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.

"the percentage of Americans working outdoors fell from 90 percent at the beginning of the 19th century to less than 20 percent at the close of the 20th century."

English soccer club Manchester City will keep track of its fans’ biometrics using connected scarf embedded with a biosensor to “get a better understanding of the emotion at the heart of the world’s beautiful game.”

“What’s aspirational has changed,” says Beth McGroarty, research director at the nonprofit Global Wellness Institute. Pressures to be perfectly happy, beautiful, and “healthy” are being replaced with a more realistic, relaxed, and less consumerist culture.

People understand things through narratives, including the future. Everyone is the science fiction writer of their own life. When hoping for a good life, and thinking about what might bring that about, we are utopian writers; when fearful that bad things will happen, we are dystopian writers.