Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone. - Robin Sloan

Greatest among us are those who can deploy “my friend” to total strangers in a way that is not hollow, but somehow real and deeply felt; those who can make you, within seconds of first contact, believe it.

Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he's a friendless sixth-grader.

"Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade," she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. "Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue."
Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.
"But I think the writers had their turn," she says, "and now it's programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system."
I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. "So what's the next upgrade?"
"It's already happening," she says. "There are all these things you can do, and it's like you're in more than one place at one time, and it's totally normal. I mean, look around."
I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all learning into phones showing them places that don't exist and yet are somehow more interesting...