Today was the day: Emily would write up her thesis, confront her advisor and finally decide whether to start the Ph.D. and be locked in Toronto for the next four to eight years, working on the same things. If she hadn’t been fired yet, that is. She got to work. She had four days left, she could do this.
First she organized her books and notes on the table. Then she put Jazzy in the chair next to her. Then she breathed in coffee. She closed her eyes, and graphs and diagrams formed and disinte-grated like images in a kaleidoscope, social networks sticky like spiderwebs, forming and pinching off again. Many of the people she’d interviewed didn’t know most of the people on their own social networks, not even enough to remember why they’d added most of them in the first place. So Emily had est
