Author: The Atlantic

Cited by

• Robert Wilson (1)
  • IN: The Affinities (2015) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: When an obscure data-management company launched what it called “the Affinities” a couple of years ago, almost no one paid attention. It was a quixotic idea that seemed to gain no traction: there was no ad campaign outside of a few media outlets in a few major cities, and not much press coverage even in those markets. But something surprising was happening under the radar … Invited as a special guest to a local meeting, I arrived with limited expectations. What I would find, I suspected, was a group of perfectly ordinary people who had been convinced to pay annual dues for the privilege of flattering one another, a commercial conceit of which P. T. Barnum might have been proud. But there was a real energy in the gathering—social, sexual, intellectual—that took me by surprise. It made me wonder where all this was going, and I asked one young woman what she thought the members of her Affinity might be doing in twenty or thirty years. She laughed at the question. “Writing our memoirs, I guess,” she said. “Or maybe signing our confessions.”
    FROM: “Teleodynamics, Meir Klein, and the Rise of the Affinities”, (2015), Article, US