Jennifer Egan

Thirty-three is still young enough to register as “young.”

Registering as “young” is especially welcome to those who may not register as “young” much longer.

My dad was a big proponent of Own Your Unconscious when it first came out, in 2016; he’d gotten to know Bix Bouton, who invented it. I had no interest in externalizing my consciousness to a Mandala Cube and revisiting my memories, or—worse—filling in what I’d managed to forget.

In the thirteen years since Own Your Unconscious had been released, one of its ancillary features—the Collective Consciousness—had gradually become central. By uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online “collective,” you gained proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same.

Mandala’s MemoryShopTM only really works for recent traumas: You externalize the portion of your memory containing the “event” and then reinternalize it with that part erased, overriding the original.

ix wrote that it was his memory of Rob, and that morning, and those years—his difficulty remembering them—that first spurred him to try to mass-produce a memory externalization device.

If a two-person conversation remains awkward for eight lines of speech—four lines each, not counting salutations—it has an 80 percent chance of remaining awkward, whereas if a conversation becomes natural within those first eight lines of speech, it is likely to remain so, and—surprisingly—to leave an impression of naturalness despite up to ten additional awkward lines

Her goal was not (she insisted) to locate the descendants of Fortunata’s original subjects but to test and strengthen a theory she was developing about human “affinities,” or what made people like and trust one another.

Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. Why could nobody see this?

Patterns of Affinity introduces, with elegant simplicity, formulas for predicting human inclinations. In order to work, the algorithms require intimate knowledge of the individuals in question: a breadth of information that our mother could acquire only in a remote, insular community where the history of each member was known to all the rest. At the book’s conclusion, she speculates that her formulas’ predictive powers could, theoretically, be applied to people living in a complex, mobile environment … but doing so would require exhaustive personal information that would be impossible to acquire in a modern setting without posing an array of intrusive questions whose answers few people, if any, would be willing to supply.

She never once spoke our names in public or acknowledged, even to us, that we’d made a tragedy of her career by perverting her theory to bring about the end of private life.