In Attention, A Love Story, Casey Schwartz examines what it means to pay attention in the age of distraction and revisits what writers as different as David Foster Wallace and Simone Weil have had to say on the subject. Schwartz will be in conversation with Joshua Cohen, author of Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction.
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Attention, A Love Story
By Casey Schwartz
Published by Pantheon
What do we talk about when we talk about attention? We might start with the studies: the average American unlocks their iPhone eighty times a day; the average millennial checks their phone almost twice as often. These kinds of statistics tell the story of the last decade, as technology has wound its way into our lives as never before. But Casey Schwartz grapples with the larger questions emerging from this change, offering a focus on attention itself. What is it? What does it mean when we give it away?
Expanding on her popular New York Times Magazine article, “Generation Adderall,” Schwartz details the decade she spent taking prescription pills to help her pay attention (or so she thought), then moves outward to consider the wider landscape of attention, past and present. From our craving for distraction to our craving for a cure, from Silicon Valley to psychedelics to the works and lives of writers like David Foster Wallace, Aldous Huxley, William James, and Simone Weil, who each wrote powerfully about attention’s role in defining our lives, Schwartz acts as our sympathetic and qualified guide.
Blending memoir, biography, and original reporting, Schwartz examines her attempts to preserve her authentic life and see what’s most important in it. Attention, A Love Story will resonate with readers who want to determine their own minds, away from the siren call of their screens.
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Attention
By Joshua Cohen
Published by Random House
A wide-ranging, rule-bending collection from “a major American writer” (the New York Times)—reclaiming the power of attention in an age of constant distraction.
Throughout Attention, Cohen directs his sharp gaze at home and abroad, calling upon his extraordinary erudition and unrivaled ability to draw connections between seemingly unlike things to show us how to live without fear in a world overflowing with information. In each piece, he projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his, and a voice as witty, profound, and distinct as any in American letters. At this crucial juncture in history, Attention is a guide for the perplexed—a handbook for anyone hoping to bring the wisdom of the past into the culture of the future.
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