EDITOR’S Note

ERTAIN BOOKS, IF WE ARE LUCKY TO ENCOUNTER THEM at just the right moment, exert a kind of emotional-intellectual-gravitational force on us. Time slows down; the mind opens up. Maybe this is what we mean when we say a work of art “speaks” to us. I, in this way, and I was similarly pulled to her essay “The Loneliness Project: My Journey Through American Loneliness” (page 25). One passage in particular resonates: “If there is one thing I can say I’ve learned to be unequivocally true in my life as a writer and a person thus far, it’s that everything takes longer than I think it will,” Radtke writes. “The beginning of a book project is all possibility, or all promise: You haven’t yet uncovered the problems you’ll spend the next several years taking apart amid the gloom of your laptop while lines slowly etch themselves across your forehead and suddenly become permanent. The slowness of writing is also its pleasure, though, because it’s where you become better. The person you are when you finish a book is a person who is smarter than the one who started it, if you’ve truly taken your time.” As an unabashedly slow reader, I have to believe this is true for the consumer as well as the producer.