Showing 24 articles matching jenny o'dell.
Novelist and essayist Jenny Diski died this morning. She had been writing a diary for the London Review of Books about her inoperable cancer. Her memoir, In Gratitude, was released last week. Browse our archive of her work, her complete LRB archive, and last year's profile of Diski in the New York Times Magazine.
Jenny Odell is a multidisciplinary artist and the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.
“I’ve noticed that the times I’m extra susceptible to being on social media is when I am feeling personally insecure or when I’m dealing with existential dread. That within itself is not part of the attention economy - that’s just a human being having feelings and reacting to things. For me, it’s a question of like, ’What do I do with that?’ I can either feed it back into the attention economy and actually get more of it back - more anxiety or more existential dread - or I can go in this other direction and spend time alone or with people who care about the same things. Those are places where I can bring my feelings and they won’t destroy me.”
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Jenny Kleeman is a journalist, broadcaster and the author of the new book Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontier of Birth, Food, Sex, and Death.
“It’s better to cover one thing in a really illuminating way than to try and explore every single aspect of a topic in a really superficial way. So if there’s one thing that particularly interests you or fascinates you, if there’s just one question you want to ask, do as much research as you can on that one question and you’ll end up with a much more illuminating interview than something that is a precis of their entire field. Because anyone can do that.”
Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.
An essay on depression, art, and growing up.
Inside the maze of an Amazon scam storefront empire.
Recalling a sexual assault.
An encounter with Emerson’s essays.
At the age fifteen, Jenny Diski, a “foundling,” went to live with Doris Lessing. For fifty years, the two talked every week. Diski promised Lessing that she would never write about her but now, after Lessing’s death, Diski has begun to recount the story of their relationship.
The question of how to name her relationship with Lessing plagued Diski.
Lessing invited Diski into her home, but did she want her there?
How Bill Belichick and Nick Saban bond.
How sharing a Hawaiian pizza from Pizza Hut became a Beijing family tradition.
Posing for family survival in a society that values boys over girls.
On Keith Richards’ autobiography.
There’s some very sensible advice on how to take drugs, too.
On being kicked out of Doris Lessing’s house.
On Jenny Craig’s European expansion and how dieting differs in France and the States.
A profile of the Hollywood star-maker behind Vanna White, Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy.
“What I had going for me was teen rage, contempt impervious to offers of compromise; the power of the mask capable of turning ice to marshmallow, and all the time in the world, all the ability to sustain it without surrendering.”
Paul was in his 80s when someone called to say she was his daughter, conceived in a fertility clinic with his sperm. The only problem? He’d never donated any.
On Wall Street, being Black often means being alone, held back, deprived of the best opportunities.
“When I was fourteen, I had a relationship with my eighth grade history teacher. People called me a victim. They called him a villain. But it’s more complicated than that.”
A profile of Jenny Offill, whose latest novel addresses climate collapse.
In 1959, a social psychologist in Michigan brought together three institutionalized patients for an experiment:
[W]hat would happen, he wondered, if he made three men meet and live closely side by side over a period of time, each of whom believed himself to be the one and only Jesus Christ?
Harmony smiles, blinks and frowns. She can hold a conversation, tell jokes and quote Shakespeare. She’ll remember your birthday, McMullen told me, what you like to eat, and the names of your brothers and sisters. She can hold a conversation about music, movies and books. And of course, Harmony will have sex with you whenever you want.
On Alison Winter’s Memory: Fragments of a Modern History, and issues of memory in the 20th century.
Underlying the compelling feeling that we are our memories is a further common-sense assumption that our entire lives are accurately retained somewhere in the brain ‘bank’ as laid-down memories of our experience, and that we retrieve our lives and selves from an ever expanding stockpile of recollections. Or we can’t, and then that feeling that it’s on the tip of our tongue, or there but just out of range, still encourages us to think that everything we have known or done is in us somewhere, if only our digging equipment were sharper.
