2024-08-30
57 分钟I’m convinced that attention is the most important human faculty. Your life, after all, is just the sum total of the things you’ve paid attention to. We lament our attention issues all the time — how distracted we are, how drained we feel, how hard it is to stay focused or present. And yet, while there’s no shortage of advice on how to improve our sleep hygiene or spending habits or physical fitness, there’s hardly any good information about how to build and replenish our capacity for paying attention. Gloria Mark is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of the book “Attention Span.” And she’s one of the few people who have deeply studied the way our attention works, how that’s been changing and what we can do to stop frittering away our attention budgets. This was our first release of 2024, a kind of New Year’s resolutions episode. And since it can sometimes help to be reminded of the intentions with which you began your year — especially in the midst of a high-intensity election season — we thought we’d share it again. Book recommendations: “The Challenger Launch Decision” by Diane Vaughan “The Undoing Project” by Michael Lewis “The God Equation” by Michio Kaku Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. 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 Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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So we are off this week, but I wanted to replay a couple of episodes that have been on my mind at this particular moment.
Like a lot of people, I can feel my attentional habits slipping in this election.
I'm looking at my phone more refreshing social media, more feeling like I gotta be on top of everything, and feeling more tired, more distracted, more all over the place.
In January, I had a conversation with Gloria Mark, one of the really eminent researchers of attention, about how our attention works and how to refresh it when it becomes exhausted.
I hope you enjoy from New York Times opinion this is the Ezra Klein show hello, and we are back from the holiday break.
So before we begin today, we have a couple of open jobs on the show.
One, a researcher role which will be central in our political and policy coverage in 2024, which is going to be a big politics and policy year, and an associate engineer role who will be helping to engineer the show, making this whole thing happen, making it into actual audio.
That sounds good.
If either role seems up your alley, you can find the links to them in our show notes.
But today I like to begin every year by doing some shows, not on resolutions, which I don't really tend to believe in, but around some questions that I am thinking about and trying to work on as we enter into new year.
And foremost in my mind right now is attention.
And I think it's foremost in my mind because it is literally foremost in mind.
Whatever you are paying attention to is what is foremost in your mind.
And I am so convinced that attention is the most important human faculty that at the end of your life, what was your experience of your life?