“Yet as we adjust, her correspondence and ours — traveling hundreds of miles, as if from one era to another — is teaching us all more than we’d imagined. The gift of digital detox that we thought Australia was giving our daughter has also become a revelatory bequest for us — her American parents and her older brother. Something in the act of writing, sending and waiting days or weeks for a reply, and in the physical and social challenges experienced by our daughter at a distance, is changing all of our personal operating systems. Without the ever-present immediacy of digital connection, even just temporarily, can a family be rewired?” Damien Cave on what happened when his 13-year-old “left her phone behind for hiking, chores and study in the Australian wilderness. Our pen-and-paper correspondence is opening up an unexpected world.” NYT (Gift Article): What We Gained (and Lost) When Our Daughter Unplugged for a School Year. (I’d love to get back into the practice of writing on paper. But at this point, my hand gets sore signing a check.)