There is so much information that our ability to focus on any piece of it is interrupted by other information, so that we bathe in information but hardly absorb or analyse it. WikiLeaks uploaded Bradley Manning’s leaked data to a place where its subjects could read it, which is said to have played a role in the Arab Spring too. Getting out of it is about slowness, and about finding alternatives to the alienation that accompanies a sweater knitted by a machine in a sweatshop in a country you know nothing about, or jam made by a giant corporation that has terrible environmental and labour practices and might be tied to the death of honeybees or the poisoning of farmworkers. Seventeen women accused of having abortions (which is sometimes how a miscarriage is interpreted there) are in prison for homicide in El Salvador. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.’ For the smartest person in Vonnegut’s story, the radio transmitter isn’t enough: ‘Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. Good things came about with the new technologies. On them people had long, deep conversations of a sort almost unknown today, now that phones are used while driving, while shopping, while walking in front of cars against the light and into fountains. Mobile phones were commonplace and email was the standard means of communication between friends, between students and supervisors, and between the university and its members. Another study found that students, when left to their own devices, are unable to focus on homework for more than two minutes without turning to web surfing or email. London Review of Books Or perhaps children have value until they turn out to be women. I live in the heart of it, and it’s normal to walk through a crowd – on a train, or a group of young people waiting to eat in a restaurant – in which everyone is staring at the tiny screens in their hands. You listened to the news when it was broadcast, since there was no other way to hear it. This mystification of reproduction is full of missing men and missing access to resources.

I visit New Orleans regularly, where the old leisurely enjoyment of mingling with strangers in the street and public venues – where music is often live and people dance to it, not just listen to it sitting down, where people sit by preference out front and greet strangers with endearments – forms a dramatic contrast with the Bay Area where contact with strangers is likely to be met (at least among the white middle class) with a puzzled and slightly pained expression that seems to say you’ve made a mistake. It made whole what is broken. It will not be easy to go back, though I did see a poster recently (on Facebook) that made the case for buying books from independent bookstores in cash. But people get hurt in part because we don’t want to talk about who does the hurting.

The CDC’s highlighting of unintended pregnancy in the United States raises the questions of how maybe better access to reproductive rights and education and healthcare might have more to do with reducing unintended pregnancies than asserting that all reproductive-age women not on birth control should not drink alcohol (a mandate that ignores how many women get pregnant unintentionally while actually on birth control). Time passed in fairly large units, or at least not in milliseconds and constant updates. Seriously, we know why men are absented from these narratives: it absolves them from responsibility for pregnancies, including the unfortunate and accidental variety, and then it absolves them from producing that thing for which so many poor women have been excoriated for so long: fatherless children. You read the paper over breakfast. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. And maybe a broader one talking about all the ecological and economic factors that impact the well-being of children. Someone did the work to increase my commitment. Perhaps. Even when that someone is the person being addressed; the CDC guidelines telling men that they too should watch their drinking notes that “Excessive alcohol use is commonly involved in sexual assault.” It’s as though there’s a person named “excessive alcohol use, or rather Excessive Alcohol Use whose shirts or maybe hip flasks would be monogrammed EAU. Thirdly, a meaningful population of women are lesbians and/or, when they drink, keep company with other women and not with men or not with men who have sex with women or who have unprotected sex with women. Then emails deteriorated into something more like text messages (the first text message was sent in 1992, but phones capable of texting spread later in the 1990s). It denies the existence of many other kinds of women and the equal responsibility of at least one kind of man. At times I feel as though I’m in a bad science fiction movie where everyone takes orders from tiny boxes that link them to alien overlords. Everyone just dashed off notes about practical things, with maybe a little personal stuff in the mix, and you can’t get epistolatory with someone who won’t receive it with enthusiasm, or at least I can’t. So #MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening, and even then—as we’ve seen in the case of Christine Blasey Ford, testifying against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—continuing to be rendered inconsequential.

A great many people relied on the same sources of news, so when they discussed current events they did it under the overarching sky of the same general reality. Girls in middle and high school even now, even in supposedly progressive places like New York and San Francisco, are told their forms and garments cause male behavior. The literary Internet’s most important stories, every day. Meanwhile, the mechanisms of pregnancy are assiduously avoided in this mystification of reproduction story. By the time I was a graduate student, things had changed. Someone pushed me to call forward my vision for the future. There’s a beautiful passage Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza wrote in the wake of the 2016 election: This is a moment for all of us to remember who we were when we stepped into the movement—to remember the organizers who were patient with us, who disagreed with us and yet stayed connected, who smiled knowingly when our self-righteousness consumed us. We are building something immense together that, though invisible and immaterial, is a structure, one we reside within—or, rather, many overlapping structures.