Status Updates From Exhalation

'The universe is so vast that intelligent life must surely have arisen many times. The univers is also so old that even one technological species would have had time to expand and fill the galaxy. Yet there is no sign of life anywhere except on Earth. Humans call this the Fermi Paradox.'

'We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated.'

'People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.'

'Regarding the role of truth in autobiography, the critic Roy Pascal wrote, "On the one side are the truths of fact, on the other the truth of the writer's feeling, and where the two coincide cannot be decided by any outside authority in advance." '

'Millions of people [...] have been keeping lifelogs for years, wearing personal cams that capture continuous video of their entire lives. People consult their lifelogs for a variety of reasons—everything from reliving favorite moments to tracking down the cause of allergic reactions—but only intermittently; no one wants to dpend all their time formulating queries and sifting through the results.'

'It's indicative of the Victorian attitude toward children that at no point does Dacey suggest that children should be raised by their parents.'

["Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny"]