Tag: attention
September 7, 2026
Public NOW archive for September 7, 2026.
The body has its own clocks. What interests …
The body has its own clocks. What interests me here is the mismatch between the body’s rhythm and the story the working day tells about us. The working day assumes a fairly flat human being: switch on in the morning, remain cognitively available for eight hours, then switch off at an administratively acceptable time. If...
September 5, 2026
Public NOW archive for September 5, 2026.
September 4, 2026
Public NOW archive for September 4, 2026.
Time is a nonrenewable resource, but that language …
Time is a nonrenewable resource, but that language can make a life sound like a battery slowly running down. Use it wisely. Don’t waste a drop. Extract maximum value before the whole operation shuts down. There’s truth in the warning, but also a trap. The moment we call time a resource, the manager in the...
Some people want to kill time, as if …
Some people want to kill time, as if the hours were an enemy to be disposed of. They scroll, distract themselves, wait for something better to begin. But killing time is a strange ambition. Time and life arrive as the same substance. You can’t murder one without wounding the other. Others want to sidestep time....
Virus of the spirit. The phrase gets under …
Virus of the spirit. The phrase gets under my skin. It folds biology, information, psychology and magic into a single image: something enters a host, borrows the host’s machinery and reproduces itself. If the host is a person, the machinery is attention, memory, desire, fear, identity and language. A thought enters through a parent’s warning,...
The Dorothy Practice: Staying With the Visible World for Another Beat
I am sitting in Bonnie, our caravan, with my morning coffee while the campsite begins to wake around me. A rook is cleaning up the empty pitch next to ours. One of his companions joins him. A little later, on my way to the shower block, I pass a chicken picking crumbs from another camper’s...
This morning I am sitting in Bonnie, our …
This morning I am sitting in Bonnie, our caravan, with a cup of coffee and Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals open in front of me. We are in a field near Ashbourne on our first trip away in her. Dorothy is writing about walks, weather, meals, visitors, William, and the small movements of...
We talk about consuming books, as though reading …
We talk about consuming books, as though reading were a kind of nutritional exercise: pages in, knowledge out. But the best reading has never felt like consumption to me. It feels more like entering into correspondence with another consciousness across space and time. A conversation where one voice has the strange advantage of having thought...
The air has changed. I almost don’t want …
The air has changed. I almost don't want to say it out loud, as if naming it might hurry things along, but there was a trace of winter under the morning. It wasn't cold. The air had acquired an edge, just enough to remind me that the year is already leaning towards another season. Where...
I picked up an old book this morning: …
I picked up an old book this morning: Perceiving Ordinary Magic: Science and Intuitive Wisdom by Jeremy Hayward. The cover is a blue corridor of repeating geometry, the kind of image that used to promise either a difficult physics lecture or a trip through somebody else’s consciousness. Somewhere in its opening territory, Hayward pointed me...
The Map Is Not the Adventure: Reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost
I took a different street home the other day. There was no great expedition in it. I was walking back through Southam by a route I know too well, heading toward the familiar turn that gets me home with the least fuss. Then I thought: I could go that way instead. I had no errand...
I keep seeing headlines about the new rules …
I keep seeing headlines about the new rules of attention, usually written by somebody who wants to sell a better way of getting hold of it. The old rules were blunt enough. Interrupt people. Startle them. Keep them scrolling. Learn which colours, fears, desires and half-conscious wounds make a thumb hesitate for a second longer....
Everything Is Something Else
My new YouTube channel that examines AI and modern work through judgment, context, and long memory.