Sarah Owen

The small town where I grew up has three tracts within it. Staying within your tract is an extreme level of residential stasis, but 30 percent of young adults do just that. By contrast, huge leaps, like my great-grandmother’s from New York to Honolulu or my parents’ from Honolulu to New Hampshire, are extremely uncommon.

Social psychologists have known for decades that people are motivated to work harder when others are watching. When they are observed, people run faster, are more creative, and think harder about problems.

"We are constantly negotiating with the pesky figure of the algorithm, unsure how we would have behaved if we’d been left to our own devices. No wonder we are made anxious"