Enduring and cherishing with Zadie Smith
Smith at the Elle Style Awards in September
ALAMY/AP/INVISION, SCOTT A. GARFITT
Essays by a great companion, throwing ideas around like confetti, writing with vigour, hope, rage, despair, admiration and generous humour
Dead and Alive: Essays
ZADIE SMITH
(HAMISH HAMILTON, 352 PP, £16.99)
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Can you believe it? When Steve Jobs goes on a family holiday, his children are not allowed to use the devices he himself created. Zadie Smith is master of the apposite footnote: this one neatly endorses her anxiety about the effects of “predatory” algorithms on suggestible young minds. It has long been a worry, but her essay “Some Notes on Mediated Time” is her determined – if doomed – attempt to pin down what precisely happens to our perceptions of reality when technology outstrips us and time, having blithely dawdled through the golden years of our youth, seems suddenly to pass “all at once in a great, panic-inducing swoosh”.
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