The Stars in Our Pockets Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age

“Beautiful, elegantly expressed” meditations on the ‘inner climate change’ we experience as we shift between our offline and online lives—for fans of Oliver Sacks and David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water (New York Review of Books).

What shapes our sense of place, our sense of time, and our memory? How is technology changing the way we make sense of the world and of ourselves?

Our screens offer us connection, especially now in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there are certain depths of connection our screens can’t offer—to ourselves, to the natural world, and to each other. In this personal exploration of digital life’s impact on how we see the world, Howard Axelrod marshals science, philosophy, art criticism, pop culture, and his own experience of returning from two years of living in solitude in northern Vermont.

The Stars in Our Pockets is a timely reminder of the world around us and the worlds within us—and how, as alienated as we may sometimes feel, they were made for each other.

Howard Axelrod is the author of The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude, named one of the best books of 2015 by Slate, the Chicago Tribune, and Entropy Magazine, and one of the best memoirs of 2015 by Library Journal. His essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, O Magazine, Politico, Salon, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Boston Globe, and the Paris Review. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Arizona, and is currently the director of the Creative Writing Program at Loyola University in Chicago. Connect with him at howardaxelrod.com.