you were just another cog, just the smallest possible pinion in the engine of global progress, one of mass culture’s million tiny underwriters, dispersing risk.” “And how was I doing that, exactly?” “It was your whole starving artist ethos, that whole rebel-without-a-cause motif. Back then, we really believed that the worst person in the entire sou

Turns out, if all your companionship and social capital derives from being an important artist, it is frightfully easy to decide that you are one.

Elizabeth called this phenomenon the “meaning effect,” a term she much preferred to “placebo effect.” Because to say that these effects arose from placebo implied that they arose from nothing—for that’s what placebo traditionally was, an inert substance, literally and intentionally useless—when in fact the placebo effect was elicited by the strong

“You know, when I was young,” Jack said, “none of my friends wanted corporate sponsorship.” “Why?” “They called it selling out. It meant you were fake.” Toby snorted. “That’s dumb.” “You think so?” “It doesn’t mean you’re fake. It means you’re good.”

This is what it felt like to not belong: the anxiety, the constant low-level wariness, trying to avoid that shame Jack felt when it was revealed to him that he’d been doing something horribly crude, or thinking something horribly shallow. Like this photograph, which was apparently perpetuating violent American dominance, and here he’d thought it wa

Whereas most people his age found it pleasant or amusing to reconnect with the long-lost friends now finding each other on Facebook, Jack experienced this same phenomenon as a kind of deep threat. In Chicago, he is not the same person he was in Kansas—he has tattooed his body and changed his whole persona and walled off that part of his personal st

Jack means it to be a lesson on the difference between reality and the representation of reality. Beauty, he tells his students, is a constructed, not intrinsic, condition. The things we think are beautiful are only the things that have been depicted beautifully. And if it’s not depicted, it’s not seen. It never enters the imagination. It becomes a

Elizabeth had never once set foot in Park Shore, Illinois, and when she’d first asked Benjamin what the place was like, he’d described it as “the confluence of real estate’s three magic l’s.” “And what are the three magic l’s?” she’d asked. “Liberal, leafy, and loaded.”

she got up and pulled the covers over him and kissed him on the forehead and said her customary farewell, which was not “Good night” or “Sweet dreams” or anything like that. Those tended to agitate Toby, who generally considered nighttime to be scary and treacherous. No, the way she said goodbye to him each night was the way everyone signed off on