The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, large and small, appear everywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally augmented. Amid this flood, your attention practices matter more than ever. You might not be able to tune this world out. ... Show More
Oct 5
All Around Is Fairy Ground: Pleasure and the Regency Garden with Timothy Mowl (Reaktion, 2026)
Regency gardens dazzled with colour, invention and theatricality: trellises heavy with roses and jasmine, shrubberies designed for intrigue and lawns enlivened with pools, grottoes and fanciful ornaments. Yet behind this world of perfume and spectacle lay a striking social shift. ... Show More
30m 30s
Sep 20
Damian White and Nicholas Pevzner, "Designing the Just Transition: Design-Politics, Labor, and the Battle for Post-Carbon Futures" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Environmental politics is clearly at an impasse, increasingly foreclosed by a fragmenting elite consensus on climate change, an escalating populist backlash on the right, and a pervasive sense of climate doom on the left. This book considers what new openings might be offered by ... Show More
31m 26s
Sep 17
Jim Gaona Ellis, "Educators As Designers: The Hidden Architecture of Learning" (Harvard Education Press, 2026)
An invitation to K-12 educators to reimagine their roles through the transformative lens of design In Educators as Designers, Jim Gaona Ellis draws on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the latest UDL guidelines to position teachers as creators, innovators, and problem-solve ... Show More
50m 50s
Sep 2025
Episode 34 Developing the Skill of Focus in a Distracted World
<p>The average person checks their phone 96 times per day. We live surrounded by notifications, alerts, and an endless stream of information competing for our attention. While technology has brought incredible advances to our lives, it has also created an environment where sustai ... Show More
18m 12s
Jun 2023
The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age
Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the a ... Show More
19m 15s
May 2024
Your Mind Is Being Fracked
<p>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 ... Show More
1h 12m
Apr 2024
Ep. 298: Rethinking Attention
We think of information as something neutral; a spotlight that helps illuminate the reality of the outside world. Accordingly, more information is better than less. In this episode, Cal pushes back on this model, arguing that the form in which information arrives can strongly imp ... Show More
1h 21m