Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady

This week, we revisit our 2019 conversation with Jenny Odell as she discusses her book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy with Roxanne Coady. JENNY ODELL is an artist and writer who teaches at Stanford, has been an artist-in-residence at places like the San Francisco dump, Facebook, the Internet Archive, and the San Francisco Planning Department, and has exhibited her art all over the world. She lives in Oakland. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is her first book.

In today's episode, we revisit our conversation with James Forman, Jr. from 2018 as he discusses his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. James Forman Jr. is a professor of law at Yale Law School. He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, numerous law reviews, and other publications. A former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, he spent six years as a public defender in Washington, D.C., where he cofounded the Maya Angelou Public Charter School.

This week, we revisit our conversation with Lisa Taddeo on her book Three Women, now out in paperback. Lisa Taddeo has contributed to New York magazine, Esquire, Elle, Glamour, and many other publications. Her nonfiction has been included in the Best American Sports Writing and Best American Political Writing anthologies, and her short stories have won two Pushcart Prizes. Lisa Taddeo's debut nonfiction book, Three Women, poignantly, provocatively, and perceptively describes the emotional landscape that she studied for eight years, resulting in a book that Refinery29 descries as "a book that pays deep and solemn attention to the link between a woman's body and heart and sense of self."

Steve Luxenberg is the author of Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation and the critically acclaimed Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret. During his thirty years as a Washington Post senior editor, he has overseen reporting that has earned numerous national honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes. Separate won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.  This episode was originally aired on October 24, 2019.

Doctors are acculturated and socialized to maintain life. Sometimes at all costs, even the human costs of suffering. The relatively new field of palliative care looks for the way that medicine can embrace and relieve the tension of seeking to preserve life while embracing life’s temporality. Dr. Sunita Puri explores the issues with exquisite elegance and humanity in her book That Good Night, out now in paperback from Penguin Press. Dr. Sunita Puri is an assistant professor of clinical medicine at the University of Southern California, and medical director of palliative medicine at the Keck Hospital and Norris Cancer Center. She has published essays in The New York Times, Slate, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and JAMA-Internal Medicine. She lives in Los Angeles.

In the 1990s, three to five percent of American children were believed to have what was referred to as "disordered attention." By 2013, 11 percent were believed to have disordered attention. In 1990, six hundred thousand children were on Ritalin, and by 201 three and a half million children were on stimulants. So was this better diagnosing of the problem? Is the diagnosis actually reliable? And is there an ironic result of treating the problem pharmacologically?  All these questions are explored in Casey Schwarz's book, ]Attention: A Love Story, but the telling is enhanced by your own personal romance with Adderall. This week on Just the Right Book, Roxanne Coady and Casey explore her explanation of what brilliant writers like David Foster Wallace have to say about attention and just why attention might be the key to a full life.  Casey Schwartz is the author of Attention: A Love Story and In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis. She contributes regularly to The New York Times and lives in New York City.

Why is putting out the fire more fascinating than preventing the fire? And why do we think we don't have the money to prevent something, even if the lack of prevention creates a cost? Or worse, cost lives or quality of lives? We seem to be addicted to response, recovery and rescue. All that can change to our collective good., and in dramatic ways. In Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, best-selling author Dan Heath provides the road maps, the rationale ,and dozens of incredible real examples of how thinking upstream can change anything and everything.

David Kamp is an author, journalist, humorist, lyricist, and a charter member of the Sesame Street—viewing audience. A longtime contributor to Vanity Fair, he has profiled such cultural icons as Johnny Cash, Sly Stone, Lucian Freud, Bruce Springsteen, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Among his books are the national bestseller The United States of Arugula, a chronicle of America’s foodways. His first musical as a lyricist, Kiss My Aztec!, a collaboration with John Leguizamo, had its world premiere at Berkeley Rep in 2019. He began his career at Spy, the legendary satirical monthly. He lives with his family in New York City and rural Connecticut.

Dr. Richard Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations. An experienced diplomat and policymaker, he served as the senior Middle East adviser to President George H. W. Bush, as director of the Policy Planning Staff under Secretary of State Colin Powell, and as the U.S. envoy to both the Cyprus and Northern Ireland peace talks. A recipient of the Presidential Citizens Medal, the State Department's Distinguished Honor Award, and the Tipperary International Peace Award, he is also the author or editor of fourteen other books, including the best-selling A World in Disarray.

BESS KALB is an Emmy-nominated writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live. Her writing for the show earned her a Writer's Guild Award in 2016. She has also written for the Oscars and the Emmys. A regular contributor to The New Yorker's "Daily Shouts," her work has been published in The New Republic, Grantland, Salon.com, Wired, The Nation, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles. This episode is sponsored by Care/Of. For 50% off your first Care/of order, go to TakeCareOf.com and enter the code book50.