RUNNING SCARED

Jenny Odell takes on time and its captors.

- PARUL SEHGAL

The intruder entered not through the door but through the window. Silently, it began making a home in the cool damp of Jenny Odell’s kitchen, in a pig-shaped planter. The moss spores arrived in the spring that Odell began working on her book “Saving Time” (Random House). For the next three years, she and the moss shared air and sunlight as she wrote at the kitchen table, the rhizoids that grabbed at the soil taking root in her imagination. “It has been a reminder of time,” she writes about her unlikely companion. “Not the monolithic, empty substance imagined to wash over each of us alone, but the kind that starts and stops, bubbles up, collects in the cracks, and folds into mountains. It is the kind that waits for the right conditions, that holds always the ability to begin something new.”

Odell’s work has a knack for finding the right conditions and anchoring itself in them. Her previous book, “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” (2019), became a surprise best-seller, raising an alarm about how social media had fractured our capacity for deep focus and corralled us into relentless self-optimization. Although a glut of books on attention were vying for our own, hers stood out—not for the originality of its argument, I suspect, but for the sincerity of her persona on the page. Here was a multidisciplinary artist for whom the Internet was a native landscape; now she was teaching herself to see her surroundings, to notice more—more birds, more flowers—and claiming far-reaching consequences for simple acts of awareness. Looking up, looking around is the “seed of responsibility,” she argued. It was the prelude to enlarging one’s notion of community and our obligations to it.