In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, I publish a reported piece about attention. Where has ours gone? How do we get it back? I look at the industry and the science of attention, which is increasingly measured in the laboratory and sold through the advertising trade. But there’s another aspect to attention, more difficult to pin down and yet more essential: the kind that arises between a person and a work of art. I go inside a secret international order of artists, writers, and scholars who come together to pay radical attention to artworks, then vanish underground again.
This piece felt urgent to me, and fundamental. Sustained attention is the basic medium of both democracy and art, the frame in which the imaginative past is held and understood. If there is a feeling of the bottom having fallen out of civil and creative life lately, changed attention norms are both the likeliest cause and the means for restitution.
It is perhaps fitting that the second piece included today is a memory of the poetry scholar and critic Helen Vendler, who died last week, at ninety. In this short tribute, I write about my memories of her as a teacher—devoted, open, and interested. She was a master of attention.
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“The Battle for Attention,” The New Yorker, April, 2024: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/06/the-battle-for-attention
“Helen Vendler’s Generous Mind,” The New Yorker, April, 2024: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/helen-vendlers-generous-mind
At attention,
Nathan