THE PART I EDITED OUT

T E L E D E N S I T Y *

“About 1893, the country leading the world in telephones per 100 persons (teledensity) was Sweden.”

* my new favorite word

It was not difficult to convince J. to join. In a way, I guess I knew already at that point that he was in love with me. For I knew I could ask him to do numbers of ridiculous things, from which he could otherwise not profit – and I knew that the world worked in this economic way, for I had seen how the economy deflated and I had read the recession as a personal attack, feeling that the world had deliberately spurned me.

only the best wikipedia page ever

Of course this exists

I just discovered the world of collecting “vintage” computers from the 1980s, researching a story, and it is completely amazing. I want one!!!

The first piece I did for the editor Winston Cowles was a story about living without the internet. I was twenty-four. I had gotten the call to meet Cowles, who was still Managing at The Sun when it was still on 23^rd street – because he had read and liked a piece I had done for the Princeton Bulletin – a piece about living in New York in bohemian poverty, as Fitzgerald had done: I had skipped the bill on a steak at Delmonico’s, snuck into the Metropolitan at intermission, slept on a ruched velvet couch in the lobby of The Biarritz. It was a snide piece, full of youthful insecurity and defensive snark, but he had said, over the phone, that it had “its charms” and invited me to a Wednesday lunch at a shadowy Italian place with white tablecloths and a dusty bar.