For the first time, she experienced life in the city as a teenager
without an iPhone. She borrowed novels from the library and read
them alone in the park. She started admiring graffiti when she rode
the subway, then fell in with some teens who taught her how to
spray-paint in a freight train yard in Queens. And she began waking
up without an alarm clock at 7 a.m., no longer falling asleep to the
glow of her phone at midnight. Once, as she later wrote in a text
titled the “Luddite Manifesto,” she fantasized about tossing her
iPhone into the Gowanus Canal. […]
“I still long to have no phone at all,” she said. “My parents are so
addicted. My mom got on Twitter, and I’ve seen it tear her apart. But
I guess I also like it, because I get to feel a little superior to
them.”