Very often my goal in writing is to try to make normal things feel weird, and weird things feel normal. I try to do that because our sense of normality isn’t to be trusted: every now and then something opens ours eyes and shows us that our ‘normal’ is, well, kind of messed up. When these things happen—some social shift, a personal tragedy, an encounter with a stranger, a lesson from a teacher—we get snapped out of it, as if we’ve been asleep, and feel an urge to change things. That’s where the word ‘woke’ comes from.

It’s also, while we’re at it, where teenagers get their sense of righteous outrage. Teenagers are the closest thing we have to beneficent aliens visiting earth. They’re in the odd position of coming to understand the world around them for the first time. They have our sense of justice, but haven’t yet become accustomed to injustice. The result is anger, outrage, and sometimes, action. Seeing the world with moral attention, I think, means becoming something of a teenager again.