N of 1

(When I first posted this, back in early September, I broke it into two parts, concerned about the length. That’s bugged me ever since, so this restores it to my original intention)

My n of 1 settles into the big chair.  Smiles around her eyes, eager for whatever comes next.  Not that different from those years ago when she was three and four and five.  I'd hear them, she and her Mom, the red Sorento pulling up in the driveway below my window, our front door opening and closing.  She'd briefly say hello to Nonni and then she'd appear in my study.  It has always been her room as much as mine.  She knows where everything is.

Some months ago, I posted an essay that tried to capture something of the character of the world in which she lives, how she manages the swirling torrent of unbound information.  I’d become fascinated by her apparently healthy and sane relationship with her phone, which seems so contrary to the conventional fussing about kids and screens.  Partly in jest, I decided to design a summer research project – how is it that she manages to be so well-adjusted?  I sketched out a mock proposal:

Concerns about rising levels of mental illness among teens, particularly young women, have led to increasingly strident calls to limit smartphone access by children and teens.  While the statistics are indeed cause for concern, there has been little attention paid to the overwhelming majority of young people who are not experiencing these negative effects.  This project seeks to use one reasonably well adjusted college sophomore (and their circle of friends) as a case study for how they are curating the nonstop bombardment of information that characterizes contemporary society.

I hired Josie.  She is both research assistant and research subject.  My n of 1.¹

She comes over two afternoons a week, picks up lunch along the way.  A sandwich from the Publix deli, or a salad bowl from Cava, or sushi from our favorite Japanese place.  Sometimes it’s a fast food sandwich and fries.  She knows places I’ve never heard of.  While we eat I lay out the day’s plan.  She helps me with chores too difficult for me to manage in my crippled condition. Keeps Sam’s food and water dispensers full, tends to his litter box.  Maybe a load of laundry, takes out my trash.  Keeps my coffee pods and breakfast biscuits organized.  She likes precision.  She likes arranging things.  She has a fine esthetic sense.

She spends some of the time with the ongoing project of cataloging my 50 years of handwritten journals.²   She tapes a tag to each physical volume, giving the inclusive dates.  That becomes the title of record in LibraryThing.  Sometime in the early 2000s I started listing, on the first page of each, the cities I’d taken that volume to.  She includes that in the notes. 

The rest of the afternoon goes to the research project.

Certain things seem to be empirically true.  I’m trying to understand how they weave together.

• She is, to all appearances, a well-adjusted, mentally healthy young adult.  Good grades, active social life.  Describes herself as “optimistic.  A good friend.”

• Her phone is always within reach – she tells me, when I ask, that her screentime app informs her she picks it up some 236 times a day.

• I never feel, when we’re together, that I don’t have her full attention, despite her glances and occasional taps at her phone.

I give her assignments.  Things to read and respond to, that we can use as jumping off points for conversation as I try to see the world as she sees it.  An essay from a young woman in England who’s nostalgic for a past she thinks the smart phone robbed her of.  The Surgeon General’s editorial arguing for social media warning labels.  The Pew study about how bad people are at distinguishing fact statements from opinion statements.  I put the assignments up in a Google doc.  She makes some notes.  And then we talk.  My job is to listen, although inevitably I do most of the talking (she is the most patient person I know). 

She was finding her way around my iPad when she was five.  She got her first phone when she was seven.  So how has she avoided the damage that the pearl-clutchers claim these devices are inflicting on “the children”?

Turns out she has rules.  Norms developed over years.  We decide that her final project for the summer will be some TikTok-ish videos in which she shares some of these rules with an imaginary thirteen or fourteen year old, someone who might not be as optimistic, self-aware, and socially adept as she is.  She settled on four.

Think Before You Post

Unlike Josie, who was born into it, those of us raised in the world of things were unprepared for the online world.  We knew about counting to ten before you spoke in anger.  We all knew the regret from making a remark that was far more cutting than intended, and now couldn’t be taken back.  “Some things are better left unsaid” – a bromide we all knew, regardless of how difficult for some of us to put into practice.  Some of us, at least, had experienced the sick feeling of wishing we hadn’t sent that letter after all, dreading the moment when he or she would read it, wondering if there would be anything we could do to make it right.  If we hadn’t done it ourselves, we knew it as a plot device from novels and movies.

None of that prepared us, in the nineties, for the immediacy of e-mail or the permanent, public nature of it.  We didn’t understand how easy it was to send our snarky comment about one of our colleagues to an entire email list rather than just to the one friend it was intended for.  We didn’t yet realize that the Internet was forever.  We didn’t know about tone, about how easy it was to miss irony and satire, how dumb our own cleverness could make us look to others. 

Our norms emerged slowly, out of painful experience.  “Never put anything in an email that you wouldn’t be willing to see on the front page of the New York Times.” One of my favorites.  Seemed impossible for most of us to adhere to.  We couldn’t close the gap between believing that our private messages were, well, private, and the reality that they are not.³  Our social norms were formed in the world of things and were inadequate.

But our stumbles with email were nothing compared to the brutality that social media encourages.  How did it get so ugly so fast?  What happened to the promise?  Do you remember those years when we believed in the wisdom of the crowd?  When elevating the voices of the voiceless was going to usher in a golden age of true democracy?

Josie doesn’t.  In our fascination with the new shiny thing we didn’t see the thorns.  Josie’s sight is much clearer, her armor buffed and polished.

In her video, she makes it personal.  “Has someone ever done you dirty on social media?”  The impulse is to immediately unleash your own fury back at them.  “Don’t do it!”  She says.  She is emphatic.  Not that it may come back to “bite you in the butt”; it will.  At least sleep on it, she says.  It’ll look different in the morning.  You’ll feel differently.  Her conclusion surprises me (as do many of her conclusions).  “Maybe go talk to the person in person”.  I thought she was going to talk about the nastiness that people turn on the people they don’t know; but when I asked, very early in the project how she dealt with online toxicity, she made a disgusted face.  “I don’t like it.  I swipe past.”

She knows that it's only the people that you have real relationships with that can hurt you.  Those are the ones you need to tend to.  The ones who don’t know you can be ignored.

Set Time Limits

“Scotty!  Time to come down out of the tree!”

That would be my Mom calling me in for dinner.  In the back yard of our house on the Island was a huge maple tree, and one of my favorite spots for reading was high up where the branches combined to make a comfortable (enough) seat.  I suppose I was seven, eight, nine when I’d retreat there after school, or afternoons in the summer.  There was never enough time for reading.

People who don’t read much have always been suspicious of those who do.  In a 16^th century Italian dialogue, one friend chides another,

Will you ever allow yourself to desist from turning your pages day and night, day after day?  What sweet friendship do these books of yours offer that you spend your time with them and become pale, exhausted, consumed, poor, and sickly?⁴

Josie says she spends more time scrolling before bed than she thinks she ought to.  She’ll pick up the phone to look at a couple of funny TikTok videos and whoosh, an hour’s gone by.  She says she still gets enough sleep, so she’s not too worried about it, but she is alert to how absorbing the scrolling can be. (I’m just gonna read one more chapter, thinks ten year old me, one ear cocked to the sound of a parent’s footstep on the stairs). 

“So you need to set limits,” she says.  “So that your time spent scrolling doesn’t get in the way of the other things you have to do.  Set a timer.  Try cutting back by 10%.  When you’re comfortable with that, maybe try a little more”.  We fixate on the addictive quality of the algorithms, which is no doubt true.  But is it a difference in degree or kind?  I remember clicking through the tv channels late at night, unwilling to exert the bit of energy needed to turn the thing off and go to bed.  Springsteen sang about “Fifty-seven channels and nothing on” back when 57 channels was an unimaginable explosion of content.  Clearly the demon device in those days was that remote, which kept me from having to get up and break the spell of the diabolical machine.  Now we blame it on the algorithms, rather than our own weak-kneed inertia.

Nearly Everything You See Online is Edited or Fake

In the days when we had three tv networks (plus tiny PBS) and one or two daily newspapers we knew that there were people who believed strange things.  There were endless convoluted theories about the Kennedy assassination.  Some people believed we’d never landed on the moon.  Evolution was a hotspot for belief and disbelief.  In the American South, a couple generations of revisionist history had many people believing the War Between the States had little to do with slavery.  Scattered around the country in isolated areas were armed enclaves ready to do battle with the government. But beliefs like these were out of the mainstream and most people believed in the mainstream.  We assumed that the newspapers and tv news shows were telling us the truth.  They might make mistakes, but those were honest errors.  Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America.⁵

The mainstream consensus started to crack under the weight of the deceits of the Vietnam War, but habits of belief are hard to break.  We transferred our belief in veracity to the internet.  Even now, in our world of fact-checkers and constant accusations of lies and misinformation, we can’t quite shake ourselves of the notion that there is an underlying stratum of truth and if only we can keep whacking away at the untruths, we (and our blinkered antagonists) will be able to see reality for what it really is.  This is just as true for the followers of Q and the defenders of Donald Trump as it is for those who see themselves as firmly rooted in the rationality of the Enlightenment.

I turn to my n of 1. “One of the big concerns that people have with phones, and this is for girls particularly, is that you compare yourselves to what you see online and end up feeling terribly inadequate.  Does that ever happen to you?”

“It did some when I was in middle school, but then I realized that everything you see is either edited or fake.  So there’s no point in comparing yourself.  So I don’t.”

“But if everything is fake, how do you figure out what’s true?”

“I ask my Mom.  Or you guys.⁶  Like when I was worried about the demonstrations on campus, I called you to explain what was going on.”

This is a transition that’s been very hard for older people to make.  We’re so focused on trying to identify and combat misinformation.  Josie starts from the assumption that it’s all misinformation, so she’s relieved of that burden.  When she needs to have something verified, she goes to the people that she knows and trusts.  This seems terribly risky to me, but it makes sense.  I grew up in the days when you relied on experts to analyze truth and falsity.  But on the internet expertise has been replaced by persuasion.  You need to recognize that you’re being manipulated at every turn.  Then you’re better able to arm yourself against it.  Sharp talking influencers are worth listening to, but you don’t trust them. Trust is precious. You don’t want to waste it.

Find A Community You Can Trust

Isn’t the question of trust the pre-eminent conundrum of the our age?  How many kids have fallen into an online community that they trusted, even though it was full of conspiracy theorists and anti-government goons?   Think of how many people trust Donald Trump!

Once again, I had it all wrong.  Josie’s community, the people online in the snapchat groups that she is in almost constant contact with (as she picks up her phone 236 times a day) are nearly all people that she has developed trusted relationships with offline.  People she became friends with in gymnastics from the time she was three, and then all through her school years.  People they’ve introduced her to.  (Her boyfriend is a friend of a friend who she met at a gathering of friends.)  What the phone gives her is a way to keep these relationships vivid, even through all of the moves and life changes that she and her friends have gone through.  My past is full of people that I was once extremely close to, but lost touch with as the barriers of distance became too much for occasional letters and phone calls to overcome.

This follows seamlessly from her distrust of everything she sees online.  Of course she wouldn’t invest trust in someone she’d never actually met.  How foolish is that, when no matter what somebody professes there’s always someone arguing against it.  Better to say Build a community you can trust.

This resistance to the algorithms, this highly tuned skepticism, this rootedness in her offline relationships, were all unexpected.  She is at ease with the online world, clear-eyed about its dangers, confident in her use of it all.  She says it’s easier for her because she grew up with her phone.  It was never a fancy new gadget shifting the ways she interacted with the world.  She has antibodies that us older folks never had a chance to develop.  We’re as vulnerable to the depredations of the internet as the Plains Indians were to smallpox.  She’s made of tougher stuff.

The four of us are in a Life360⁷ group.  “Does it ever bother you that your Mom, and Nonni and me, always know where you are?”

“No.  I mean, if I thought she was stalking me, or trying to control where I go...  But she trusts me.  She knows I’m not going to go places I shouldn’t.”

Trust.  My Mom told me one time, in my late teens, that she and Dad had to trust that they’d done a good enough job of raising us that when we went out we wouldn’t do things that would get us hurt or in trouble. 

“I’m not going to pry for specifics, but do you have any big secrets that you keep from your Mom?”

She thinks about it.  “No, not really.  I tell her pretty much everything.”

“And do you think that’s typical for people your age?”

“The people I hang out with?  Pretty much.  People my age in general?  Maybe half and half.”

My Mom and I were always close, the spring leading up to my 19^th summer in particular.  She was taking classes at Fox Valley⁸ as well, working on her bachelor’s degree in education and several days each week our class schedules meshed and we’d drive over together.  I was taking a creative writing class, an art appreciation class that had a huge impact on me, piano, music theory.  I read William James Varieties of Religious Experience, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.  We’d talk philosophy and literature while we had sandwiches in the little cafeteria. I’m sure we were closer and shared more than most nineteen year old men and their mothers in our little Wisconsin town.

But there were huge chunks of my realities that I told her nothing about.  The studious nerd that she knew was certainly genuine and she saw some of the guitar player.  Surely she assumed I was sexually active and suspected I was dabbling in drugs (small town America in 1975), but she wouldn’t have guessed the degree of promiscuity, the daily marijuana, frequent psychedelics, occasional pills and those few experiments with narcotics.  She’d told me more than once that there were things about my life she didn’t need to know.  Whatever she might imagine I was doing or not doing she had to rely on trust and hope to keep at bay the fear that I’d end up doing things that would upend my life, or end it altogether.

Marian is involved in every aspect of Josie’s life.  The immediacy of their contact still startles me, that we’ll be discussing something and she says, “Let me ask my Mom” and she grabs her phone and does and Marian responds.  As if one of them is just chiming into the conversation from the other room.  It’s always on.

But their reality belies the helicoptering stereotype.  Ever since Josie was small I’ve watched her Mom carefully, insistently, push her beyond her comfort zone.  We were at a friend’s house one afternoon, just the three of us, to use the pool.  Josie was learning to swim, wailing and crying that she couldn’t do it, couldn’t get all the way to the other side.  Her Mom insisted.  I would’ve given in, but “Mommy makes the rules” and I stayed quiet, aching with Josie’s tears.  She slapped her hand on the far wall and burst into a smile, her Mom gathered her up in a towel telling her how wonderful she is.  Both of them proud and delighted.  Good thing it wasn’t up to me.

In toddler gymnastics, Josie excelled.  And I’d see the same thing when they were at our house and Josie was conditioning.  She’s doing splits and stretches and there’s more whimpering and wailing that it hurts, that she can’t do it, but her Mom won’t give in.  I ache for the kid’s misery but I’ve learned to trust the Mom.  I see that she never pushes the kid beyond what she can do, but never lets her get away with less than she’s capable of.  And Josie responds to the pressure.  It’s clear that’s what she needs.  Parallel to the push, there’s always the reality check – are you sure this is what you want to do?  And Marian seems to know just where the line is.  It’s a mystery to me, but she’s always had a magic touch with children. 

I’ve watched her calm screaming babies on airplanes, find the missing toddler at DisneyWorld just before the mother goes into full-blown panic, gently push and prod the special needs child to do more than the parent knew they could, back when she was managing her Gymboree or coaching toddler gymnastics.  In the late 1990s she and I did some duet gigs, me on acoustic guitar and both of us on vocals.  The year we played a summer festival in the little Alabama town where she was going to college, we walked across the grounds to the stage and I swear every person under three feet tall in the place came running up to her, Mimi! Mimi!  It happens to her even now when she runs into a kid, now a high school or college student, or a parent of one, who thanks her for what she did for the child was back when.  I came to understand that Marian sees babies and toddlers and small children as fully formed human beings, albeit with little experience and limited musculoskeletal development.  She takes them seriously, tunes into their brightness, and has a fine sense of how much more capable small kids are than most adults appreciate, how much they are aware of, how much they are affected by attention and neglect.  To watch Marian with Josie was a flower of mysteries unfolding and blooming. 

Marian taught her about “restaurant voice” before she could talk.  We had some favorites, places where we were known, where they probably would’ve put up with more rambunctiousness from the kid, but Marian wouldn’t allow it.  It astonished me how the toddler would start to fuss and Marian would put her hand on the table, lean in and whisper “restaurant voice” and Josie’s volume would drop.  “I didn’t know you could do that with little kids!” I’d say.  Marian would laugh at my ignorance.

Family dinners at our house were always at the dining room table, always nice tableware.  Conversation involved all of us.  After the meal, if she got bored, she might go to the living room to play.  She’d appear engrossed in her trains or her books or her little castles but I knew she was always listening and observing.  Once in a while I’d catch her eye and the glances would say that she knew that I knew that she knew.  As time passed, and we got our phones, they were not allowed at the table.

Josie’s had a fraught relationship with her Dad, who she did not meet until after her fourth birthday.  Then it was every other weekend at his house and he was adamant about “his time”.  The Court insisted that he allow her to go to her gymnastics meets, which he grudgingly accepted, but in the narrowest terms.  We were in Atlanta on one of his weekends.  Nonni and I had agreed to drive her to his house near Birmingham after the meet on Saturday because her Mom had to stay over to coach on Sunday morning.  But when the time came, Josie wanted to stay that one more night to watch the next morning’s competitions.  She pleaded with her Mom to make her Dad say yes.  But M said, “You’re going to have to be the one to ask him.”  More pleading.  More Mom standing her ground.  So she did, and of course he said no, insisting that this was “family time” and he’d already given up a day.  It’s a three hour drive.  She whimpered in the back seat for a while, then was quiet and I’d watch her bereft face, anguished in the rearview.  We pulled into the driveway after dark.  Nonni asked if she wanted one of us to walk her to the door.  “No, I got this.”  She got out of the car, settled her backpack, took a deep breath.  She got to the door and we could see her paste her smile on just before she rang the bell.  I’d seen that move before.  She was two weeks shy of eleven.

Hillary was right when she said “it takes a village”.  Josie was four and increasingly curious about family arrangements.  This was just before her Dad entered her life.  “So Kai has a Mommy and a Daddy,” she said thoughtfully one time when I was strapping her into her car seat, referencing one of her friends.  “Well, I’ve got a Mommy and a Nonni and a Nonai and a Queenie and Bispo⁹...  I’ve got lots of ‘em!”  She had great counselors in daycare, great coaches, excellent teachers in her first several years of school.  She knows that the unhappy relationship with her Dad has had a negative impact (e.g., in her conflict avoidance), but says she doesn’t feel damaged by it.  She always had so many smart and caring adults around to rely on. 

Nobody is guaranteed a healthy happy life and so often parents try to do everything right and their kids still suffer.  In her wonderfully sane and pragmatic newsletter Technosapiens, Jackie Nesi points out that it’s teens who are already struggling in social situations, already engaging in risky behavior, already wrestling with emotional issues who are more likely to have problems with social media and what they encounter online.  It’s the totality of how children are treated, the context within which their phone use takes place that gets lost when we demonize those little pocket computers.  I think often of a bored little boy we saw one day in a restaurant, sad face illumined by the glow from his dad’s phone as he leans against the man’s shoulder.  A little while ago he was happily engaged in conversation with the four adults at the table, but one by one they turned their attention to their phones, making it quite clear to him what their priorities are.

We’re coming to the end of the summer.  Next week she’ll move into her first apartment. 

“It seems to me that people my age don’t spend enough time listening to people your age.”¹⁰

“No, they don’t,” she says, her voice flat and firm. 

If we did, we might be less arrogant with our presumptions.

She is comfortable in her world in a way that I never could be, but I understand it a little better now.  Hers is an immediacy that is alien to me. The people she loves are never more than a fingertap away.  Same with her favorite stores.  Like the fish who knows nothing of water, she moves through the online eddies and turbulence at ease in her element.  I need a wetsuit and extra tanks of air.

The constraints of time and space that were fundamental for me have been breached. The ways that we acquire and organize and accumulate knowledge have been exploded, turned inside out.  For all of recorded history prior to the 1990s, information was stored in physical objects, its storage and retrieval determined by the limitations of the physical world.  Think of a library as a nest of systems designed to keep track of the location and movement of those physical embodiments of information, its catalogs and indexes describing, sometimes minutely, but never completely, the information each object contains.  The Sumerian scribes started it, figuring out how to arrange the clay tablets on which they noted the season’s beer production.  Over centuries people developed fabulous systems, but until the 20^th century none of our brilliant inventions could eliminate the need to physically go to where a document or record was, or figure out how to have it brought to you.¹¹ 

I’ve been reading Flannery O’Connor’s letters to A.  Late 1950s.  Rural Georgia.  Much of their correspondence involves sending books and copies of articles back and forth, querying librarians about whether such and such a volume is available.  In one letter, O’Connor tells A that she’s sending along an article that another friend had sent her – she’s sure he wouldn’t mind.  A letter or two later she’s reminding A to send it back and we read between the lines that he may have minded after all.  Each copy was precious.  My own files from the ‘70s and ‘80s are stuffed with articles torn from magazines or photocopied at ten cents a page.

In the unbound¹² of the digital world those of us who grew up only (or merely mostly) in the world of things sputter and gasp in the flood.  The algorithms sweep us into new streams supposedly connected to other streams we’ve been in, but this doesn’t give us what we need, and the tools and systems that we’ve so finely honed to give us mastery in the physical world are mostly useless.  How did we get here?  What do we do?  How can we tame the flood?  Thirty-five years of the World Wide Web, fifty years after conceptualizing the internet, and we’re still struggling with how to come to grips with its strangeness.

So I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on those who focus on the loss, who create an idealized fantasy of the paradise of childhood back before phones, when children played freely in the neighborhood, walked to the corner grocery store by themselves, took the streetcar on their own, learning resilience and the skills for solving their own problems.  They’ve neatly excised the memories of the isolation, abuse, and loneliness that were very much the reality for just as many kids in those days.  They struggle to develop good habits for their own phone use and when they fail and their kids emulate their behaviors they blame the phones, and do what they can to keep them out of the hands of “the children”.  Taking the phone away from a struggling kid is a poor band aid; taking the phones away from all kids, because some are struggling is foolish.  It sadly reminds me of the Moms for Liberty attacking school and public libraries in the forlorn hope of protecting their children's "innocence" by keeping them ignorant of the magnificently terrifying realities of sex and gender. As if they could prop up the angel of history and stand fast against the terrible strangeness of this world.  And when those kids finally do gain access to the coveted device, won’t they be eager to explore every forbidden nook and crook and cranny of this fabulously strange world they’ve been barred from their entire life.

It’s not strange for Josie.  The phone’s not compelling – it’s too familiar.  Mundane.  This is the way the world’s always been. Her phone’s a handy device for connecting her to the world, but nothing special.  When I started the project I wanted to learn how she moves back and forth between the physical world and the digital.  I’ve come to understand that she doesn’t see that dichotomy at all.  She is firmly rooted in the physical world.  The phone lets her expand that world, make it bigger and more interconnected.  But her big issues are the same ones people have always faced.  Living on her own is challenging and exciting, relationships are hard, heartbreak is inevitable, joy blooms when you least expect it, the future is a mystery.  She’d like one day to have a job she enjoys, some kids, a nice house.  She says she has days when if she doesn't stay focused on what's right in front of her "my head would explode".  The usual stuff.  Not strange at all.

1. I explained to her that the convention when reporting the results of a survey (for example) is to refer to the n of x when indicating how many subjects answered a particular question.  I was unaware at the time that there is a particular type of clinical trial called N of 1.  This isn’t that.

2. 167 volumes so far, going back to 1972 – there are many more to go.

3. It was 1999 when the CEO of Sun Microsystems said, “You have zero privacy anyway.  Get over it.”  We didn’t want to believe it then and we continue to battle, fruitlessly, against it even now.

4. Quoted in “Livelier Than the Living” by Catherine Nicholson, New York Review of Books, June 20, 2024.

5. I haven’t asked, but chances are good that Josie has never heard of Walter Cronkite.  Neither, I suppose, have an increasing number of readers of these essays.

6. That would be Nonni and me.  “Mommy, Josie, Nonni, Nonai”.  The family refrain since she could talk.  We were in a hotel in Maui, getting ready to go out.  She was at the door, impatient as we gathered our things.  “Go ahead,” I said.  “We’ll meet you at the elevator.”  “I can’t go out there without a parent,” she says, as if I’m being an idiot.  “And who are your parents,” I ask, amused.  She gives me the withering look only a four year old can train on adults, encompassing the three of us, “You guys.”  Of course.

7. An app that enable members of the group to track the others’ movements.  Actually, you’re tracking where the phone is – which, of course, is nearly the same thing.

8. The 2-year university extension campus near us.

9. Our best friends, who assumed the roles of additional grandparents.

10. When I say “my age” I’m including people several decades younger.  It’s hard for me to internalize how old I am.   Josie and I’ve stopped referring to the labelled generations.  She sees too many differences between herself and people even five years older to feel that “Generation Z” describes anything meaningful.

11. From the middle of the 20^th century, radio and television began to shift the paradigm, but storage and preservation still required a physical medium.

12. I will be forever grateful to Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness for blowing my mind with the image of the unbound in the Library’s basement bindery.