“You don’t have much time!” According to whose timeline? Apparently that of the male director I worked with who felt the need to inform me of this. That big biological clock you see dangling from my neck ran out of batteries a long time ago; the rope from which it hangs has loosened its grip. I rock this clock for fashion, not function. And yet I still know what time it is. Stop clocking me. Other than air, food, and shelter, what’s good for you is not necessarily what’s good for me. Your life goals are not the same as mine. And in the immortal words of the poet Jay Z, what you eat don’t make me shit.

Absolutely. I run into it because so much of what I get is noise and people being evil, and there is nothing I can do to fix that. But then something comes through, whether it is in a comment or on Twitter or via email, that is lucid and that challenges me in a truthful way, and that is when I respond. I respond when I am going to be able to become better and do better. That is so well put. It is hard to be criticized and it is hard to change, but it also feels good. That thing that allows you to keep being vital in your work is to open up to stuff and to be a permeable membrane.

In what ways does feminism influence your work? I just think feminism is my work. Everything I do, I do because I was told that as a woman, my voice deserves to heard, my rights are to be respected, and my job was to make that possible for others. And I am not saying I always succeed at that, but that is the value system that I was raised with and the one that I still hold dear, and it is one that makes all this possible, and it makes it possible for me to not shrink under a couch when there is criticism. It is what makes it possible for me to write about my experiences without feeling as though I am wasting everyone’s time or sounding hysterical. It is the thing that makes space for all of it. It means everything to me because it sort of is everything. It is the closest thing I know to being religious, if that makes any sense.

Perhaps because Harry's life, on the page and, even more luridly, onscreen, was measured out in highlights, as the plot demanded, whereas Mason is revealed in a string of lowlights, or in those episodes which seem dim and dull at the time, and only later shine in memory's cave. A haircut, in short, matters more than a Quidditch match. We happen upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the process…

The unexamined life’s no different from the examined life— Unanswerable questions, small talk, Unprovable theorems, long-abandoned arguments— You’ve got to write it all down. Landscape or waterscape, light-length on evergreen, dark sidebar Of evening, you’ve got to write it down. Memory’s handkerchief, death’s dream and automobile, God’s sleep, you’ve still got to write it down, Moon half-empty, moon half-full, Night starless and egoless, night blood-black and prayer-black, Spider at work between the hedges, Last bird call, toad in a damp place, tree frog in a dry ...

I am the best at intervals! Heart rate in the target zone—boom! Oxygen intake—optimized! Calories—burning! Suck it, Emily Crabtree. My Fitbit is talking about me, and what it’s saying is really positive.

At a bar celebrating my friend’s birthday in midtown. You were wearing Google Glass. I tried to mouth, “You look like a moron.” Did you record that?

They are sophisticated, but with none of the arrogance that can imply; they are addictive, but with none of the banality that can entail. There is sensuality and sexual depravity, homesickness and wanderlust, nostalgia and immediacy. Sylvan Esso acknowledges that the world is a tumult of complications by giving you a way to sing and dance with those troubles, if not to will them away altogether.

Ellena was creating these, peering into flowers and leaves and roots and choosing exactly what he wanted, and Rémy's technical wizards were then going in with their scalpels and slicing out what he didn't. So he was designing new olfactory tools for himself, natural smells that had never before existed in nature, to build future perfumes.