Benjamin Kunkel: Never mind losing your virginity -- what is it like to live with someone? Proust seems to have recognized that domestication, as the technologists call it, was harder to describe than initiation. Most internet users in wealthy countries now pay for web access at a flat monthly rate, and many popular mobile phone subscriptions allow you talk yourself hoarse without incurring surcharges. And if flat rates allow us to be always on, every day more "content" piles on with us. Even now, I guard my solitude jealously enough that I have never owned a mobile phone—a fact that may end up ensuring me more solitude than I like. When I am forced to admit to a fresh acquaintance that I have no mobile number to offer, suspicion of eccentricity or poverty is the most generous response I receive; sometimes I get a look of frank alarm. But it seems I would rather raise a few eyebrows, curse the occasional payphone, and miss out on some parties than to spoil my necessary concentration and even boredom with phone calls I know I couldn't resist fielding or placing.
Lee Siegel: 1. Not everyone has something valuable to say.
2. Few people have anything original to say.
3. Only a handful of people know how to write well.
4. Most people will do almost anything to be liked.
Kunkel: It would be nice to feel that the gratifying shallowness and diversity of digital life can be balanced with fidelity to great and challenging writing and art, that our chatting won't get in the way of our attempted masterpieces. There is no giving up the internet now. No one is stopping you from stopping yourself. It's just that many users of digital communications technology can't stop. An inability to log off is hardly the most destructive habit you could acquire, but it seems unlikely there is any more widespread compulsion among the professional middle-class and their children than lingering online. The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online—but this is boredom on the installment plan, one click a time, and therefore imperceptible.
Matt Knox: It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.
On Walter Benjamin: Long before Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the soul.
William Fleisch: "Comeuppance" uses game theory and evolutionary psychology to explain why people find pleasure in both the happy and tragic lives of fictional characters.
Louis Menand: Other people’s culture wars always look ridiculous.
Jonathan Lethem: I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.
Jonathan Franzen: The technological development that has done lasting harm of real social significance -- the development that, despite the continuing harm it does, you risk ridicule if you publicly complain about today -- is the cell phone.
Francine Prose: Instead of looking at works and point out what is wrong with them, why not look at brilliant works and see how they did it. The advantage of reading widely, as opposed to trying to formulate a series of general rules, is that we learn there are no general rules, only individual examples to help point you in a direction in which you might want to go.
On Lee Siegel: Information, however trustworthy, cannot be equated with knowledge born of reflection.
Sarah Boxer: That the whole culture of linking — composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references — doesn't sit happily in a book.
Stefan Klein: For many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.
Nicolas Rasmussen: When Allen Ginsberg helped open the counterculture's own anti-amphetamine campaign in 1965 under the slogan "speed kills," he wasn't referring just to the drug that so many Americans relied on to keep up. He was also thinking of the demand that amphetamine satisfies. It might be time to think again about heeding his call.
Mark Bittman: Who would say you don’t need time to think, to reflect, to be successful and productive?
Neil Postman: If we had known the impact the motor vehicle would have on life, would we have embraced it so thoroughly?
David Lynch: It's such a sadness. You think you've seen a film on your ... Fucking Telephone. Get real! The phone is ringing! Answer it!
Sam Anderson: Information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt.
Virginia Heffernan: Swampy, boggy, inescapable connectivity: it seems my middle-class existence has stuck me here.
Jan Chipchase: In an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.
William Deresiewicz: There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude.
Mark Twain: When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.
Walter Kirn: To people over a certain age the idea that popular culture is in decline is a comforting one, which may explain its deep appeal. If the new tricks are stupid tricks, then old dogs don't need to learn them. They can go on comfortably sleeping by the fire.
John Lanchester: If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.
Lingering | 
