"Like so many young men in so many foxholes before him, Hogg discovered in himself a powerful drive not to leave this Earth without making a mark. "

"'We really only remember a few hundred people, if that many, out of the billions that have ever lived,' he told me at his house in a gated community in Parkland, ten days after the shooting. 'Is that what I was destined to become?'... 'It’s so funny,' says Delaney Tarr, Hogg’s good friend and a founding member of the #NeverAgain crew. 'The way David tweets is legitimately the way he is in person. If he has an opinion, he’s not going to silence it for a moment.' Unlike many of his peers, Hogg appears not to care much what people think about him. He’s been bullied before: 'I’m easy to pick on because I’m a string bean,' he says. 'I’ve had this shit said about me my entire life' — not death threats, but 'twig arms and shit like that. I don’t care.'... [H]e is dyslexic. He didn’t learn to read until the fourth grade and recalls teachers 'telling my parents I would amount to nothing, like I was some kind of broken toy.' He found a way to process their skepticism. 'They taught me not to give a shit about what other people think — all that matters is what you think.'... At 16, Hogg started waking at 3 a.m. to meditate, not with a guru or through an app but following the tenets of Metta meditation. 'I sat there in my room very creepily in the dark,' he says. 'I would hold on to this rock that I got in California the last time I was out there, when I was hiking with my best friend. You could tell it used to be really rough, but because it was in the ocean so much it was really smooth and soft. It fit perfectly in the palm of my hand, and then I would just hold that and try to focus. It’s really focusing on loving anyone, including those you hate.'"

From "David Hogg, After Parkland Furious and unflinching, an NRA enemy, an accused “crisis actor,” and a high-school grad trying to figure out what’s next" (New York Magazine).