Οn a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains. The stranger's phone was bright, and as I looked on she scrolled through a waterfall of videos that other people had filmed in their homes. She watched one for four or five seconds, then dispatched it by twitching her thumb. She flicked to a text message, did nothing with it, and flipped back. The figures on her screen, dressed carefully and mugging at the camera like mimes, seemed desperate for something that she could not provide: her sustained attention. I felt mortified, not least because I saw on both sides of the screen symptoms I recognized too clearly in myself.
For years, we have heard a litany of reasons why our capacity to pay attention is disturbingly on the wane. Technology the buzzing, blinking pageant on our screens and in our pockets— hounds us. Modern life, forever quicker and more scattered, drives concentration For just as long, concerns of this variety could be put aside. Television was described as a force against attention even in the nineteen-forties. A lot of focussed, worthwhile work has taken place since then.
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Denne historien er fra May 06, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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MING HAN ONG
Thadeus had never offered to take Johnny Mac out for a meal before. This is new, Johnny Mac says, grinning. For twenty-five years, Johnny Mac worked as a tenant-rights lawyer. He is a fount of varied and surprising knowledge.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON'S CHOSEN PEOPLE
What a long-unpublished novel reveals about her magnificent obsession.
FEAR AND LOATHING
Are all our arguments really over who's harmed?
ODD JOBS
\"Severance,\" on Apple TV+.
ON A MISSION FROM GOD
Inside the movement to redirect billions of taxpayer dollars to private religious schools.
MAKE HIM LAUGH
How Lorne Michaels's sensibility governs \"Saturday Night Live.\"
TABULA RASA
“Bleb” is worth eight points in Scrabble. Thought you might like to know. I have known the word since Wednesday, June 11, 1958, when I learned it from a company physician at Time Incorporated, in Rockefeller Center. He said I should have been hospitalized four days ago, but there was nothing much to do about it now, go back to work.
WELCOME TO OUR FIRST/FINAL BOOK CLUB!
Thank you, everyone, for coming to our first/final book-club meeting. Apologies for how long it's taken us to settle on a date, but in between work, kids, and the pretense of joining adult recreational sports leagues, it seems that we all have incredibly busy schedules.
THE POISON MACHINE
The talk-show host Yinon Magal's hard-line tactics.
MEAN TIME
“Hard Truths.”