Are Americans working too hard, too fast, and too chaotically for our own good? Slate books editor Dan Kois was eager to find out when a review copy of Stephanie Brown’s Speed: Facing Our Addiction to Fast and Faster—and Overcoming Our Fear of Slowing Down landed on his desk. So he proposed a challenge. Could I read the entire book, write a review, send it to him for an edit, and complete the revisions within a four-hour window? And in a sense, Brown turned out to be right. In order to crash the project, it was necessary to completely unplug from email, Twitter, and other minutiae of the modern digital workplace. Even though I wasn’t offline for very long, I did feel certain pangs of loss. Was I missing important news? Would I fall behind on the latest memes? Nonetheless, Brown’s diagnosis of America’s speed addiction is wildly unpersuasive. Brown’s major tactic is to simultaneously pathologize banal aspects of human life and conflate very real substance abuse problems with her made-up speed addiction. Continue reading at 'Slate'
[ Slate | 2014-01-07 00:00:00 UTC ]