100 Things draws on themes that have run through a lot of her work. It applies an appealing humour and light touch, and tells a vivid story: how, in little more than 20 years, we have shed ingrained social and behavioural habits, as well as some of the most basic ways we once thought of ourselves and our relationships with others. If they are minded to read it, anyone under 40 will presumably understand the book as the evocation of a strange, slow, endlessly inconvenient reality that now feels almost exotic. For anyone older, it will deliver a sense of loss – and of being old enough to remember times that seem almost hilariously distant.

One of Paul's talents is the ability to see big change in lots of small ones. She writes about the end of talking to strangers on aeroplanes; the increasingly lost human habit of staring out of windows; and why no one bothers to remember phone numbers any more.

In one particularly ingenious entry, she explains the demise of the full stop (or, in American English, the "period"). If you have ever wondered why putting such once-crucial punctation in emails, phone messages or tweets now feels so awkward, here is the answer: "The period can feel so emphatic as to sound sarcastic, the internet’s version of 'puh-leeze' and 'no, thank you' and 'srsly' rolled into one tiny dot." It can easily come across as passive-aggressive. Exclamation marks, moreover, "now convey warmth and sincerity"; failing to use them runs the risk of making the person you are messaging feel uncertain and anxious.

Such small transformations, Paul explains, arrive without warning and magnify a sense of everything being in flux. For fear of becoming social outcasts, most people feel they have little option but to try frantically to keep up.