D. Graham Burnett Archives

Psyche

Read a Book, Knit a Sweater, Feel Good

Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement exalts spending time offline, but is its dogma persuasive?

June 17, 2026 • by Rachel Potter

Amateurs, crafters, operators, gatherers, counter-coders, monkey-wrenchers, gamers and players, parents, epimeletes, bards and reciters, spectators and fandoms, and puzzlers: These are the 11 categories that the Friends of Attention collective use to describe the types of people reclaiming powers of concentration offline. All perform what the Friends call “attention activism,” ...

Imagining new approaches to the humanities

“What could history have been?” The question asks how events might have turned out otherwise, if only X had happened instead of Y. What if JFK hadn’t been assassinated? What if Hitler had? The official term for this kind of what-if thinking is “counterfactual history,” and it covers anything from ...