"This book is a collection of 30 essays, meditative and formally inventive, that consider all kinds of subjects (keys, hats, Bell's Palsy), the memoir, writing, the essay itself, and Michael Martone's friendship with writers David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Kurt Vonnegut. The theme of the book is the emergence and incorporation of new technologies that the essay can try. Several of the pieces were written specifically for online venues while the pieces on the death of Martone's mother, father, and brother-in-law were written on Facebook while the events happened. An essay about using new technologies in the classroom was written in "tweets." Brooding--the book's title and the title of an essay--is about the disappearance of early browsers and the emergence, after 17 years, of a brood of cicada and the reconnection to people in the past and metaphors of electronic memory. Other essays treat that memory and remembering via the memoir as technologies, essays calculating and sorting machines" --