On Easter Sunday, while on her afternoon stroll, the Irish novelist Denise Deegan realized she still had not yet called her mother. “Hello,” she said cheerily into her phone. “Hello,” a man on the street replied.
Looking at the man’s face, she realized the voice belonged to the actor Matt Damon.
On a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow-passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains.