Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Yawn
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.mary-mann.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-mann-895719137/ * https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/05/the-virtues-of-boredom/525642/ * https://www.mary-mann.com/about/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 84078317
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n84078317
HEADING: Mann, Mary
000 00692cz a2200157n 450
001 2440241
005 20161222144038.0
008 840622n| azannaabn |a aaa
010 __ |a n 84078317
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca01153363
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d OCoLC |d DLC
100 1_ |a Mann, Mary
400 1_ |a Mann, Mary A. |q (Mary Anneeta)
670 __ |a The Los Angeles theatre book, 1984: |b t.p. (Mary Mann) verso t.p. (Mary A. Mann, Ph. D.) p. 255 (Mary Anneeta Mann)
670 __ |a There are no enemies, 2009: |b t.p. (Mary Anneeta Mann) p. 4 of cover (B.A., English, Sydney Univ.; M.A., drama, Univ. of California at Berkeley; Ph. D., communications & drama, Univ. of Southern California)
953 __ |a ba10 |b rc05
NOTE: This is not Mary Anneeta Mann, who is a different person per Mary Mann’s and Mary Anneeta Manns LinkedIn web sites–DP
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Columbia University, M.F.A., 2015.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and researcher. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY,vwriting associate and researcher, 2016–. Has been a guest on Marketplace and WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show.
AWARDS:Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellowship.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times, Smithsonian, and Outside magazine. Also contributor to websites, including Booklslut, Salon, and Slate. Served as an associate editor of Women in Clothes, edited by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton, Particular Books, 2014.
SIDELIGHTS
Mary Mann is a writer whose debut book, Yawn: Adventures in Boredom, examines the cultural phenomena of boredom throughout history and across the globe. Drawing from interviews, research, and personal experience, Mann recounts her search for the truth about boredom. She became interested in the issue while talking with friends and family and acknowledging that she also had a tendency to be bored, which produced a good amount of restlessness and made her think she might be heading toward depression, which runs in her family.
“She writes about her ‘fear that there was no overarching purpose for my time,’ how boredom can paper over feelings of powerlessness or meaninglessness,” wrote Atlantic Online contributor Julie Beck, adding: “It’s easier to label that itchy sensation ‘boredom’ than it is to consider the feeling one gets sometimes that the train of life is stopped on its tracks, that the narrative is going nowhere.”
Addressing the topic of boredom, Mann writes in Yawn: “There are few more ordinary sentiments,” adding: “Over 70 percent of Americans, and 80 percent of people worldwide, are bored with or actively dislike their jobs.” Although Mann’s investigation into boredom shows that the the thing most people are bored with are their jobs, Mann writes boredom is more pervasive than most people think with people claiming to be bored by many, if not most, things. “Mann’s research traces several fascinating ways boredom has shaped social development and habits (and, sometimes, the other way around), noted NPR: National Public Radio website contributor Genevieve Valentine.
Mann recounts attending several events or meetings in which boredom was a central theme. For example, she goes to an event called “Bored and Brilliant” and also attends a sex-toy party seeking some information on how to take the boredom out of the bedroom and the boredom that often evolves in a monogamous relationship. In her interview with Atlantic Online contributor Beck, Mann noted the abundance of “different tools and resources for us to keep things fresh,” adding that statistics abound concerning how people keep their sex lives fresh but questions just how fresh it really is. “It gets to be very exhausting and very unsexy, actually, to think about sex in that way,” Mann told Beck, adding: “It feels to me like there’s something interesting to be explored and experienced after the novelty wears off—to find out what are the other pieces that make up happiness and love.”
In addition to meeting couples who are bored by monogamous sex, Mann also introduces readers to the lives of deployed soldiers who seek entertainment to pass their days of boredom. In her interview with Atlantic Online contributor Beck, Mann noted that she talked with poet Brian Turner, who was also a soldier who had a tour of duty in Iraq. While Turner talked about the deployed soldier’s long bouts of boredom, Mann related to Beck that “as much as he believes that war is kind of a boring thing, he acknowledges that there’s also this aspect of meaning to it that’s harder to get, for him, at home.”
Mann also discusses solitary confined and how boredom is used as a from of punishment. She addresses what she calls in the book the “restless violence” of teenage boys who turn to violent types of activities as an antidote to both boredom and the depression that boredom can sometimes lead to in this segment of the population.
A major theme of the book is how to find escapes from or cures for boredom. “Mann demonstrates by pursuing varied and quirky subjects,” noted a Publishers Weekly contributor.” Mann discusses how the idea of travel is a remedy for boredom and how an entire travel industry has evolved in relation to the need for people to get away from boredom. In the process, she discusses Thomas Cook, a British man considered to be the father of modern tourism in the mid 1800s. Cook saw travel as a way for the British working class to escape their mundane lives and find some other way to entertain themselves beyond drinking. Another potential way to stave off boredom, according to Mann, is to take naps, something that the giant tech company Google supports for their employees.
Throughout the book, Mann takes each focus of each chapter and relates it to her own life. For example, in discussing the idea of whether or not boredom often can be a motive crime, Mann recounts her own fine for drinking in public. Mann also delves into various historical accounts of boredom, including an examination of fourth-century Christian monks who led lives as ascetic hermits in the Scetes desert of Egypt and whose records include discussions of lethargy.
“Mann … manages to avoid the biggest potential pitfall of a book on boredom — she doesn’t solve it,” wrote NPR: National Public Radio website contributor Valentine, adding: “Yawn is deeply interested in connecting the history, psychology, and cultural narratives around boredom.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “Readers who come to share Mann’s understanding could find the book useful, or at least a brief diversion from their boring lives.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Mann, Mary, Yawn: Adventures in Boredom, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2017, review of Yawn.
ONLINE
Atlantic Online, https://www.theatlantic.com/ (May 8, 2017), Julie Beck, “The Virtues of Boredom,” author interview.
FSG Originals, http://www.fsgoriginals.com/ (May 10, 2017), “Mary Mann Has Our Attention.”
Mary Mann Website, https://www.mary-mann.com (November 1, 2017).
NPR: National Public Radio website, http://www.npr.org/ (May 20, 2017), Genevieve Valentine, “We Have Always Been Bored — Yawn Wonders Why.”
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (November 2, 2017), review of Yawn.
The Virtues of Boredom
What’s going on under the surface when people feel bored?
Prince Charles looking bored at the 1953 coronation of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.
Prince Charles with his Aunt, Princess Margaret (right), and his Grandmother, Elizabeth the Queen Mother, at the 1953 coronation of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.Hulton Deutsch / Getty
JULIE BECK MAY 8, 2017 HEALTH
Share Tweet …
LinkedIn
Email
Print
TEXT SIZE
Like The Atlantic? Subscribe to The Atlantic Daily, our free weekday email newsletter.
Email
SIGN UP
Boredom is in many ways an emotion of absence. The absence of stimulation, of interest, of excitement. But as Mary Mann reveals in her new book, Yawn: Adventures in Boredom, what’s lacking when we feel bored is often something much deeper than entertainment. She writes about her “fear that there was no overarching purpose for my time,” how boredom can paper over feelings of powerlessness or meaninglessness. It’s easier to label that itchy sensation “boredom” than it is to consider the feeling one gets sometimes that the train of life is stopped on its tracks, that the narrative is going nowhere.
Feeling bored “doing work that didn’t mean anything to me in San Diego, a place I’d never meant to live,” Mann writes, “felt as if I’d slipped out of the role of protagonist in my own life, just fallen right out of the story altogether.”
Of course, we can’t be plucky protagonists every moment of every day; there have to be lulls in the story. And as Mann talks to soldiers bored with war, and artists bored with art, and many slices of the 70 percent of Americans who find their jobs boring, she loses some of the shame she feels in being bored. Maybe the need people feel to act out when they’re bored reveals something about what their lives are missing. Maybe monogamy doesn’t need to be “spiced up.” Maybe it’s not a crisis if things aren’t always interesting.
“It’s a pleasant surprise to be delighted by sameness,” she writes.
I spoke with Mann about what boredom really means, and how it manifests in our relationships and in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. A lightly edited and condensed transcript of our conversation is below.
Julie Beck: What do people even mean when they say they’re bored? You mention that we use that as an umbrella for a lot of different emotions. Is it a glossing over of deeper issues that people just don’t want to deal with?
Mary Mann: It can be a lot of different things. The way that researchers study it is as this feeling of irritated restlessness. You’re cranky, you’re sort of like, “Ugh, I gotta get out, I gotta do stuff.” It’s a very motivating force, which is what differentiates it from depression.
But I think there can be a lot of stuff wrapped up in that. Maybe we’re not happy with what we’re doing and that’s why we feel that way. Maybe we’re feeling trapped because of circumstances outside of our control. Maybe we’re feeling angry at someone but we’re trying not to feel angry with someone. One of the things about boredom that researchers have found is that its function is as an alert system. It could be alerting you to all kinds of different things.
Beck: I was thinking about the connection between boredom and loneliness—both being emotions that everybody has, but can’t really admit to having. If you do, it makes people uncomfortable. Both boredom and loneliness make you seem toxic.
Mann: Toxic is a great word for it. There’s an idea, I think especially with loneliness, that it can be contagious. You see someone super lonely and you think “Oh they’re going to glom onto me and I’m never going to escape.” I’ve moved a lot and when I move to a new city that’s something I always worry that people see in me.
But with boredom I think it’s also embarrassing. People don’t want to admit that they feel bored because there’s a judgment about it, right? “Only boring people get bored.” It’s a sign that maybe you’re not as creative or as great or as fascinating as you would like to seem. So we just don't talk about it.
Beck: Is there some kind of a shift with that as you become an adult? Because I feel like when you're a teen, it's totally cool to be bored. You're bored with everything. It’s a dismissive judgment on the world; it's not reflecting on yourself.
Mann: I think there is a shift in it. That’s partly how people talk dismissively about boredom. They say, “Oh you sound like a teenager,” and that’s such an insult for grown ups.
Beck: There’s that old curse, right? “May you live in interesting times.” I think it would be fair to say the current times are extremely interesting, and many would perhaps like them to be less interesting. So there is an acknowledgement out there that interesting is not necessarily good. And yet … people don’t like the times to be boring.
Mann: When things are going really well in the world it feels like some people—some writers, some artists, moviemakers—have this desire to stir up visions of trouble. Because it does make it seem more interesting, in the moments when the world feels more stable. I’m thinking about entertainment and how much of it is war-centered, conflict-centered, because I guess that’s just more interesting.
Speaking of our current political moment, at one point during the election campaign, I was getting all these Google alerts of different times that Donald Trump had said things were boring. And I made a list of all the different things. It was just so many different disparate things he had just dismissed offhand as boring.
Beck: Like what?
Mann: They include: other people’s campaign events, his own emails, The Amazing Race, the NFL, Samuel L. Jackson, Jeb Bush, a whole bunch of different Fox employees. It’s a downer but also funny. You gotta laugh, right?
Beck: Maybe it's a bummer that people need blood spattered on their faces to be entertained. But how does that translate to wanting our lives to be interesting?
Mann: I spoke with a soldier, Brian Turner—he’s a beautiful poet and he’s written a lot about his experience as a soldier in Iraq. And he was saying that while a lot of actual war is pretty boring, you’re patrolling, you’re in the barracks, you don't have a ton of entertainment, there’s also this thing about it that appealed to him. He said something like: When you’re in civilian life, you have to climb trees to find meaning, while at war it’s just kind of falling from the trees onto your head. There is such a long history of war as this epic thing that creates this ultimate narrative of good versus evil and lives are at stake. So as much as he believes that war is kind of a boring thing, he acknowledges that there’s also this aspect of meaning to it that’s harder to get, for him, at home.
“There’s something interesting to be explored and experienced after the novelty wears off.”
Beck: You have a chapter about “spicing things up,” which is a terrible phrase that is mostly used in the context of the sex lives of long-coupled people. And it’s so interesting to me that we’re so anxious as a culture about long-term relationships getting boring, at the same time as we valorize monogamy, because monogamy is literally a commitment to sameness. Do you feel like those things are in tension?
Mann: I guess the problem with boredom in monogamy has been around as long as monogamy has. I did interview a polyamory expert and she had a theory that there’s something called "new relationship energy" that gives you this rush in the beginning when you’re first falling for somebody and that naturally fades.
There’s a funny aspect to this that’s almost competitive. I was thinking about that when I was reading Esther Perel's Mating in Captivity. There are so many different tools and resources for us to keep things fresh, and so many statistics about how other people are keeping things fresh and how fresh are they keeping it? It gets to be very exhausting and very unsexy, actually, to think about sex in that way. It feels to me like there’s something interesting to be explored and experienced after the novelty wears off—to find out what are the other pieces that make up happiness and love.
Beck: I was thinking about all those Tinder people who are all on the top of a mountain. I swear to God, everybody’s always on a mountain or with a tiger.You point out that the people who want thrills are easily bored. For people using dating apps to try to find long-term monogamous relationships, presenting themselves this way, as thrill-seekers, is a weird strategy, right?
Mann: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a weird paradox. The people who present as most interesting are also the ones who are most easily bored. Because boredom is such a motivating force, you’ll do whatever to not feel it. You’ll climb a mountain, you’ll go wrestle that fish away from a bear or whatever. Statistics can show what people click on, and we do seem to be attracted to people who profess to love new things and new experiences.
Beck: I'm like, you seem exhausting. Hard pass.
Mann: Me too! If you actually think about the reality with that person, they’d be like let’s go kayaking now! Today!
I wonder if there’s this idea that if you’re with someone who’s always doing interesting things, you will become more interesting, too. Your life will be more interesting and more stimulating. When people talk about being bored in relationships, that also seems to have a contagious aspect. Like “Oh he just wants to watch TV every night, we are getting boring.” The “I” becomes a “we” really fast.
Beck: Yeah but what were you doing before? You were watching TV every night, I know you were.
Mann: I did get a chance to talk to the ad man behind the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World.” That whole campaign is really funny because the Dos Equis guy is a person who would be so exhausting to hang out with, but he is compelling to think about. He’s humorously interesting. And the ad man had an ex-girlfriend who would jokingly tell him he was boring, and it made him madder than anything else. He hated being told he was boring. I get it! It’s a painful thing. It’s a mean thing to be told.
Beck: Just like how we were talking about being bored can mean kind of anything, who's to say what you really mean when you're like “This person is boring”?
Mann: I agree with that. It could just mean they’re not to your taste. Or they’re annoying you.
Beck: Or they’re shy.
Mann: Yeah, absolutely.
Beck: So I really appreciated your savage roasting of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this idea that if you can’t fulfill the basic needs at the bottom of the pyramid—shelter, food, whatever—then you don’t care about attaining the other aspects of human experience like love and purpose. Do you think there’s a notion in the culture that purpose or meaning or being interesting is just something that the well-off get to chase?
Mann: I do, actually. People do talk about boredom so much as a privilege, and it’s like, you’re just not thinking. Look at people on factory assembly lines, look at people in refugee camps, their lives are not luxurious by any means, but they’re dealing with these very boring conditions and they still want purpose in their lives. One of the things that felt really crazy to me was, when looking at people’s responses to refugees who said that they were bored in refugee camps, how mean people could be about that. Some of the comments on these articles that would quote refugees saying, “We have to wait in line for hours and hours to get stuff, it gets boring.” Just that word alone would trigger comments like, “Hey if you’re bored, go home.” People were just so upset by it.
Beck: How often does boredom come from a desire we have for our lives to have a narrative? Putting aside the fact that life is only narrative in retrospect, I think that’s one way to think about boredom that your book is really getting at. Like boredom is the parts of life that don’t advance the plot in any way.
RELATED STORY
Life's Stories
Mann: One thing I thought was really interesting in researching this was talking to Martin Demand Frederiksen, who had spent all this time with these young men in Georgia, the country, studying how they were feeling boredom. He was talking about this one man he interviewed, who hated being in the country. He thought it was boring to the point of depression, and he really wanted to be a musician. He didn’t have any outlets, he was sort of trapped where he was. And feeling trapped is a big part of boredom. People feel boredom a lot when they feel trapped and vice versa. And this particular guy, he preferred to do his interviews with Martin in the past tense. He preferred to pretend with Martin that they were in the future looking back at his current life as part of this trajectory that led him to whatever success he was going to find. So this boredom would be part of the story, it would be the struggle that then leads to the glory. It was a really good example to me of how things that are really good narrative aren’t necessarily things that anyone would want to live through. No one would want to be in this guy’s situation. He was really unhappy. But it did make for a good story.
When I was talking to Martin about it, he was like, “I had to struggle not to make the book too interesting,” because it really wasn’t interesting there. But it’s interesting to read about people getting into trouble, doing drugs, drinking, whatever, because they’re bored.
Beck: Another aspect of this is control, right? In the book you mention how most elevator door-close buttons don’t do anything; they are just placebos there to manage people’s antsiness and let them feel like they have some kind of control. How much of the stuff we do when we’re bored is just trying to grab back some sense of control, to push the narrative forward, to feel like a protagonist again?
Mann: I do definitely think that a lot of it is about regaining control, because it is so much a feeling about being trapped. And you would not be trapped if you had control over what you could and couldn’t do and what you could and couldn't be. And that's partly why I think boredom can be especially frustrating for people who do have a lot of options. Maybe this is how it gets connected to privilege, because you can’t blame it on anything as easily. If you’re Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald wandering around the world and still kind of bored, it becomes this big huge existential crisis. Whereas if you’re this guy in Georgia who very clearly is physically as well as emotionally trapped, the things confining you are more clear. In that sense you can see the things that if you could grasp them and control them, would help your situation.
Because boredom is such a motivating, annoying, irritating force, boredom can be kind of useful. Now that I’m a lot more comfortable talking about boredom and thinking about my own boredom, it’s easier to make certain decisions instead of trying to fight the feeling or pretend I’m not feeling it.
Beck: Do you think you’re better at identifying what under the wide boredom umbrella is actually going on with you when you're feeling bored in different situations?
Mann: I do. I wouldn’t say I’m perfect at it, but it’s definitely helped a lot. Through the process of writing the book, as I was learning more and more about the connections between boredom and depression, I ended up going and looking into the history of it in my family and ways that boredom manifested for me. And I ended up getting some good help with depression, which was something I’d never done before. Working on this kind of opened me up to being okay with that. Understanding that this is the thing that I’m trying to get away from or bury.
Share Tweet Comments
LATEST VIDEO
How Da Vinci 'Augmented Reality' — More Than 500 Years Ago
Here’s how Leonardo Da Vinci brought the Mona Lisa to life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julie Beck
JULIE BECK is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where she covers health and psychology.
Twitter
Ads by Revcontent
From The Web
This Smartphone Accessory is Almost Too Good
HDZoom360
It's Scary What This Site Knows About You - Enter Any Name
TruthFinder
The 2017 Honda HR-V Is Here. Design Yours
Kelley Blue Book
Triplets Take DNA Test but Drs Reveal Painful News
Worldation
Personalize This Content
Most Popular
'It's a Shame the White House Has Become an Adult Day Care Center'
DAVID A. GRAHAM
True to his state’s nickname, and his alma mater’s teams, Bob Corker has twice stepped up as a pivotal volunteer in the political career of Donald Trump—first, volunteering his support when few mainstream Republicans were willing to get near Trump, and more recently, after announcing his intention to retire from the Senate, putting himself forward as a leading elected critic of the White House.
After a series of remarks by the Tennessean over the last month, but especially more recently, Trump unloaded Sunday morning.
Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Senator Bob Corker "begged" me to endorse him for re-election in Tennessee. I said "NO" and he dropped out (said he could not win without...
8:59 AM - Oct 8, 2017
18,669 18,669 Replies 10,609 10,609 Retweets 43,896 43,896 likes
Twitter Ads info and privacy
CONTINUE READING
Death at a Penn State Fraternity
CAITLIN FLANAGAN
At about 3 p.m. on Friday, February 3, Tim Piazza, a sophomore at Penn State University, arrived at Hershey Medical Center by helicopter. Eighteen hours earlier, he had been in the kind of raging good health that only teenagers enjoy. He was a handsome, redheaded kid with a shy smile, a hometown girlfriend, and a family who loved him very much. Now he had a lacerated spleen, an abdomen full of blood, and multiple traumatic brain injuries. He had fallen down a flight of stairs during a hazing event at his fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, but the members had waited nearly 12 hours before calling 911, relenting only when their pledge “looked fucking dead.” Tim underwent surgery shortly after arriving at Hershey, but it was too late. He died early the next morning.
CONTINUE READING
Commanding Officer Benjamin Sisko with Dr. Julian Bashir in the 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine' episode 'Past Tense' Revisiting Star Trek’s Most Political Episode
ROBERT GREENE II
“It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that they’ve given up.” This was how Commanding Officer Benjamin Sisko, played by Avery Brooks, described early 21st-century Americans in an episode from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. When it aired in 1995, “Past Tense” spoke to contemporary concerns about homelessness by telling a story set in 2024—the near future for viewers, but the distant past for characters. In the two-part episode, Sisko and two of his companions from the U.S.S. Defiant find themselves stranded in San Francisco, where they’re reminded that the federal government had once set up a series of so-called “Sanctuary Districts” in a nationwide effort to seal off homeless Americans from the general population. Stuck in 2024, Sisko, who is black—along with his North African crewmate Dr. Julian Bashir and the fair-skinned operations officer Jadzia Dax—must contend with unfamiliar racism, classism, violence, and Americans’ apparent apathy toward human suffering.
CONTINUE READING
Cartoonish figures interact with the world through code. The Coming Software Apocalypse
JAMES SOMERS
There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.
The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.
CONTINUE READING
AP Classes Are a Scam
JOHN TIERNEY
Fraudulent schemes come in all shapes and sizes. To work, they typically wear a patina of respectability. That's the case with Advanced Placement courses, one of the great frauds currently perpetrated on American high-school students.
That's a pretty strong claim, right? You bet. But why not be straightforward when discussing a scam the scale and audacity of which would raise Bernie Madoff's eyebrows?
The miscellany of AP courses offered in U.S. high schools under the imprimatur of the College Board probably started with good intentions. The idea, going back to the 1950s, was to offer college-level courses and exams to high-school students. The courses allegedly provide students the kind of rigorous academic experience they will encounter in college as well as an opportunity to earn college credit for the work.
CONTINUE READING
Will Donald Trump Destroy the Presidency?
JACK GOLDSMITH
Donald Trump is testing the institution of the presidency unlike any of his 43 predecessors. We have never had a president so ill-informed about the nature of his office, so openly mendacious, so self-destructive, or so brazen in his abusive attacks on the courts, the press, Congress (including members of his own party), and even senior officials within his own administration. Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty.
CONTINUE READING
A transparent model of the brain with a network of vessels filled in Scientists Somehow Just Discovered a New System of Vessels in Our Brains
JAMES HAMBLIN
You are now among the first people to see the brain’s lymphatic system. The vessels in the photo above transport fluid that is likely crucial to metabolic and inflammatory processes. Until now, no one knew for sure that they existed.
Doctors practicing today have been taught that there are no lymphatic vessels inside the skull. Those deep-purple vessels were seen for the first time in images published this week by researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
In the rest of the body, the lymphatic system collects and drains the fluid that bathes our cells, in the process exporting their waste. It also serves as a conduit for immune cells, which go out into the body looking for adversaries and learning how to distinguish self from other, and then travel back to lymph nodes and organs through lymphatic vessels.
CONTINUE READING
How Iceland Got Teens to Say No to Drugs
EMMA YOUNG
It’s a little before 3 p.m. on a sunny Friday afternoon and Laugardalur Park, near central Reykjavik, looks practically deserted. There’s an occasional adult with a stroller, but the park’s surrounded by apartment blocks and houses, and school’s out—so where are all the kids?
Walking with me are Gudberg Jónsson, a local psychologist, and Harvey Milkman, an American psychology professor who teaches for part of the year at Reykjavik University. Twenty years ago, says Gudberg, Icelandic teens were among the heaviest-drinking youths in Europe. “You couldn’t walk the streets in downtown Reykjavik on a Friday night because it felt unsafe,” adds Milkman. “There were hordes of teenagers getting in-your-face drunk.”
CONTINUE READING
Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
JEAN M. TWENGE
One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”
Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”
CONTINUE READING
The First White President
TA-NEHISI COATES
IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
CONTINUE READING
Are All Mental Illnesses Related?
CAITLIN CADIEUX AND NICOLAS POLLOCK
Depression, anxiety, overeating, addiction, and all other mental disorders share a common mechanism.
WATCH VIDEO
Mass Shootings in the United States: 'This Is Who We Are'
JAMES FALLOWS, DANIEL LOMBROSO, AND BRIANNA PRESSEY
In the wake of Las Vegas, only one thing is certain, according to James Fallows: it will happen again.
WATCH VIDEO
What If Everyone Ate Beans Instead of Beef?
TYNESHA FOREMAN, ALICE ROTH, AND BRIANNA PRESSEY
What can an individual do about climate change? The easiest answer: make this one dietary switch.
WATCH VIDEO
MORE POPULAR STORIES
Home
Share
Tweet
Next story in Health
Subscribe
Get 10 issues a year and save 65% off the cover price.
Name
Name
Address 1
Address 1
Address 2
Address 2
City
City
StateZip Code
Zip
Country
United States
Email Address
Email
ORDER NOW
Fraud Alert regarding The Atlantic
Newsletters
The Atlantic
The Atlantic Daily
This Week
This Month
New Photo Galleries
Top Videos This Week
Politics & Policy Daily
CityLab
Today’s Top Stories
This Week's Most Popular Stories
I want to receive updates from partners and sponsors.
Email Address
Email
SIGN UP
Follow
FacebookTwitterLinkedInInstagramTumblrPinterestRSSApp Store
About
Masthead
FAQ
Press
Jobs
Shop
Books
Emporium
Manage Subscription
Contact Us
Send a News Tip
Privacy Policy
Advertise
Advertising Guidelines
Terms and Conditions
Responsible Disclosure
Site Map
TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2017 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
Save
FSG Originals
Magnifybtn-fbbtn-twbtn-tb OUR BOOKSOUR AUTHORSABOUT USDIGITAL ORIGINALSFEATURESEVENTS TAGS
Mary Mann
Mary Mann is the author of Yawn: Adventures in Boredom. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Believer and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Mary Mann Has Our Attention
MAY 19, 2017
ABOUT FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
Mary Mann Has Our Attention
Mary Mann is far from bored. Not only was her first book, Yawn: Adventures in Boredom, published May 16, she’s also been writing and schmoozing like a madwoman.
In New York Magazine’s The Cut, Mary wrote about boredom, marriage, monogamy, and forcing her boyfriend to accompany her to a sex store trivia night. In the piece, she touched on a huge anxiety for many couples:
To call a person boring is hurtful and demeaning. To call a relationship boring, or even to say that you’re experiencing boredom within a relationship, is often seen as the kiss of death. The magazines and books advising you to avoid being boring in bed or in conversation at all costs, the shows and movies that perpetuate this idea that love is a flame that’s either lit or out — all conspire to create a belief that boredom is a kind of pox, and you’re just not as good of a couple once it touches you.
But just because we experience boredom in a relationship, Mary explains, doesn’t mean it’s the end. In fact, it’s pretty normal.
Writing for Slate, Mary tackled a huge question: Can technology solve the 2,500-year-old problem of boredom in the classroom? The reality is, well, a double-edged sword. As Mary writes,
Archer (a professor) was addressing a common conundrum of educational technology: that it can end up contributing to the problem it was created to fix—an “endless feedback loop,” as a frustrated professor I know put it. Classroom distraction doesn’t just come from the phones in students’ pockets; it can also result from the very gadgets invented for the classroom, gamified educational tools that often aid and abet short attention spans by catering to the most restless.
And yes, Mary admits she got bored listening to the professor explaining the very theories she needed to write her own article.
Mary also write a piece for Outside titled “How to Turn Boredom into a Performance Enhancer.” If only it were that easy… Still, as Mary explains, the world’s best endurance athletes get bored, too. But instead of giving up, like us, they push through boredom to find flow, the coveted state of “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake”:
It sounds fantastic, but there is a downside: boredom and flow both tend to flourish under the same conditions—an extended period of time devoted to a single activity. Thus, by trying to squash boredom with, say, a good podcast, you’re decreasing the chances of achieving flow.
. . .
But [the sports psychologist] went on to explain that if runners who feel occasional boredom “can make it through those lethal first minutes to the other side,” they might find their mind starting to follow new and unexpected routes. This tracks with recent research finding that boredom actually helps us develop certain positive skills, like creativity and associative thinking. As Black Girls Run co-founder Toni Carey told me, “Running can be a spiritual experience, but I notice that those times when I can feel everything flowing together, every movement connected with my breath, they happen when I’m not running with music.”
Eh, we’ll stick to leisurely walking the treadmill while reading.
And if you still aren’t bored (no, we’re not done making bored jokes yet), Mary published two excerpts of the book online. The first, in Electric Literature, is an essay about how boredom and an enterprising Brit (Thomas Cook) gave birth to the modern tourism industry. And the second excerpt, published in Literary Hub, breaks down boredom in the office place. Finally, Mary did two fantastic interviews with The Atlantic and The Culture Trip.
Check it out, and get a copy of Yawn now!
pg. 3
10/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507497723764 1/1
Print Marked Items
Mann, Mary: YAWN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Mann, Mary YAWN Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $15.00 5, 16 ISBN: 978-0-374-53584-1
Studying a mood that "pops up in every facet of existence, from work to love to war."Mann likely won't
mind if you find her debut book a little boring; in fact, she'll likely expect it. Her engaging, essayistic
examination underscores boredom's pervasiveness, how most people find themselves bored by most things--
work most of all. Recognizing her own tendencies toward boredom and the restlessness that often
accompanies it, she decided to start exploring just what boredom is, why it is so common, and what, if any,
purpose it serves. She finds she is not alone: "Boredom in 2015 was becoming something of a hot topic, an
old feeling made new by media attention, and here we were at the very cusp of a trend," she writes of
attending a sold-out event called "Bored and Brilliant." (Mann also learned about international conferences
on the topic, but why spend the money to travel to Poland when there's so much boredom to study near
home in Manhattan?) The author attended a sex-toy party for some insight on how to deal with boredom in
bed or with monogamy in general. She explores how some consider travel an antidote for boredom, with a
whole industry of tourism catering to that need. She writes of the "restless violence" to which teenage boys
in particular are prone as they try to break the cycle (also termed "boredom-induced violence") and the deep
depression into which some can descend, with boredom as a trigger or at least an early warning sign. She
writes of boredom as a part of the creative process. Mostly, she distracts herself with the project, but even
she can become bored with the study of boredom, recognizing the penchant that sparked her interest in the
first place. She concludes that "the things I learned about boredom, and the ways I learned to talk about it,
actually proved useful." Readers who come to share Mann's understanding could find the book useful, or at
least a brief diversion from their boring lives.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Mann, Mary: YAWN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911598&it=r&asid=f4d03fcb706a35183746447fdef6ab3f.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911598
With Mann’s choice of title, one might think she is damning her own tome, but this book of essays on boredom is anything but soporific. Exploring such different settings as the workplace, war zones, and libraries, Mann offers a witty and enjoyable discourse on a ubiquitous state of mind. Certain topics are universal—“All sorts of things went through my head,” she recalls of restaurant hostessing, “but nine times out of ten they turned into sexual fantasy.” She notes, as well, that boredom can lead to anger and loneliness. Another central theme is curiosity as the cure for boredom, as Mann demonstrates by pursuing varied and quirky subjects. One chapter extolls the virtues of naptime, naming tech giant Google as a notable proponent of the practice; another discusses how U.S. service members spent their downtime in Iraq. In each chapter, Mann discusses how a particular topic relates to her life, inviting readers to take an empathetic view of a common emotion and its myriad causes. Mann’s wit and honesty will draw readers in, relegating actual boredom to the back burner until they’ve finished reading. (May)
We Have Always Been Bored — 'Yawn' Wonders Why
May 20, 20177:00 AM ET
GENEVIEVE VALENTINE
Boredom is a going concern, particularly in a Western culture over-saturated with things designed to make every moment count. Freelance researcher Mary Mann began writing Yawn: Adventures in Boredom because she was concerned with her own restlessness; was she succumbing to the depression that ran in her family? Was modern malaise taking hold? Was she fundamentally ungrateful for life, as her parents had always suggested about bored people? If she was broken, was there a cure? (And if you're already rolling your eyes at Mann, this is not going to be an easy read for you.)
Last question first: We're all inherently broken, and there's no cure. People have always been bored.
And the moral component of boredom isn't a modern guilt trip. Mann's research traces several fascinating ways boredom has shaped social development and habits (and, sometimes, the other way around). In the fourth century, a monk named Cassian visited the Desert Fathers in Egypt; in recording their quiet habits and seemingly endless contemplation, he also noted "tedium or perturbation of the heart ... one is forever in and out of one's cell, gazing at the sun as though it were tarrying to its setting." Several centuries of literary history shove blame back and forth about whether boredom is a male or female failing. In the 1840s, Thomas Cook invented modern tourism as a way to give bored small-town Brits something to do besides drink.
Now, every day brings a new article about how to stop the demon of lassitude, or a new invention designed to keep us from ever being at loose ends again. Using the boredom-sinks in her own life, Mann tries to connect the old with the new: Egyptian monks and cubicle farms (Mann hates them), the literary history of lassitude and the modern sex life (Mann takes her boyfriend to a spice-things-up trivia night), tourism and ... well, tourism (Mann was a kayak tour guide for a while).
Mann can be a thoughtful writer; the chapter on tourism touches on how it functioned as a colonizing force, as Europeans sought out new places and then demanded the comforts of home. But Yawn splits the difference between autobiography and scholarship, and Mann's need to tie things back to her own experience has mixed results. Sometimes she provides a thread to draw you though the meandering moments — glimpses of her family life are poignant — or offers herself as a fidgety proxy for our own self-blame about boredom.
Sometimes it's just baffling; Mann uses an eyepatched library patron as inspiration for a running joke about Stack Pirates that she must think is funny, given how often she returns to it. And sometimes it backfires utterly; in talking about boredom's relationship to crime, she quotes from an inmate's account of soul-crushing solitary confinement, then breezes away from it to the wider idea of boredom as motive for crime, noting briefly that she got a fine for public consumption while researching the book; "I can relate," she says dryly, landing somewhere between tone-deaf and grotesque.
But Mann also manages to avoid the biggest potential pitfall of a book on boredom — she doesn't solve it. Though she finds some answers (boredom isn't depression, because motivation to do something else still remains), this is more an exploration of the inevitable than a mystery with a big reveal. Yawn is deeply interested in connecting the history, psychology, and cultural narratives around boredom; if the authorial presence gets a little draining, well, maybe that's part of the point.
Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon.