wiped from the memory of everyone who knows him each year on the fifth of January. Tommy – who is placed into a foster home on the morning of his first birthday when his parents wake to discover a child they don’t remember having crying in their lounge room – is raised (in a way) by Miss Michelle, who runs Milkwood House, colloquially known as the Dairy. Every year Tommy wakes in the Dairy, to an empty room, and descends the stairs rehearsing the script that will ingratiate him back into the lives of his former friends and carer. Surprisingly, that works.
“Users” is not only a book for today or a warning about tomorrow, but a timeless and moving story about fatherhood and one man’s yearning for a more meaningful life.