"The book opens with stories of new love—crushes, first dates.  There is a longer story tracing a relationship from beginning to end, followed by stories about breaking up and then starting over, finding just the right person to fall in love with again."

"As a parent, you can’t help but wonder if you’re doing it right, where you’re falling behind, is everyone having more fun than you, do these kids even like me??? I think that way as a parent and a Dungeon Master."

"The stories are completely unlinked, and encompass a mix of genres: there’s horror, science fiction, historical fiction, and a ghost story or two, alongside quite a bit of flash fiction."

"At some point around 2018, I spontaneously started writing pieces that I trusted in a way I hadn't for a long time."

"Language acquisition is something I’ve thought about a great deal in my life—my parents learning English, my navigating English and Cantonese, and various language extinctions in my life."

"I generally write for about three hours and then panic about the things on my to-do list."

"Our book is about the function of the brain. We argue that we live in a world that is chaotic and often unpredictable, and the book presents our thesis that the brain invents a simplified world to help us navigate this chaos and conduct our daily activities."

"One morning, I got out of bed and looked out my window and saw a group of children dressed in full tactical gear."

"The essays move around a lot in subject and form -- there are shorter, more lyric pieces, longer works of cultural criticism and literary journalism, some memoir work; one is about Brad Pitt eating on screen, another is about watching LeBron James's online dad content, another is about Andy Warhol's diaries"

"I believe that broken bodies tell broken stories. Or, they can, at least. Mine does."