Your Mind Is Being Fracked

The steady dings of notifications. The 40 tabs that greet you when you open your computer in the morning. The hundreds of unread emails, most of them spam, with subject lines pleading or screaming for you to click. Our attention is under assault these days, and most of us are familiar with the feeling that gives us — fractured, irritated, overwhelmed. D. Graham Burnett calls the attention economy an example of “human fracking”: With our attention in shorter and shorter supply, companies are going to even greater lengths to extract this precious resource from us. And he argues that it’s now reached a point that calls for a kind of revolution. “This is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this,” he tells me. “And we need to mount new forms of resistance.” Burnett is a professor of the history of science at Princeton University and is working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. He’s also a co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention, which is a kind of grass roots, artistic effort to create a curriculum for studying attention. In this conversation, we talk about how the 20th-century study of attention laid the groundwork for today’s attention economy, the connection between changing ideas of attention and changing ideas of the self, how we even define attention (this episode is worth listening to for Burnett’s collection of beautiful metaphors alone), whether the concern over our shrinking attention spans is simply a moral panic, what it means to teach attention and more. Mentioned: Friends of Attention “The Battle for Attention” by Nathan Heller “Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can Fight Back.” by D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt Scenes of Attention edited by D. Graham Burnett and Justin E. H. Smith Book Recommendations: Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter L. Galison The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith. Original music by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  I think a lot about the way we talk about attention. Because the way we talk about something is the way we think about it. What do you always hear about attention when you're in school? Pay attention. As if we have a certain amount of attention in our mental wallet. And we have to spend it wisely. We need to use it to buy algebra, rather than buying gossip, or jokes, or daydreams. I wish that was how my attention worked. It certainly did not work that way then. I graduated high school with a 2.2 because I cannot pay attention. I just can't. To information delivered in the form of long lectures. I wish I could, I try. My attention, it just doesn't feel to me like something I get to spend.

• 1:05Ezra Klein?

  It feels, I don't know, it feels more like taking my dogs on a walk. Sometimes they walk where I want them to. Sometimes I'm in control, and sometimes I am not in control. They walk where they want to. They get scared by thunder and they try to run away. Sometimes a dog side eyes them from across the street and they turn from mild-mannered terriers into killing machines. Sometimes they are obsessively trying to get a chicken bone. And even when I hurry them past it, they spend the whole rest of the walk clearly thinking about that chicken bone and scheming about how to get back there. My attention feels like that to me. And this is what I don't like about the way we talk about attention. We are not always in control of it. We may not even usually be in control of it.

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  The context in which our attention plays out, what kinds of things are around us, it really matters. And it's supposed to. Attention is supposed to be open to the world around us. But that openness, it makes us subject to manipulation. You really see that now when you open your computer or your phone. It's like the whole digital street is covered in chicken bones, there's lightning cracking overhead, there are always dogs barking. And I worry about this for my own mental habits, for my kids, for everybody's kids. I don't think we're creating an attentionally healthy world here. And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this. And I keep feeling like we're getting near it, but not quite there. Because the way we talk about attention, it just doesn't feel rigorous enough to me.

• 2:32Ezra Klein?

  Doesn't feel like it is getting at the experience of it well. And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this. People who've found a better way to study attention, or talk about it, or teach it. Then I was reading this piece on attention in The New Yorker by Nathan Heller. And I came across D. Graham Burnett, who's doing all three. He's a historian of science at Princeton University. He's working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. And he's a co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention, which is a kind of grassroots artistic effort to create a curriculum around attention. And yeah, that got my attention. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 3:16Ezra Klein?

  D. Graham Burnett, welcome to the show.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thanks.

• 3:20Ezra Klein?

  So you've written that our attention is getting fracked. What do you mean by that?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Fracking. I suspect most of your listeners have heard that term. Fracking is mostly associated with this idea of getting petroleum resources out of the earth. But it's a new technology for doing that. In the old days, pre-major exploitation of petroleum resources, there were like these big juicy zits of high-value crude oil just sitting there in the earth, waiting to geyser up if you tap them. Drill a hole, whoof, gusher. We've tapped all that out. The only way you can get the remaining petroleum and natural gas resources out of the deep earth is to pump down in there

• 4:08Speaker 01

  high-pressure, high-volume detergent, which forces up to the surface this kind of slurry mixture, natural gas, crude oil, leftover detergent and juice, and nasty stuff, which you then separate out and you get your monetizable crude.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  This is a precise analogy to what's happening to us in our contemporary attention economy. We have a, depending on who you ask, 500 billion, 3 trillion, $7 trillion industry, which to get the money value of our attention out of us is continuously pumping into our faces, high pressure, high value detergent in the form of social media, nonstop content that holds us on our devices. And that pumping brings to the surface that spume, that foam of our attention, which can be aggregated and sold off to the highest bidder.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  How do you define what attention is? I would love for us to use this whole conversation to sort of roll up on the shores of that deepest question again and again. So let me go at it one way. I'm in the process of finishing a history of science book about the laboratory study of this thing called attention since about 1880. In laboratories, using experiments, scientists have, since the late 19th century, sliced and diced a human capacity that they've called attention.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  And it is that work that they did that has made it possible, I would argue, to price the thing called attention that we're invoking when we use that fracking metaphor. It's entangled with the idea of stimulus and response. The earliest experimental work on attention is about sitting folks in laboratory chairs and showing them certain kinds of displays, a cursor, a flash. That triggering or targeting conception of attention has been the primary way that scientists, experimental psychologists, engineers have conceptualized and placed in evidence a thing called detention.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  When they started doing sort of early eye tracking experiments to sort of follow where people's gaze went, how much information they could take in at a glance, and figuring out how to quantify that, largely, it should be said, financed by friends in the emerging advertising industry, there was a kind of unholy symbiotic relationship that emerged between certain forms of experimental psychology and those who were trying to study how to sell mouthwash and cigarettes. When those folks were doing that kind of work, they were certainly talking about a thing that was attention, they could call it attention.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  It's very similar to the thing that right now, the most powerful computational technologies, the most sophisticated programmers and the most intricate algorithms are madly working to aggregate an auction continuously.

• 7:32Ezra Klein?

  In your research, what's been the holiest or most unholy attention experiment you've come across?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that question. Well, let's do unholy. And maybe you'll give me two. In the interwar period, a set of experiments called pursuit tests were used to train and assess the capability of military aviators. Pursuit tests were attention experiments, a little like forerunners of video games. Imagine a cursor that moves around on a non-computer screen. This is manual, like a clockwork cursor that's traveling back and forth in

• 8:24Speaker 01

  front of you. And you have a little envelope, a mechanical envelope that you have to move, manipulate, kind of with a joystick, to keep bracketing that cursor as it moves around in front of you. And then we hook you up to a rebreather so that you're gradually deprived of oxygen.

• 8:43Ezra Klein?

  It's a big twist. I didn't see that one coming.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, we might also hook you up with headphones and run a lot of really loud and distracting noise through them. And we could also ask you to pedal or do other exhausting things with your body. There are a whole set of ways we could complicate this ecology. And then, as you gradually lose consciousness, you're asked to continue for as long as you can manipulating this envelope around the cursor. This was understood to be an attentional test. It's cybernetic, as you can see, it's a way of integrating humans with machines. It uses attentionality as a way of measuring the kind of mechanization of the human subject in relation to a machine. Some people are better at it than others. And let me assure

• 9:31Speaker 01

  you, if you're going to put somebody in the cockpit on one of these very expensive fighter planes, you want somebody who's really good at that. So I would call that one kind of unholy. I mean, let's be clear.

• 9:43Ezra Klein?

  Yes, fixating fighter pilots to see what happens to their attention. Yeah, I'll categorize that in the unholy.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I don't want to sound paranoid either. I'm in favor of fighter pilots who are able to pay attention.

• 9:54Ezra Klein?

  I understand why they were doing it.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Nevertheless, you can get a little shiver when you think about the way now we've been, if you like, cybernetically integrated into our devices. And you can see aspects of that reality prefigured in the genealogy of experimental work on attention that I'm describing. I'll give you another one. The development during the Second World War of radar created unprecedented opportunities for defense capabilities in relation particularly to German U-boats. Nevertheless, no matter how good your radar is, if the person looking at the radar screen isn't paying attention to it, you're totally screwed. A really intense

• 10:39Speaker 01

  set of classified experiments took place during the Second World War to assess. A very new problem. How long could people pay attention to screens? And what could you do to optimize their ability to keep paying attention to screens for long periods of time? That work gives rise to an understanding of the way people cease to pay attention, what comes to be called the vigilance decrement, the drop off in vigilance to a statistically low frequency phenomenon. And that work too can give you a little shiver to come to understand that there is, again, this deep techno scientific story of studying a thing that we recognize as

• 11:23Speaker 01

  attention, but studying it in this highly instrumentalized way that is entirely bound to questions of stimulus and response, to triggering and targeting. And we see the legacy of that kind of work to this day in the way we think about attention. That attention was sliced and diced in laboratories. And that very same thing is what's now being prized with these calamitous effects in the way we experience ourselves.

• 11:56Ezra Klein?

  I'm so interested by that form of attention. And it gets at something that has bothered me about a lot of the writing on attention, some of the conversations I've had on the show about attention, which is it's so wound up in this idea of attention as being something we should always have agency over. I think that implicitly in a lot of discussion of attention and a lot of research around attention, the attentional goal seems to emerge as a worker who never breaks focus on their task across the entire day. And so the enemy of attention in this telling is distraction. And I do feel that as a worker, right?

• 12:40Ezra Klein?

  I come in and I open my computer and I immediately feel distracted by messages coming and slacks and a million things. And then, at the same time, that discourse, it points somewhere I'd like to go, but not the only place I'd like to go, right? I don't imagine the good life as being a life where I have the attentional capacity of the perfect worker, right? A lot of what I'm interested in, you know, in theory with attention is a sort of more open form of awareness, an ability to see other people more deeply. And I'm a meditator, and so one thing I notice a lot over time is that what I think I should be paying attention to and then what appears to come up with great value to me are not the same thing, right?

• 13:24Ezra Klein?

  Too much agency over my attention, too much control is a way of not hearing other things in the world, too.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  You put your finger on really the heart of the matter. So I want to suggest that part of what makes the conversation around attention right now both so difficult and so important is that secreted within that term are in fact two very different projects bumping up against each other. In a laboratory, you use instruments. As it turns out, if you use instruments to get at a thing called attention, you end up finding an instrumentalized form of attention. Is that form of attention real? Absolutely.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  In fact, the technologies for making it real are powerful. You can quantify it, you can place it in evidence experimentally. Is it part of what's in that sort of worker conception of attention that you invoked? Yes, as it happens, it is. But that other thing that you're kind of calling in when you talk about meditation, when you talk about awareness, when we invoke the sort of experience of being, the kind of ecstasy that can come with a certain durational flow of immersion in a person, a conversation, a book, the experience of reading, an object.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  That comes from a different place. It's also in the language of attention and it has its own separate history. If you want to see both those operating now, let me give you two recent theorists of attention, both very prominent, whose accounts of what attention is are absolutely contradictory, perfectly paradoxical, but sort of both interestingly true. Two biz school theorists, Davenport and Beck, do a book called The Attention Economy. I think it's 2001. They don't actually coin the phrase, but they're responsible for it sort of exploding into the collective conversation. How do they define attention in that book?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  They say, "Attention is what triggers, catalyzes awareness into action." Attention is what catalyzes awareness into action. Definition that couldn't be more different. The recently deceased French philosopher Bernard Stigler, in a beautiful and difficult book called Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations, centers that book on attention. What does he say attention is? He says, "Attention," playing with the attendre in French, "is waiting." The exact opposite of catalytic, triggering. It's waiting.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  It's in fact, for him, infinite waiting. And what are you waiting on when you attend to an object? Wait on it? He says, "You're waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in the object, which long webs of connectedness are a mirroring of the rich, long webs of connectedness that are in you." So let's imagine for a second that there was a painting on the wall of this studio and you and I were looking at it together. We might look at that painting. It might be, let's say, a religious icon or something. And you and I would bring to the experience of looking at it what we have. We would notice colors.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  We would think about other images like it we might have seen. We would think about the other images that might not be here, but that could be, or the symbolic things that are in it. And as we experience that kind of web of things that are in the image, we'd really be sort of seeing a long web of connectedness that's in ourselves. And so for Stigler... Attention is waiting on the disclosure of those long webs of connectedness, which are a mirroring of our own infinitude in the world. Attention, infinite waiting, attention, triggering, sharp contrast.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  And let me try to bring in like a third thing that I think is kind of exquisitely poised over and outside of that contestation between those two. In the early 20th century novel Wings of the Dove, the American novelist Henry James describes a really beautiful and intense scene in which a very, very ill woman, terminally ill woman, has a fleeting encounter with a doctor she desperately needs. She believes this doctor kind of knows what she needs to survive. She hopes that this doctor can kind of get her past her anguish. The doctor's very busy and James depicts the scene where the two of them sit for a

• 18:33Speaker 01

  moment. And he describes the doctor as placing on the table between them, a clear, clean, crystal cup, empty, of attention. An empty crystal cup of attention that the doctor places on the table between them. And that sort of figuration of attention as a kind of an empty cup that we place between ourselves and the object of our attention is like, I think it exquisitely invokes that idea of imminence, that kind of negative capability, anything's possible here, the gesture of generosity.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  It has a little bit of that sense of waiting, but it also has a sense of a solicitation, something needs to happen. So it includes elements of that catalytic and it includes elements of that kind of mirroring waiting image. And so when I have to sort of talk about what I think attention is, I'll often use that image, like what's attention? Attention is that kind of empty cup we can place between ourselves and the things we care about in the world to see what happens.

• 20:04Ezra Klein?

  You've talked about how attention is, or at least the way we think about it now, is a modern construct. Can you talk a bit about that?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Let me give you one of the most amazing arguments about attention that's ever been made by anybody, by my distinguished colleague Jonathan Cray. Jonathan Cray is an art historian at Columbia University. In a book called Suspensions of Perception, published around 2000, he made a super challenging argument about where that language of attention comes from and why, in the late 19th century, the same time that the scientists start studying in laboratories, everybody starts getting worried about it and talking about it in a very particular way. Cray argues that you don't see a lot of discussions about attention

• 20:51Speaker 01

  in the 1780s, 1790s, even 1820. It's not a thing. He says that worry about attention comes into being across the second half of the 19th century in a very particular way because of a very specific set of transformations in the experience of personhood. Imagine white guys in wigs with knickers on. These guys thought of themselves as a little bit like a camera obscura, right? Those boxes that have a little pinhole in them, like a forerunner of the camera. The mind is like that box. There's a world out there. There's a world in here. There's a nice mapping function between those two worlds. And therefore,

• 21:34Speaker 01

  I, as a property, white male subject, am good in the world because the world is out there and in me in a relatively unproblematic way.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Curry argues, I think correctly, that that way of conceptualizing the human, the classical model of human subjectivity, implodes across the second half of the 19th century. What kills it? What does it in? We discover that, in fact, everybody doesn't have the same picture inside themselves as what's out there in the world, that we're these oozy things made of meat, you know? And that actually, our eyes have blind spots. And suddenly, the sort of physiological complexity of sensation makes a mincemeat of the classical model. So then where are you in this kind of blooming, buzzing confusion of modernity? Now that you're like, an opaque, thick meat creature, instead of this nice, camera-obscure creature?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Well, Curry argues that attention is born in that moment, as a way of saying again, that I hold together as one being, as I confront or encounter the world. Where are you? You are where your attention is. Your will, maybe? That's that idea that somehow will has something to do with it? For William James, attention and will were almost inextricable, right? That free will itself, if it existed, its locus was the moment in which I could choose to give my attention here versus there. And while everybody recognized that there was involuntary attention,

• 23:13Speaker 01

  there was this deep sense that attention was born in the late 19th century as a new language for talking about the coherence of the human subject.

• 23:25Ezra Klein?

  Let me offer two responses that come to mind, and starting here. So obviously, he knows the discourse around attention much better than I ever will. But the first thing that I know where there was a lot of discussion and conversation about attention going far, far, far back before the 19th century, is with the religion. So in Christianity, you have deep attention to attention among different kinds of monks and monastics. Buddhism has that. There are traditions in Judaism around that. I'm sure there's much more in other religions that I know less well. Prayer is an attentional

• 24:04Ezra Klein?

  question. Meditation is a technology of attention, as it gets talked about now, but you can frame it in much more spiritual ways than that. So what should that make us think that there was so much more, perhaps, attention to attention within the monastic religious traditions?

• 24:24Speaker 01

  It's a great question, again, and I share your interest in those forms of attention. I do want to say that while it is certainly true that people have been concerned about how to hold before their minds and their senses, objects since forever, and that religious spaces have been central zones for that sort of combat of the senses and the will. If one actually digs in on that stuff, the language often isn't sort of the language we would use. Contemplation, for instance, was a central preoccupation of monks. But if you had brought them the kinds of questions that are getting asked by the early 20th century concerning

• 25:09Speaker 01

  that stimulus-response phenomenon, or even the ways that William James will talk about attention, that would have been unrecognizable to them. That said, much of my own interest in attention actually comes out of my own meditational life as well. I care deeply about the spiritual traditions that inform our resources as we begin to think about what to do now. And there are some 20th century thinkers who have commented in really profound ways on the relationship between prayer and the sort of thing we are now worried about when we talk about attention. The great French mystic Simone Weil comes to mind. So Simone

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Weil, who kind of skirted up to the edge of Christianity in different ways, but never kind of crossed over, was a political activist, a labor activist, and ultimately a kind of social justice martyr across the era of the Second World War, wrote passionately

• 26:13Speaker 01

  That pure, unmixed attention is prayer. So for her, that, if you like, apophatic attention, attention that won't have an easy object or end or purpose. When I say apophatic, I invoke the tradition of negative theology, right? Two theological traditions, one where you try to get at God directly, one where you say, look, God's so beyond us, we're not going to get to God. We're finite creatures, God's infinite. Our best chance to get anything like the God space is to sort of enumerate everything that's not God

• 26:54Speaker 01

  to get at God via the via negativa, the negative way. So we will enumerate the cloud of unknowing rather than getting all puffed up with ourselves that we're having a conversation with God. I would argue that Simone Weil's account of attention as a sort of radical, pure emptying of oneself, an openness to imminence, is apophatic. It's an attention that isn't triggerable. It won't target. You can't bring it out in stimulus and response experimentations because it waits in a kind of ecstatic and infinite openness

• 27:38Speaker 01

  for that which it knows not.

• 27:42Ezra Klein?

  So that's the other question that that comes up for me. There is an argument that what we are saying about attention now is just another moral panic of the kind we've been having since the early 19th century, that people were complaining about how we were losing our attention then, trains were too fast, life was too fast, everybody was reading newspapers. And it's the same arguments, and yet it's all been fine. We worried about this with the advent of radio, with the advent of television. It just comes up and up and up and up. And then we could just kind of move on to the next thing and we worry about it again. And when people think about the attentional golden age, to the extent they imagine it,

• 28:24Ezra Klein?

  they don't mean the 15th century. They mean right before whatever the thing they're worried about now is, right? Blogging was great. Social media was too far. Or if blogging was too much, newspapers are great, but you know, digital news is too far. How do you think about that concern that that you and me, we are aging and just part of a perennial moral panic?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  I'm sympathetic to that critique of all this. By the same token, people have been deeply right again and again, that things were changing. And things have changed in ways that were catastrophic, in addition to changing in ways that have been transformative and good. And some measure of what we need out of historical consciousness is the kind of critical discernment to make those judgments. So was there a moral panic about advertising in the early 20th century? There sure was. Why? Because people started experimenting with projecting advertisements using very bright lights, arc lamps on the underside of clouds. And everyone was like, this is horrible. I don't want to read soap ads like

• 29:32Speaker 01

  on the night sky. And then people began to think it would be amazing to sort of have amplified screaming ads floating in the air over cities, so that you would have continuous barrages of sound advertisements in space. Also horrible. New technologies do really make possible new forms of human exploitation. This is real. The factory system certainly improved life in lots of ways. It made available much less expensive textiles, for instance. But you'd have to be out of your mind not to recognize that the aggregation of labor in the satanic mills of Lancashire created monstrous new labor conditions, against which

• 30:13Speaker 01

  people had to gather together and mount resistance. I would argue that we are in a moment now.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  In which this human fracking and the essentially unregulated commodification of this precious stuff out of which we make ourselves, the instrument of our being, this is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this, and we need to like mount new forms of resistance. We don't know yet what the forms of resistance will be, just like those early resistors in the factory system didn't yet understand the way that labor politics and trade unionism would emerge as meaningful technologies

• 31:04Speaker 01

  of collective action. We don't yet know what forms of resistance are going to emerge. That is what we need, is like all hands on deck for a kind of attention activism that raises our awareness. And this work is happening in lots of different places already. We need to see what happens with it in the years ahead.

• 31:24Ezra Klein?

  Maybe this is a digression, maybe it's not, because you're a historian who's dealt with this question, I think, a bunch. I'm fascinated by the way we think about past moral panics, call them moral panics, right? The very term assumes just hysteria that then went away. Often, when I go back and I read critics of a previous technological moment, it's true on one level that obviously the world did not come to an end, we're sitting here talking. And it is also often true that they were right. You go back and you read Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death," and the thing he is predicting roughly will eventually happen is that we will think everything must be entertainment. And so

• 32:04Ezra Klein?

  even things that should not be entertainment will become driven by and assessed on the values of entertainment. And it is just like a direct line to Donald Trump. And you could say, oh, you know, we had a previous moral panic about television, or you could say, All these people were right. The world didn't end, but a lot of bad things actually did happen. I think about this with advertising. Mid-century, there is a tremendous amount of critique and interest in the rise of advertising. You can read The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, and he's very interested in this question. And my senses among economists and others, that's looked back on as a little bit embarrassing, right? Like, look, there's advertising and it's fine. And I don't know, I'm actually amazed. I moved to New York about a year ago.

• 32:48Ezra Klein?

  I'm amazed at how much advertising is permitted on the subway. Public space, right? The subway I would go into for a long time. It had a grayscale image advertising The Exorcist reboot. Horrifying image, like two girls, like black ichor dripping from their mouth. I mean, just grotesque. Every morning I would see it. And it seems a little bit dystopic. This is public space. Why am I being? Why every morning when I bring my five-year-old onto the subway, is he seeing an ad for a horror movie? But we've just gotten used to it. I'm curious how you think about this discourse, this sense that the things we worried about in the past, we were obviously wrong to worry about. And as such, worrying about things in the present is probably going to be wrong too,

• 33:29Ezra Klein?

  because eventually we'll simply make our peace with it and the world will move on. And if it does that, then, you know, clearly it was fine.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Where even to begin? Oh, my heavens. I mean, uh, those who have worried that things were getting worse have been essential to our being clear-eyed about our condition again and again. The process by which money value has displaced other languages of value, big picture, that's one of the enormous secular trends one can discern of the last 150, 200 years. And I would say many of the things you just invoked are, in effect, explicable out of that dynamic.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Now, I don't want to sound reactionary when I say that. And I also don't wish to kind of invoke some fantasy utopia of the past. But we are more severed from each other.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Now, than at any time in human history, even as we have this kind of ersatz experience of our being aggregated in new and powerful ways, we've seen dynamics that simultaneously severed us from each other and created new aggregations. For instance, the rise of nationalism across the 19th century, which was a kind of a harrowing ideology that created new forms of collective identity and displaced experiences of intimacy at the same time with monstrous consequences. So it's totally reasonable, I believe, to be extremely uneasy about the dynamics that we're seeing.

• 35:13Ezra Klein?

  One thing that has, again, bothered me about a lot of the discourse on attention is I think because we don't have a good definition of it itself. We don't, I think, think about it very clearly. We know what we often don't want. A lot of us don't want the feeling, the fractured, irritated, outraged feeling we have on social media or online. We don't like learning and noticing in ourselves that the amount of time we spend on any single task on the computer has dropped and dropped and dropped. A lot of us have this experience of fracture. So kind of we know what we don't want, this. I don't think we have a very good positive vision.

• 35:57Ezra Klein?

  How do you think about the creation of a positive vision of attention, given the extraordinary diversity of human experience and wants?

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a very hard question. In a sense, you're asking both a question about authority and also asking a question about prescription. We're going to prescribe for people this versus that, and who will prescribe? You know, I think of the extraordinary definition of education that Tari Spivak offers, which is the non-coercive.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Rearranging of desire. What's education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

• 36:40Ezra Klein?

  And that rings for you.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  I have to say it does.

• 36:43Ezra Klein?

  It's not how my education felt to me.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think a lot of our educations work that way. So I would say that that's a richly humanistic and at the same time, critical account of education. It's not especially an account of education that conduces to making optimized workers in the labor force. But let's just sort of unpack it for a second. We organize our lives around desire in some basic sense. You say, well, who we just tell people that they shouldn't want, enjoy, receive that little like dopamine hit, feel good when they're scrolling through TikTok. Okay.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Our desires can go lots of different places. It's also possible for us to put our desires in places that ultimately lead to our being unhappy and lonely, not flourishing. The question of how to organize our desires, how to know what it is we want, that is what we really want, or what in wanting most dignifies and extends our experience of being, as opposed to, again, severing and impoverishing us. That's the hard work of education. And people have to work that stuff out for themselves, but also they have to work that stuff out with other people.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  That's in a sense, why the humanistic tradition brings with it tradition, stuff, the kind of best that's been thought and said, texts, objects, here, here, look at this. It's not, look at this, I'm going to force you. It's, I want you, non-coercively, to discover that in being with this in these ways, something good will happen.

• 38:27Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, let me hold on this idea of non-coercion. So first, for me, education was coercive. I did not want to spend eight hours a day, sitting in these small classrooms, being lectured at. Just didn't. I had to, which I don't think is a bad thing. I am not really one of these people who thinks that childhood should be up to the whims of the child. I don't think I would have made good decisions as a kid. I'm not sure the decisions made for me were great decisions either, but nevertheless. And something that has been on my mind has been how bad I think parents,

• 39:09Ezra Klein?

  at least of certain classes right now, have gotten at coercion. And it worries me because my kids are young, so it's kind of easy right now, but I know it's going to get harder. And I see all these parents who know that they don't think their kids should have a smartphone when they're 11, and they fall because, eh, the other kids do. And I see in this debate that we're having right now about smartphones and kids, what I would describe as a real discomfort with how to be paternalistic when paternalism is actually needed. So John Height writes this book, The Anxious Generation. Part of the book's thesis is that smartphones and social media have kicked off a mental health crisis in our children.

• 39:53Ezra Klein?

  Then there's a huge back and forth on these exact studies. And one thing I really noticed in this whole debate, where I think the research is very complicated and you can fairly come to a view on either end of it, is that if you convinced me that my kids scrolling their phones for four hours a day had no outcome on their mental health at all, it did not make them more anxious, it did not make them more depressed, it would change my view on this not at all. I just think as a way of living a good life, you shouldn't be staring at your phone for four hours a day. And yet I also realize that the language of society right now in parenting doesn't have that much room for that.

• 40:38Ezra Klein?

  And I think we have a lot of trouble talking about just like what we think a good life would be. Not a life that leads to a good job, not a life that leads to a high income, but just the idea, which I think we are more comfortable talking in terms of at other points in history, that it is better to read books than to not read books, no matter if you can measure that on somebody's income statement or not. And so I wonder not just about the non-coercive rearranging of desire, but I also wonder about, I mean, I don't love calling it the coercive rearranging of desire, but the ability to talk about what we think we should desire or socially approve of, and then particularly for younger kids for whom their attentional resources are being formed.

• 41:21Ezra Klein?

  Actually insist upon that.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  So I want to ask you back a question in response to that, which is just where do you anchor your intuition that it is, say, better to read a book than it is to scroll on TikTok for four hours?

• 41:43Ezra Klein?

  If I'm being honest as a parent, right, and I'm not saying I would legislate this, I anchor it in my own experience of attention.

• 41:52Ezra Klein?

  I think books are remarkable and specific in their ability to simultaneously allow for a deep immersion in somebody else, right, another human being's story or thoughts or mind, and also create a lot of space for your own mind wandering. And I will say, and it's one of the reasons I wanted to invite you on the show, we'll talk about the school of attention that you're part of in a bit. I will say that my biggest concern, and the concern that nobody really has an answer to for me, because I do want to send my kids to public school, is that I care less about how they are taught subjects and how they are taught attention, what kind of attention they're able to bring to the things they will want to know.

• 42:36Ezra Klein?

  But again, the thing that worries me is that I see so little discourse like that.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  I'm enormously moved by what you're saying. The dynamics that you're describing are not unfolding in empty space. They're unfolding in relation to a basically unbridled dynamic of financial optimization. Like, we just can't leave capitalism out of this. The system in which we operate is centrally driven by return on investment, not by human flourishing. And there may be no other way to organize large, modern, complex societies, but we

• 43:25Speaker 01

  would be insane not continuously to hold before us the essential adversary here. The corporations are not on our sides, and the fact that

• 43:38Speaker 01

  A major split of our contemporary economy has figured out how to monetize not just our labor, but our actual ability to give ourselves to what we care about is extremely bad for our ability to continue to be non-inhuman beings.

• 43:56Ezra Klein?

  I think I'm getting at something similar when I talk about my discomfort with how hard we find it to criticize choice. People mean a lot of things when they talk about neoliberalism, and I don't love the term, one, because I think it annoys people and shuts them down, but the other is because it's imprecise. But the thing I mean when I talk about neoliberalism and the neoliberal age is a period in which the logic of markets became the logic.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 44:29Ezra Klein?

  And I think it has become very difficult to think outside of market logic. And when I read older texts, I see a lot more discussion of the good, of virtues, of, and a lot of it is very religiously inflected, to be fair. I mean, religion was an alternative structure of logic, of meaning, that was in contestation with economic ways of thinking about that. I think as religion has weakened, not only as an organized force, but as a kind of conceptual way of looking at the world, capitalism, market logic has taken over a lot of that space, and the market does not have our interest at heart.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  You invoke religion as one of the sort of traditions on which one has been able to draw for a discourse of value that would not reduce to money value. I would invoke two other kinds of institutions that have been really important. There's the space of education. I mean, I basically believe that a lot of what we do in the humanities Is a training of attention. And partially, that's like, why we have to hold on to and protect spaces for humanistic work in our education, because a lot of the other stuff can be instrumentalized. It's part of the reason it's getting increasingly exterminated from universities, because you can't monetize it.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  But I say all of that just because interpretation or meaning is so inextricable from the labor of attention. And there's a third, which I also think is interesting to consider, which is spaces of art, music, aesthetics. I mean, artists have always made fun of the bourgeois collector who showed up with a giant bag of money and said, you know, show me the most expensive thing and I'll take it. And, you know, the people in the know in the space of the arts would sort of snicker and say, you know, how callow that he walked out with that. That's not the good stuff. So each of those spaces, spaces of religion and institutions of education, study, teaching

• 46:35Speaker 01

  and learning, and then museums and spaces of artistic production, symphonies, music. Each of those institutions has meaningful traditions of non-instrumentalizable attention.

• 47:15Ezra Klein?

  Is attention the category of the thing we want or a subcategory of the thing that we want? So sometimes I wonder if attention is a word like health. If I told you health is important, you'd nod your head. You're nodding your head, in fact, right now. If I said, I'm really trying to work on my health. On the one hand, you would get what I meant by that. On some level, I don't want to die soon and young for a preventable reason, but also wouldn't really tell you anything. There's so many subcategories to health, right? You know, you go to doctors for different parts of the body, and there's mental health and fitness and different kinds of fitness and cardiovascular and strength. And sometimes when we talk about attention, it feels to me like we are talking about a thing like health,

• 47:58Ezra Klein?

  the entire basket of different forms of awareness and experience we use when we are moving through the world. And sometimes it feels like we are talking about something very specific, right? Cardiovascular fitness, not health. Right? And then alongside that, there are all these other things you might want to cultivate and be concerned about. Which one is it for you?

• 48:20Speaker 01

  I think you've put your finger exactly on that duplex nature of our discourse around attention. Both those notions are in the language of attention that we use. And I would argue that what's important now is that we have the richest conversation about attention, to surface it as our collective concern in the way that this podcast and all the podcasts you've done on this and the wide range of authors like Jenny Odell and James Williams and Tim Wu, all these folks who've written this. We need more of all of that because, and here's where your language of health is exactly right. What we need is a kind of almost revolutionary

• 49:02Speaker 01

  rising of our awareness around the importance of this stuff. I'm old enough to remember a period back when nobody went running. James F. Fix, right? He wrote the book Running in, what was it, 77? Before that, regular people didn't go jogging. They didn't go running. People who ran were people who were sort of athletes or people in sort of school because they were doing collective sports. Also, there weren't gyms that regular people went to, right? There were places like Gold's Gym, where you could go if you were a powerlifter or a boxer. I'm talking 1974, 75. The whole idea that ordinary people would sort of concern themselves with their fitness is something that's emerged over the last 40 years. It's staggering to consider the scale

• 49:46Speaker 01

  of the collective awareness of our physical well-being. Now, does that mean that health itself is a new idea? No, people have been worried about their health since forever. But the specific activation of fitness, that's a relatively new thing and it's really changed in our lifetimes. And I'm proposing to you that that's going to happen again over the next 40 years. A collective recognition that our wellness in our attentional lives, our hygiene and health and our attention is going to be constitutive of our experience of being, this is what's going to happen. It's going to reshape education, which, as you've signaled, needs to be for and about attention. That's what it needs to teach.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  And it's going to transform our other ways of being together.

• 50:33Ezra Klein?

  So you're trying to do some of this. You have, along with others, this school of attention. What are you trying to teach?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I love this stuff. I mean, we think of the school as sort of a little bit like Black Mountain College, sort of creative artistic collaboration, a little bit like, something like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, like continuing education for people who want to read together and think and be together in person, in a place. And then a little bit like the kind of radical labor schools of the teens and twenties, like the schools created by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which were more like activist projects to promote a certain kind of politics. So that's kind of the triangle in which we place the school. The school does not promote some single programmatic theory of attention. On the contrary, we're interested in all the different traditions that can inform how we take attention forward.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  We had a senior Zen student who had a course on Zen meditation as an attentional form. Class on cinematography as a medium in which attention is choreographed cinematically. A class on perfume, where smell as a sensory modality is centered as a sort of attentional form. We run workshops, and this is separate from the classes, we do free workshops. And the workshops are sort of opportunities to actually do some attentional stuff together, exercises, in which people will, for instance, listen four times to the same four-minute

• 52:05Speaker 01

  piece of music, under, again, different sort of mental orientations, but collectively, then take some notes and talk out what happened as they sort of use their attention. And possibly the coolest thing we do at the school are these things called sidewalk studies, in which between five and 10 people will get together, usually a bar, a cafe, and they'll read a carefully selected paragraph closely together and talk about it, seminar style, having a drink. That paragraph is on a card. When you flip the card over, there's a thing to do together, like a street action, like a kind of situation, a style activity.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  So an example would be like a great Audre Lorde passage on food in the city. The action is going into a bodega and actually examining the bodega for where surveillance is happening, where nourishment is happening. And then moving to the second bar and talking through what it was like to sort of be in the space of the bodega with the Audre Lorde passage in our heads together. And there are dozens and dozens of these exercises that are continuously being invented by folks in the school and doing them together. They do it because it's a way of being together and practicing attention together to generate forms of solidarity.

• 53:24Ezra Klein?

  I'm interested in that idea of practicing attention together. You know, with my kids, when I think about this, one of the things that I wonder is, when I ask like, what do I mean by I want them taught attention? Some part of it is just like, I want them to have familiarity, like a visceral, somatic familiarity with what different kinds of attention feel like. I'm not sure I had that for a very long time. I've, I'd of course experienced many kinds of attention, but it's only later in life I've become more mindful of what they feel like. And that's helped me diminish the role of some in my life. Right? The reason I'm not on Twitter or X anymore is that I don't like the feeling of the attention it furnishes. I don't like how I feel when I leave it.

• 54:08Ezra Klein?

  Reason I've sort of moved back to paper books is like, I do like the feeling of the attention. I, I notice that it is healthier for me. It sounds to me a little bit like something you all are trying to do is just creating context in which you experience different kinds of attention. So you have that internal map you can work with.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's a do by doing kind of thing. You actually have to come together with other people and Surface the question of attention and then experience what giving one's attention with others can do to be reminded of how precious that feature of our being is and discover what can be returned from the world to themselves out of opening themselves to it attentionally.

• 54:57Ezra Klein?

  So I thought a good place to end here would be to do the deep listening activity, or at least a truncated version of it that you described earlier. So how do you lead people through this?

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Okay, so this would be an example of one of the exercises we might do at one of the attention labs at the Strother School. And we always like to make clear that we borrow from lots of different traditions. So this is very much like the kinds of exercises that the wonderful sound artist genius Pauline Oliveros would use in her practice. It's not exactly like her stuff, but we always kind of talk a bit about Pauline Oliveros when we set this one up. And there are other sound artists who inform the kind of stuff we care about. Annie Lockwood and others. The exercise is going to have four phases. I understand that you've got a sort of sound piece queued up.

• 55:46Ezra Klein?

  We've got it.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Okay, we're going to actually play it four times. So your listeners have to be ready. You're going to hear that piece of music, which is about how many minutes would you say?

• 55:56Ezra Klein?

  I think we've cut it to 30 seconds or so.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's 30 seconds. We normally do this for a little longer, but all right. So wherever you are, get ready. You're going to hear this 30 second sound piece four times. And I'm going to give you the mood under which you'll attend to it. First, just listen. Okay, first, listen.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Second Listen Recall What have you heard before?

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Third Lesson Discover What do you hear for the first time?

• 58:21Speaker 01

  And four, finally, Don't Listen What do you find when you don't listen?

• 59:06Speaker 01

  So let's talk back and forth. An observation about each of the phases. What happened in the first phase, for you guys?

• 59:13Ezra Klein?

  The striking thing about listening to it the first time was the way my body's response kept changing. So initially, it's like you've got these birds, you know, it seems like it's going to be a kind of nice ambient piece of music. And then just like the intense escalating tension, somewhat mounting dread. The noise goes up, the number of sounds happening simultaneously feels like it goes up, the volume goes up. So by the end, you've begun, or for me, I began, it's like, oh, like a nice, like, Jesus Christ, why did my producers choose this piece of music? So yeah, it was a little bit, for the first time, I was just on the ride of the bodily response to it.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  For me, in the first time through, I was acutely attuned to a thousand questions sort of pulling me in all directions because I'm accustomed to doing these kinds of things like over a long time. So, you know, longer, more immersive, more people. So a lot of anxiety is to whether this kind of thing can work in this setting. So the truth is, I became aware about midway through that I was effectively not listening to the thing at all on the first time through, trying, but trying but failing for me on the first one. We go to the second listen, where we were trying to hear something that we'd heard before. Recall.

• 1:00:39Ezra Klein?

  The second one I was struck by, so I remember the birds, right? I noticed they go on a little bit longer than I thought. And the second, I was a little braced because I remembered the feeling I had on the first. It was like, oh, as this keeps going, you feel worse. And so the remembrance was of what was coming in the way that then made me surprised about what was there in the, in the moment.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Super interesting. This is so embarrassing, but I heard the birds for the first time in the second phase.

• 1:01:07Ezra Klein?

  It's not remembering.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  That's not, so it was a double catastrophe because I was like, how the heck did I not hear the birds in the first phase? My listening was so bad in phase one. And two, wait a second, I'm not supposed to discover new things until phase three. So I had phase catastrophic disaster and felt bad about myself. But then sort of rounded on that and became aware of that sort of inexorable march time that comes in and the sort of harrowing fatalism that one associates with that musical mode. And so I had gotten to that in the first listen and was able to be like, okay, okay, I'm remembering that, I'm remembering that.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Third listen, were you able to discover anything new?

• 1:01:56Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I was more attentive to the birds. So I was sort of tracking them. I realized they disappear. The whole piece then on the third, the thing I noticed was it, it feels like you're clear cutting a forest, right? That, that felt to me like what that piece of music was, right? You are going through the forest. It's initially fairly untouched. And then with each rising, I mean, the birds eventually falling silent, you know, that tick, tick, tick, tick. When you talk about the fatalism of it, I mean, this felt like a, like a piece of music that was about the clear cutting of an ecosystem.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I love discovery for me involved a loop into how this piece came to be.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  I heard a twang that felt guitar-like, but I'm almost certain that the music was composed electronically. So I had a little moment of your engineer or your creatives, whoever's back there making this. And were they at a machine? What kind of machine? What kinds of clips or samples were they drawing on? So my kind of discovery in a sense was the sources and being recalled to the question of the sources of these sounds, these acoustic experiences. Final phase four, you tried not to listen, Ezra. What happened?

• 1:03:16Ezra Klein?

  It was more comfortable.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:03:18Ezra Klein?

  That body response, that kind of mounting dread, that anxiety just was muted. So it was more like the way I listen to music when I work, where my attention is not on the music and the music is providing a mood and an energy. Right? The music is a kind of stimulant. But I'm not deeply immersed in it.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  What did you do with the rest of you to not listen? Because of course, our ears are funny. You can't close your ears. So the stuff's gonna keep coming in. It's not like our eyes where like we

• 1:03:52Ezra Klein?

  I moved to the eyes.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Ezra Klein?

  More of my attention was on what I was seeing.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did exactly the same thing. Did you close your eyes in the first three phases? Did you keep them open as in listening? You did.

• 1:04:03Ezra Klein?

  Kept them open on all.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  That's interesting. I closed them, but I opened my eyes in the final phase and had a little taste. It was quick, but a little taste of that, like a foretaste of the ecstasy of trying to awaken my visual field and brighten it such that it would sort of displace my acoustic experience. So I kind of had hypervision for a second in an effort to sort of blast out of my ears the acoustic experience by overwhelming it with the other sensory modality. And that felt, that was a little tremor of the good stuff where you can sort of feel an activation of what you can do with your attention as an aspect of being. I must say I enjoyed that.

• 1:04:49Ezra Klein?

  So what's the point of all that for you? If that is a successful lesson when you do it, what are you hoping people have experienced? Like, what is the meta lesson of that lesson, right? It's not just what you heard in the music. What did we just do?

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, I want to just admit that I'm not super sure. And that kind of uncertainty is part of it. And what I can assure you is that when seven or eight people get together in Brooklyn and do something like this for half hour, 45 minutes, we all come out of it feeling so good. It just feels so right to be with ourselves and what our minds and senses can do, and with other people in relation to what's in the world this way. And I think that at this moment, we need to carve out more spaces

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  for these kinds of activated experiences within our teaching and learning environments.

• 1:05:57Ezra Klein?

  Let me end on this. If you're somebody who's not near the Brooklyn School of Radical Attention,

• 1:06:04Ezra Klein?

  but if somebody who kind of senses something is wrong with your intention, wrong, the intentional world that you inhabit, and you want it to be better for you. You want to find a space of what will feel like attentional health. Where do you start?

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question. And for my answer, I'm gonna read one of the 12 Theses on Attention written by the Friends.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Thesis nine of the 12 Theses reads, "Sanctuaries for true attention already exist. They are among us now. But they're endangered, and many are in hiding, operating in self-sustaining, inclusive, generous, and fugitive forms. These sanctuaries can be found, but it takes an effort of attention to find them. And this seeking is also attention's effort to heal itself."

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  So my answer is find a sanctuary. It's there. And your listeners out there, they all have their different sort of sweet spots where they are able to protect themselves from the frackers. It might be gardening. It might be that they actually can weld. And like when they've got their visor down and they're kind of in the puddle of the hot metal, that's when everything is zoned out. They may be knitting and they may be doing Zumba class. I don't know what it is they're doing that's near you and what you would find and make possible, but find your people. And out of finding your people and with a measure of intentionality insisting upon

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  the sanctuary where you are resistant to being fracked, attention can begin to heal. And that seeking out of the sanctuary space is itself already part of the healing.

• 1:08:01Ezra Klein?

  So then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Oh, there are so many great books and all we need to do is protect the ability to read them and we'll be good. Well, let's start with one that I think is a deep and challenging and important book in this kind of attention space. And it's by my esteemed colleague Natasha Daushul down at NYU. It's called Addiction by Design. Natasha Daushul is a Science and Technology Studies scholar, an anthropologist by training, and she did an extraordinary book on video poker machines, gambling machines in Vegas.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  It's a kind of a pre-smartphone book about the engineering of addiction by the folks who designed those gambling machines and the environments in which they sit. And if you wanna have a kind of harrowing inwardness with the sophisticated dark patterned technologies that can be achieved even in the most primitive technologies, those machines are not fancy in important ways, right? They are a kind of 19th century printing press to a modern full-color laser printer in relation to what we have now in our pockets.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  But already to see how sophisticated the design of those systems were to suck people in and hold them, it's amazing. Natasha Dausch, Addiction by Design. A second book that I love and that also comes out of my field and that I think is a deep and hard but beautiful and important book for thinking about the history of science would be the book Objectivity by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston, both of whom are really great historians of science. That book is a history of something that seems impossible to historicize. I mean, objectivity doesn't have a history. Like, objectivity is just being objective. That's like, trans-historical.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  And they do an extraordinary and counterintuitive job of showing how radically historical our conceptualization of objectivity itself is, how entangled it is with shifting ideas of subjectivity, for instance, or the way that it plays off of the emergence of mechanical technologies for making inscriptions. So, Objectivity by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston. And then I guess my wildcard book would just be a book I love and a book about the imagination, belief, dreams, and about America. It's by Herman Melville, of course, the author of Moby Dick, a book I also love, but I'm

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  gonna invoke his much stranger book, The Confidence Man. Which is a book about how belief happens and who the people are who can make us believe and about the sort of entanglement of hope and belief. It's very much a book about this strange country that I love and believe in and that has to make us all also very uncomfortable a lot of the time. Herman Melville's The Confidence Man.

• 1:11:22Ezra Klein?

  Steve Graham Burnett, thank you very much.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  It's all a pleasure. Thanks.

• 1:11:33Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klontz Show was produced by Roland Hu and Kristin Lin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith. Original music by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Christina Semiluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.