Prayer Do you sometimes look at your watch and don’t know what time it is? Do you sometime go to sleep, wake up thinking you’re somewhere but discover you’re somewhere else? Do you sometimes go to a room in your house and wonder why you went there? Do you sometime feel so helpless that you say to yourself “God help me,” regardless of what your religion is? I do too! I can go on with an exhaustive list of those little things that we have in common and define us as human beings.

There is one massive economic difference separating ideas from physical goods: The marginal cost of an idea is now zero. If I eat a sandwich, you cannot also eat it, but once an idea, an essay, a song or a better web browser comes around, it can be shared, from anyone and to everyone, network to network, at a negligible additional cost.

My name is androgynous. Upon hearing it, you cannot tell if I am a boy or a girl. Some people say that they can tell if they know how it’s spelled: Jessie is a girl and Jesse is a boy. I doubt my parents meant to spell my name the “boy” way, but I sometimes wonder whether it was a Freudian slip; whether somehow, even then, they knew.