Jason Lengstorf warns that if you're working crazy hours, "You’re no longer a free member of society. You’ve been lured into the Overkill Cult." The insidious thing about
University of Iowa historian Elizabeth Yale (she's a fellow at the Center for the Book) has a nice piece about Down House, Charles Darwin's home for forty years, in
John Le Carré, talking in the Paris Review about working on his first book while commuting to work: In those days English newspapers were much too big to
From William Osler’s A Way of Life: An Address to Yale Students, Sunday evening, April 20th, 1913: Control of the mind as a working machine, the adaptation in it
Just over forty years ago, Erno Rubik invented what is now one of the most famous puzzles ever: the Rubik’s Cube. Recently I saw an interview with Rubik
From Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought: Voluntary abstention from conscious thought on any particular problem may, itself, take two forms: the period of abstention may be spent
In The Distraction Addiction I made the argument that our cognitive abilities and facility for using technology— in particular, our possibly unique ability for becoming mentally absorbed in
In the course of writing Rest, I’ve come to realize that I need to talk about some issues regarding work. One section I’m now sketching out describes how
In The Distraction Addiction I talk about the concept of “nomophobia,” the fear of being without your cellphone (“No” “Mobile phone” “Phobia”) coined by British researchers in 2008.
Actually it's a reprint of the article that Brigid Schulte wrote for the Washington Post a few weeks ago, but still, it's nice to see it going on the