Category: You Should See This

Out of 10 longlist nominees for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, all 10 are college graduates. On average, the nominees attended universities with rejection rates above 80 percent (i.e., highly competitive). Five went to Ivy League schools or competitive equivalents, and winners tended to double up. Charles Yu, who won the 2020 award, attended Berkeley as an undergraduate and then went to Columbia for his JD. Susan Choi, who won in 2019, graduated from Yale and Cornell. Sigrid Nunez won in 2018; she’s a graduate of both Barnard and Columbia.

The benefits of staying off social media are insanely generous. Not only your time is salvaged, but also your attention – which is far more precious.

“I was, I think, a little overawed by the jump from a rather anonymous school to a big prestigious campus in the big city and decided I was in,” he told me. It was the peak of the financial crisis; the only other immediate option was to stick around his college town and wait for his girlfriend to graduate. He ended up taking out over $60,000 in student loans to cover his year in the program. More than a decade later, his payments still haven’t dented the principal.

The San Francisco surveillance videos that have gone most viral are those that emphasize brazenness and impunity. In June, a reporter at the local ABC affiliate posted on Twitter a cell-phone video taken at a Walgreens in Hayes Valley. A man on a bicycle stands in the middle of an aisle, calmly loading cosmetics into a black garbage bag. He begins with the top shelf, and works his way down to the bottom one, until his bag is full. A few feet away is a Walgreens security guard, who makes no effort to stop the cyclist, choosing instead to film him with his phone. Eventually, the cyclist mounts his bike and rides out, ducking to avoid a half-hearted lunge from the guard. The video crystallizes the subversive, Banksy-ish quality of the San Francisco theft wave. It also supplied a political context—in her post, the reporter, Lyanne Melendez, tagged Boudin.

As part of her revenge plot, Mariam creates a fake Facebook account and messages Ruqayya, pretending to be a male admirer. The two of them message back and forth for days, before the boy asks Ruqayya to send him a photograph of herself with her hair uncovered. She receives the request while at a school event, and goes into a bathroom stall to take the picture, but eventually demurs. “Sorry I can’t,” she writes, worried about revealing herself to a stranger. He replies, “I admire you even more for saying no to what feels wrong,” which flatters her into sending him the photograph after all.