Last week,
we previewed 93 works of fiction due out in the first half of 2016. Today, we follow up with 45 nonfiction titles coming out in the next six months, ranging from a new biography of the late
Leonard Nimoy by his
Star Trek crewmate
William Shatner to a book-length essay on art, modernity, and the city by
Olivia Laing to a pair of new studies looking at the legacy of the 1960s-era War on Poverty. Along the way, we profile hotly anticipated titles by
Jhumpa Lahiri,
Annie Dillard,
Tama Janowitz,
Thomas Piketty,
Roxane Gay, and many more.
Set aside some space on those bookshelves,
Millions readers. This is looking to be a very, very good year for nonfiction.
January
Eternity Street by
John Mack Faragher: Long before
The Big Sleep or
Boyz N the Hood, Los Angeles was a lawless, violent city better known for its murder rate than for its orange groves. Faragher, a Yale historian, follows L.A.’s tumultous rise from its origins as a small Mexican pueblo at the edge of the loosely governed frontier in the 19th century. “[T]here is no country where human life is of so little account,” one Angeleno wrote in 1853. “Men hack one another to pieces with pistols and other cutlery as if God’s image were of no more worth than the life of one of the two or three thousand ownerless dogs that prowl about our streets and make night hideous.” (Michael)
The Narrow Door by
Paul Lisicky: A memoir of two long-term friendships, one with a woman novelist and the other with Lisicky’s ex-husband, a poet. Written in a collaged and non-linear way, it’s an honest and fierce examination of the ways that platonic and romantic loves inform one another -- and how their losses devastate in equal measure. (Hannah)
Why the Right Went Wrong by
E.J. Dionne Jr.: A syndicated columnist and NPR commentator, Dionne is a pundit for people who hate pundits: lucid, funny, ideologically coherent without being rigid. Here, he argues that today’s radical conservatism is rooted not in Tea Party opposition to Obamacare but much further back in history with the Republican Party’s choice of
Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. (Michael)
February:
Leonard by
William Shatner, with
David Fisher: Anyone with fond memories of the original
Star Trek has to be rooting for this book to be good. With his music and photography, Leonard Nimoy always came off as a fascinating, multi-faceted man. Shatner, on the other hand, often came off as a serious cheeseball. Wouldn’t it be marvelous to learn that, beneath the bluster and bad acting, Shatner is a sensitive and observant friend and biographer? (Michael)
In Other Words by
Jhumpa Lahiri:
New Yorker readers got
a sneak preview of this beguiling memoir of Lahiri’s struggle to learn Italian, a language she found herself drawn to for mysterious reasons. Written in Italian and translated by
Ann Goldstein (who also translated the
Elena Ferrante novels), Lahiri explores what it means to think and write in another language, and how a new language can give a writer a new voice. (Hannah)
Pandemic by
Sonia Shah: Beware germophobes! This book may stoke your fears as Shah describes how
vibro cholerae, a marine bacteria in the Bay of Bengal, caused a global outbreak of cholera in the late-19th century. Shah draws parallels between the technological advancements that allowed cholera to spread (steamships, canals, urbanization) with today’s rapid globalization, reporting on modern pathogens found all over the world. (Hannah)
March:
The Immortal Irishman by
Timothy Egan: At the height of the Great Famine of the 1840s, the hero of Egan’s new book,
Thomas Meagher, led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He promptly escaped and turned up in America, where he led the New York-based Irish Brigade in some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War and later won a post as territorial governor of Montana. A Pulitzer-winning
New York Times reporter and columnist, Egan is the author of
The Worst Hard Time, about America in the Dustbowl years, which won a National Book Award. (Michael)
All the Single Ladies by
Rebecca Traister: Despite what De Beers would have you think, only 20 percent of American women are married by age 29, a startling demographic shift that Traister examines in this group portrait of America’s female singletons. Based on interviews with academics, social scientists, and, of course, single ladies, this book shows how unmarried women have historically brought about great social change -- and will continue to do so in the future. (Hannah)
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by
Carlo Rovelli: The title says it all. This 78-page primer was a bestseller in Italy, and came from a series of popular newspaper articles. It’s written to be accessible and to appeal to the imagination of the liberal arts major -- as opposed to aspiring physicists already well versed in the theory of relativity. In writing for a general audience, Rovelli highlights the beauty of theories of gravity, time, and consciousness. (Hannah)
The Lonely City by
Olivia Laing: This booklength essay offers an alert and moving exploration of art, anonymity, and modernity as they collide in that great crucible: the city. As in her first book,
The Trip to Echo Spring, Laing deftly blends memoir and criticism; the chapters on
David Wojnarowicz and
Henry Darger, in particular, are not to be missed. (Garth)
The Abundance by
Annie Dillard: Forty-two years after
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (which netted the author a nonfiction Pulitzer at the age of 29), Dillard has chosen both old and new essays to fill out her latest collection. In the older pieces corner, “Total Eclipse” exemplifies the author’s naturalistic bent, while “This Is the Life” adds her voice to the 9/11 canon. In the younger pieces corner, she follows a teenager memorizing
Arthur Rimbaud, as well as a man who takes a snowball fight a little too seriously.
Geoff Dyer provides the foreword. (Thom)
The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe by
Elaine Showalter: Best known as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Howe was a prominent abolitionist and an early feminist who campaigned for women’s rights and social reform. This new biography focuses on her unhappy marriage and lack of independence from her husband, a private life at odds with her public achievements. (Hannah)
Charlotte Brontë by
Claire Harman: Arriving just in time for
Charlotte Brontë’s 200th birthday, this biography will speak to those already familiar with her life story as well as those who have never read a word of her novels. This isn’t the first or last biography we’ll have of Brontë, but according to advance reviews from across the pond, it may be the most novelistic. Harman brings a storyteller’s finesse as she synthesizes decades of research and scholarship, and a realist’s eye to some of the more romantic Brontë myths. (Hannah)
Heads by
Jesse Jarnow: Subtitled “A Biography of Psychedelic America,” this new history suggests that psychedelic drugs and the
Grateful Dead form a “secret American through-line between the 1950s and the present.” Jarnow, a Brooklyn-based musician and music journalist, uses the history of the legendary jam band and its loyal followers to explore an alternative America packed with “utopian homesteaders and self-taught black market chemists, spiritual seekers and pranksters, graffiti artists and government-wanted hackers, entrepreneurs and pioneering DJs.” (Michael)
Girls & Sex by
Peggy Orenstein: The author of
Cinderella Ate My Daughter delves into the adolescent years, taking a look at a subject that most parents prefer to turn a blind eye to: the sex lives of teenage girls. Drawing on extensive interviews with young women, Orenstein explores the effects of pornography and social media on a new generation’s sexual coming of age. (Hannah)
April:
The Gunning of America by
Pamela Haag: “God, guts, and guns made America free,” goes the old line. This revisionist history by the author of
Marriage Confidential begs to differ. Drawing on documents from the archives of the Winchester and Colt companies, Haag shows how the gun industry, not freedom-loving anti-colonialists and frontiersmen, sowed the seeds of the bond between Americans and their firearms. (Michael)
All Tomorrow’s Parties by
Rob Spillman: A memoir from the founder of
Tin House, who was born in Berlin and grew up among West Berlin artists and intellectuals, the son of two musician parents. As a young adult, Spillman made his way to literary New York, only to return to Germany in his mid-20s after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As much a travelogue as a memoir, Spillman portrays the changing cultural landscape of Berlin while documenting his own coming of age and search for a place to call home. (Hannah)
One-Man Band by
Simon Callow: This is the third volume of Callow’s four-volume biography of the great American icon and enigma,
Orson Welles. In this volume, which covers the years 1947 to 1964, Callow tracks Welles’s self-exile from the United States when he produced some of his most lasting work, including
Touch of Evil.
Watch the video of Welles slurring his lines in a late Paul Masson wine commercial, then read Callow’s bio to be reminded why this is so sad. (Michael)
67 Shots by
Howard Means: For many Americans, the 1960s ended on May 4, 1970, when a National Guard troop fired 67 bullets into a peaceful crowd of Vietnam War protestors at Kent State University, killing four and injuring nine others. Means uses recently compiled oral histories to piece together the inside story of the campus tragedy that sounded the final death knell for popular support for the war in Vietnam. (Michael)
Why Save the Bankers? by
Thomas Piketty: Remember when everyone was obligated to pretend to have read Piketty’s 700-page tome
Capital in the Twenty-First Century? Now, the wise folks at Houghton Mifflin have produced a Piketty for the proletariat, compiling eight years of the economist’s columns written for the French magazine
Libération. The book begins in September 2008 just after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and takes readers through the aftermath of the crisis that followed, offering Pikettian analysis of the
Obama presidency and the European Union’s debt woes. (Michael)
CRUSH edited by
Cathy Alter and
Dave Singleton: An anthology of essays about formative celebrity crushes from the likes of
Stephen King,
Jodi Picoult, Roxane Gay,
James Franco,
Emily Gould, and more. Swoon-worthy subjects include
Jared Leto,
River Phoenix,
Mary Tyler Moore,
Paul Newman, and of course,
Donny Osmond. It’s hard to resist a book that’s having this much fun with its subject. (Hannah)
True Crimes by
Kathryn Harrison: An essay collection from the author of the memoirs
The Kiss and
The Mother Knot. Written over the course of 10 years, these personal essays are about the author’s family: her parents, her children, her in-laws, and even her dog.
Katie Roiphe describes the collection as “the most honest family album ever.” (Hannah)
We Are As Gods by
Kate Daloz: In the early 1970s, as war raged in the jungles of Vietnam and in the streets of America’s cities, millions of baby boomers headed for the hills in search of rural authenticity. Shunning life in America’s “plastic” suburbs, these back-to-the-landers built geodesic domes and formed non-traditional families to populate them. Daloz, herself a child of former Peace Corps volunteers who decamped to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, focuses on a small group of communards who struggle to hold fast to their high-minded ideals as they endure brutal Northern winters without indoor plumbing or electricity -- and, some might argue, basic common sense. (Michael)
The Midnight Assassin by
Skip Hollandsworth: Those who like their true-crime leavened with historical insight may want to take a look at this tale of “America’s first serial killer” who terrorized frontier Austin, Texas, in the 1880s. Hollandsworth, executive editor of
Texas Monthly, chronicles the hunt for a vicious murderer who attacked women with axes, knives, and even steel rods. “Skip Hollandsworth has a bloodhound’s nose for a great tale,” writes
Hampton Sides, author of
Ghost Soldiers. “Through scrupulous research and a finely tuned sense of the gothic, Hollandsworth has brought this Texas-sized true-crime story, more than a century old, to vivid, chilling life on the page.” (Michael)
Kill 'Em and Leave by
James McBride: A biography of
James Brown, one of the great musical artists of the 20th century and among the most influential. McBride, who is a musician as well as the award-winning author of
The Color of Water and
The Good Lord Bird, is the perfect biographer for Brown, finding universal American themes in the musician’s life story: the divide between the North and South, rich and poor, and black and white. McBride also delves into the legal battles over Brown’s estate, a subject that sounds so complicated and epic that it could probably warrant its own book. (Hannah)
Pretentiousness by
Dan Fox: In this book-length essay, art critic Fox wants to make an argument for the virtues of pretentiousness. “Without pretension,” Fox writes, “we would never have 99% of the art, literature, music, buildings, theater, fashion, cinema, poetry, philosophy, food or design that we love.” Drawing on a wide variety of sources from literature to film to fashion and the art world, this energetic and entertaining book is written with a clarity and humor that is decidedly lacking in pretension. (Hannah)
Violation by
Sallie Tisdale: “A Buddhist woman who’s written about porn,” one critic has said of Tisdale. “Do you really need another reason to read her?” Well, if you put it that way, probably not. Portland-based indie press Hawthorne Books has compiled this first-ever essay collection by the author of
Talk Dirty to Me and
The Best Thing I Ever Tasted. The essays span Tisdale’s 30-year career and range in subject from the biology of flies to the author’s experience of working in an abortion clinic. (Michael)
May:
Labor of Love by
Moira Weigel: In this thoughtful work of social history, Weigel likens modern dating to “the worst, most precarious form of contemporary labor: an unpaid internship.” Weigel examines the history of dating, and explains why dating not only
feels like work, but is a particular kind of unpaid labor shaped by larger economic forces. Our dating rituals (and apps) have long needed the context that this book provides. (Hannah)
Little Labors by
Rivka Galchen: Galchen is to fiction what
Ferran Adrià is to gastronomy, serving up the whimsical, the startling, and the revelatory in the guise of the delightfully familiar. And here she comes again, bearing a tray of amuse-bouches: a short book of linked stories and essays about parenthood. (Garth)
White Sands by
Geoff Dyer: Originally titled “Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Where Are We Going,” this collection of travel essays asks those three very questions as its British author tours Beijing’s Forbidden City with a guide who isn’t in fact a tour guide, journeys to French Polynesia to soak up the atmosphere that inspired painter
Paul Gauguin, and picks up a hitchhiker near a prison at White Sands, N.M. (Michael)
Unforbidden Pleasures by
Adam Phillips: The latest from the prolific author of
Missing Out,
On Balance,
On Flirtation, and
Side Effects -- to name just a few of Phillips’s curiously addictive essay collections, which marry Freudian theory with a literary sensibility. This new collection examines the relationship between prohibition and pleasure, pushing back against the notion that things that are forbidden are necessarily more enjoyable. (Hannah)
Robert Parris Moses by
Laura Visser-Maessen: No one was as central to the battle for voting rights for African Americans in Mississippi in the 1960s as
Bob Moses, and few figures of that era are more deserving of a full-dress biography. This book, like an earlier Moses biography
And Gently He Shall Lead Them, is an academic title, written by a Dutch historian and published by the University of North Carolina Press. No matter. Any treatment of Moses’s role in the violent crucible of the 1964 Freedom Summer and his later work with the math literacy program, The Algebra Project, is bound to be riveting. (Michael)
Joe Gould’s Teeth by
Jill Lepore: Legendary
New Yorker writer
Joseph Mitchell first discovered
Joseph Gould on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In Gould, Mitchell found an eccentric and charismatic writer who was supposedly working on an epic manuscript called “The Oral History of Our Time.” When the manuscript went missing after Gould’s death, Mitchell concluded it had never really existed in the first place. Nearly 60 years later,
New Yorker writer Lepore picks up where Mitchell left off, to further investigate one of the magazine’s most elusive subjects. (Hannah)
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by
Elizabeth Hinton: How did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system? Hinton, a professor of African-American Studies at Harvard, traces the mass incarceration of America’s young black men to a surprising source: President
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the 1960s. With America’s inner cities ablaze with urban riots, Hinton writes, Johnson combined his famous “War on Poverty” with a lesser-known call for a “War on Crime” -- which, over time, helped create a penal system that now locks up one in every 11 black men in America. (Michael)
You May Also Like by
Tom Vanderbilt: “I like, therefore I am” is the motto of our social media avatars, and yet -- red heart and thumbs-up emojis aside -- what does it
mean to like something? How are preferences formed? By something in our biology? From our life experiences? Do we shape our preferences or do our preferences shape us? Vanderbilt tackles these questions and more in this book that you may or may not like, but will certainly find interesting. (Hannah)
The Apache Wars by
Paul Andrew Hutton: Fans of
Philipp Meyer’s epic novel
The Son may want to check out this nonfiction account of
Mickey Free -- born
Felix Telles -- a mixed-race child whose kidnapping by Apache Native Americans set off a 30-year war between the Apaches and federal troops. Hutton, a professor at the University of New Mexico, relates the violent history of America’s Southwest borderlands where dwindling Native bands, led by legendary chiefs
Cochise and
Geronimo, made their last stand against the American war machine. (Michael)
Oneida by
Ellen Wayland-Smith: A history of the Christian utopian sex-cult cum cookware and flatware makers, by a descendant of one of the group’s founders. As the book would have it, this was possibly the oddest moment in America, when extreme religious fervor in the 19th century resulted in a free-love commune for the devout, which in turn became a major corporation and one of the hallmarks of bourgeois respectability in 20th-century America. (Lydia)
June and beyond
Hunger by
Roxane Gay: A powerful new memoir about food, weight, self-image, and what it means to feed yourself. Fans of Gay’s Tumblr blog will recognize these themes from her disarmingly diaristic posts about cooking Blue Apron meals. In an era of Instagrammed desserts and lifestyle blogs, Gay’s writing about food is refreshingly sensitive to the emotions we bring to cooking and eating. (Hannah)
The Hatred of Poetry by
Ben Lerner: An award-winning poet before he became known as a novelist (and recently crowned as a MacArthur genius), Lerner defends his life’s work in this book-length essay about what it means to resist poetry. Lerner examines poetry’s great haters, as well as the work of some of the best and worst poets. (Hannah)
I’m Just a Person by
Tig Notaro: Low-key, little-known comedian Tig Notaro had a run of bad luck to rival Job’s: first she was hospitalized with a near-fatal intestinal infection, then her mother died, and then she went through a break-up. Shortly after that, she was diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer. A few days after her cancer diagnosis, Notaro took her grief on stage and delivered a brazenly honest stand-up set that went viral. Notaro then found herself on a completely different roller coaster as she experienced fame and national acclaim. Her aptly named memoir reflects on an unexpectedly eventful year. (Hannah)
Battle for Bed-Stuy by
Michael Woodsworth: The Johnson-era War on Poverty, despised for its over-reach by conservatives and lamented for its under-performance by liberals, hasn’t fared well in history, so it is a surprise to see a book-length study touting its successes.
Battle for Bed-Stuy details how LBJ’s antipoverty programs tapped into existing networks of black residents in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood to battle endemic crime and shore up the local social safety net -- in the process, ironically, setting the stage for the present-day gentrification of the once solidly black neighborhood. (Michael)
The Secret Lives of Web Pages by
Paul Ford: Every week, it seems, some starlet’s outsized derrière or surgically reconfigured cheekbones “breaks the Internet,” but how is the Internet built in the first place? Ford, an early blogger and adviser to sites like Medium and Kickstarter, explains it all for you in this breezy overview of the hows and whys of what happens when a web page loads onto your browser. (Michael)
Behind the Glass Wall by
Aleksandar Hemon: In 2012, Hemon, a Bosnian-American fiction writer best known for his novel
The Lazarus Project, spent a few months as a “writer-in-residence” at the United Nations, meeting with officials, attending staff meetings, and sitting in on sessions of the Security Council. In
Behind the Glass Wall, Hemon struggles to come to grips with the daily reality of a troubled institution that responded all too slowly to the humanitarian crisis that crippled his home city of Sarajevo, but whose charter allowed for the prosecution of Serbian war criminals. (Michael)
Scream by
Tama Janowitz: A memoir from the author of
Slaves of New York, the acclaimed short story collection about young people trying to make it in downtown Manhattan in the 1980s. Following the publication of
Slaves, Janowitz was grouped with the “Brat Pack” writers alongside
Bret Easton Ellis and
Jay McInerney -- famed for their deadpan minimalist style.
Scream reflects on that time, as well as the more universal life experiences that followed as Janowitz became a wife, mother, and caregiver to her aging mother. (Hannah)
When I was in my early-twenties, I made a new year’s resolution to stop looking at myself in the mirror so much. It didn’t work, of course–what else can one do with a reflection besides look at it? This year, in my late-twenties, I set a similar resolution: for four months, until April 1st, I would turn away from Facebook and Twitter. I had grown bored, obsessed, bothered, even–I admit it–enamored with my reflection there. And lord help me if I found myself at midnight yet again, drinking a glass a wine and scrolling through wedding photos of a friend of a friend of a friend, or, come morning, drinking a mug of coffee and vainly attempting to read and retweet one fascinating article after another. J. Alfred Prufrock may have measured out his life with coffee spoons; I had begun to measure mine with status updates.
And also relieved. In his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier decries the devaluation of individual thought and personhood in a Web 2.0 world. He writes:
The problem of the internet–its power, and the way it’s changing how we live our lives–is a big topic these days. There’s The Tyranny of Email: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your In-Box by John Freeman, and, forthcoming, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. The internet age is so young that we’re worried, and intrigued, by how it will shape us–we simply have no idea. The single most fascinating aspect of my detox was the number of people who wanted to talk to me about it. Almost everyone I spoke to said, “I wish I could do that!” Then they got this strained look in their eyes that meant, The internet is ruining my life! When I assured them a detox was easy to do, they weren’t convinced. Or they said, “Okay, yes, next month. I’ll try it.” And then they wouldn’t. It saddened me to see all these people, chained to their online lives, posting flattering photos of themselves, “liking” a funny status update, posting or retweeting a link. It’s a never-ending race to remind others that we’re here, that we exist. It reminds me of when I used to do dance routines and little plays for my mom. “Look!” I’d yell every few seconds. “You’re NOT watching! Look!” It gets exhausting. And it’s not really living.
Thanks for that lively article, Edan. After much nervous contemplation about it in the past year, I still haven’t joined either Facebook or Twitter, and now I know that I won’t!
Dropped out for a week thanks to you–it’s been coming for a while, though. I’ve realized that so much of the time that used to go to reading, like over my morning coffee, is now spent on Facebook or other random internet browsing. So we’ll start with a week, then keep going.
(Emma Straub sent me here–with her Facebook link.)
Agreed! I deactivated my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts two weeks ago, and am enjoying it. More than just being tired of the banal status updates, I was annoyed at my repetitive, obsessive checking of the Twitter feed. Anonymity and privacy is underrated.
Without FB I’d be stuck obsessively checking the weather and my clean inbox over and over. My addiction is to the entire laptop…it seems to join my every activity lately. I feel this compulsive need to see if the midnight show of KickAss at the ArcLight is selling, to check BoingBoing for new posts, to Google anything and everything. And, like I said, looking up the unchanging weather every 30 minutes or so. Maybe I need to get on the wagon for a bit!
Interestingly, around the same time you did this I fell in love and …fell off twitter for months. I’m even having trouble keeping up my blog. But I do love both Twitter and FB for the capacity to crowd-source things like where to stay and where to eat, and I do feel closer to friends and relatives at a distance—email can be so cumbersome to respond to, whereas the passive connectivity of FB means they feel more like a part of my daily life than they would otherwise.
Anyway, you’re missed, but I’m glad I get to read you over here.
I suppose it is no surprise to you that I heard of this article by way of a retweet of a twitter post. That, unfortunately, is the great gaping hole in your plan: without those sites you say you don’t need, there would be no one here to read your thoughts on it. Of course, I agreed with you 100%, but then, that’s the gaping hole in my thinking too.
@mrG (“Without those sites you say you don’t need, there would be no one here to read your thoughts on it.”) Not necessarily: I’m not on Twitter, and am an infrequent Facebook user (post a comment or update maybe once every 2 weeks) but I came across this article the way I usually do: by checking one of my favorite sites. Which can still become a distraction; but limiting your online media time to a few favorites, at least primarily, sets a sort of boundary to the field – and insures that your screentime will be thought-provoking and not filled with, say, hours of looking at funny cat videos. I agree with Edan: like most pleasures, it’s a question of moderation in the form of self-regulation.
Loved it…. Will you do a update in 3 months? And on the ball about Twitter!
Although social networking has benefited my life as a writer more than it has damaged it, I am trying to keep a balance. I now have one internet-free day a week, and that seems to be working fine. Like everything in life (food, sex, sleep), it’s all about balance.
You are a remarkable young woman. We miss you, Edan, but more power.
I agree that it is all about balance. I am a journalist so use twitter as a news feed and to find things I might not normally read (such as this article) – but don’t use it outside work. I have never joined, and will never join Facebook, because I have the old-fashioned idea that you should make an effort to keep in touch with friends you care about.
I really had to laugh at the gravity with which the idea of cutting out Facebook and Twitter for a few months was treated in this article (the “collapse” of the internet, the “strained look” in the eyes of almost everyone the author spoke to about it)—as if it were real deprivation.
I keep my number of Facebook friends low, and I enjoy reading about their creative accomplishments and inspirations; I’ve learned about new and obscure music, videos and articles; I find out about the best parties and nightclubs that they frequent and/or promote; and I am genuinely happy for the ones who have married and had children and share pictures of their loved ones.
I’m not addicted to Facebook nor Twitter, but I appreciate it for what it is: it’s a celebration of the moments we want to share.
It’s fine as long as you don’t let it siphon off your valuable time to the point that you need to go cold turkey to remember that it should enhance your social life, not substitute for it. But such is the sad, empty world of the technologically privileged, I suppose.
I am probably at the old end of the demographic here. I am 67. I’ve certainly had my share of addictions (some took years of active overcoming), not-constructive distractions or abused distractions in my life. But now, now, I am so care-taking of my time. TV is gone, movies are here and I make them count. Will my eyesight hold up? I am hoping to live to 90 and take very good care. The Millions “manifesto” struck a chord–not wasting time on vapid (other adjectives also) when I could be reading insightful. I do enjoy some light reading–the last few years the Scandinavian mystery writers fill that niche. So Edan, I think it’s a good thing. Not to presume on how you should do it–but maybe a withdrawal diary? What fills that space, what would you like to fill that space. Rest and remembering are good things to do. Good luck.
My mind is blown wide open. I’m just not sure I have the balls to try it.
Lovely article/post. Re. “If I run into you at the grocery store, the question, “How are you?” will be genuine, and that will feel good” – I can only agree. I enjoy blogging (mostly) though have so far avoided Facebook and Twitter and am fairly sure I’ll continue to avoid it – I like your analogy that it’s like a crowded elevator and everyone is talking over each other. I don’t like crowds or elevators, so that rights me off. For me, despite the undoubted benefits to having an on-line life, social media is essentially, if not necessarily, shallow and vacuous. A hello in a grocery store is so much more meaningful and, dare I say it, profound.
I quit facebook during the month of February and it was hard, especially at first. In the month that I’ve been back, I’ve realized the key my fb portion control: I check in a few times a day and see what my friends are up to but I typically don’t post status updates myself now. I might once a week because when I do then I find myself obsessively wondering if anyone has liked what I wrote or responded at all. I guess others posts feel genuine to me but my own posts feel like the “LOOKIT” thing you described so well.
(an old Peanuts cartoon has Charlie Brown yelling at the red haired girl, “I’M LOOKITING!!”)
Thanks for a great article.
Don’t go back. I quit Facebook last fall. Best decision I made in a while. There are much better timesinks, ones that don’t drain every second of your attention while not really providing anything real.
Has anyone successfully used FB or Twitter for business? Any good stories?
I have hundreds of people on FB and over 1000 following on Twitter. The exchanges can be entertaining but I have yet to derive anything meaningful from it.
When I first got on FB, I used it to see how my old girlfriends compared. Once that little game was over it went back to the typical 3 round e-mail exchanges to catch up on decades of lost time with friends. Now there is a small core of 20+ people that I keep in constant contact with. About the same before FB.
I do not feel the need to put up pictures of my kids, quite frankly it scares me. Also, it is very interesting to see how others boast about every little trip or thing they buy. Updating your status to tell me you just “put down new hard wood floors” is not why I joined a social media network.
There is a value to social media networks but you spend so much time cutting through the noise it almost works against you.
I deleted my twitter and facebook accounts around the same time, in January, and called it social media suicide. I had heard about the suicide sites, but by the time I got on them, they had already been blocked by twitter and facebook. So I deleted all entries, friends, photos, by hand. It was hard. Hard to see all of that love and attention go away. But I did it, because
I knew I was addicted. And
I don’t want facebook and twitter to have the rights to my information.
And I don’t want to spend all of my time on there. I realized that I was in a certain mood when i would check facebook and twitter, the mood of “doing something half-heartedly” or “wanting to waste time.”
Since I got off these sites, I’ve written 40,000 words of my book, 35,000 words on my blog, created an e-newsletter or three, created 6 new paintings, started writing letters to my relatives (which has brought me such joy) created an ebook about how to get more freelance clients, made 10 slideshow presentations to help people find jobs or fundraise better, and started making an online game to teach people how to fundraise. I’ve made three websites too. And I’ve progressed towards my dream of selling iced tea to people in Austin Texas.
I have gotten so much done, and I feel like a better person for having committed facebook suicide. I encourage anyone who wants to have a greater impact on the world to do it.
Mazarine
http://wildwomanfundraising.com
Full disclosure:
I have made a new, professional twitter account that I check once a day, during the week, to post my new blog entry.
I often forget about Facebook for a few days at a time and spend no more than a combined total of a half hour a day or so on Twitter, and I enjoy both places. I do sometimes think about deleting from both sites, though — or, more to the point: I sometimes wish I had the luxury of deleting from both places.
But if you’re promoting a book, deleting your social media accounts is a terrible idea. I’ve booked a lot of events via Twitter contacts, and I don’t like to think of how few people would come to my readings if I weren’t constantly talking to readers and broadcasting my events on these sites.
Facebook is annoying. I have been on Facebook for over a year and it is ok. Great way to share family photos and stories. The key is to keep your network small and easy to manage. Once you let in people you do not know, you are subject to pointless ads and stories.
Facebook is about “ME”. Most people cannot handle seeing a low number on their account so they end up being friends with anyone to get a cool looking popular number. I find most of the information worthless. Farmville, Mob Wars etc.. etc…
The internet is young but I expect a facebook killer application to come along soon. Also, Facebook is upsetting people with its privacy rights. If you want to keep anything safe and secure, just keep it off the internet. Sad but true.
This article is fantastic!!! Thank you for sharing your detox experience. One thing I think about, on top of these issues you brought up, is the way that reading other people’s blogs affects my own creativity. I’m a writer and photographer, and while I often claim to follow other artists blogs in order to find inspiration, I often leave feeling insecure and left out of the internet loop of artists. I’m sure some of this has to do with my own personal issues of insecurity, but as soon as I mention this to fellow bloggers, I’m immediately met with resounding agreement and similar frustration.
While I do often find inspiration from fellow online artists, I often end up recreating the things they have produced. I, as well, want to read and exercise restraint. Perhaps I’m headed to my own detox, of the RSS variety. Who knows…It might end up clearing out my head a bit and allowing me to produce something original.
I often wonder if all of the web is an illusion. Then I check facebook.
Greg Gutierrez
Zen and the Art of Surfing
Thank you, everyone, for your comments. Getting all this feedback means I never have to return to Facebook or Twitter ever again. I exist!
I’ve done the same thing last week, in part to Nicholas Carr’s blog and MGMT’s new song “Flash Delirium” which encourages you to “stab your Facebook”. I only wish more of my friends and family would join me in the real world, but like you said, they all make the same damn excuses.
Loved the article, Edan. I feel some of the same pressures — or rather, all of them. The noise online is deafening, and my contribution to it, at least, is ego-based. My detox starts on July 3rd when I leave on the tour. But I’m trying to take it a step further. No Twitter or Facebook, but no computers or television, either. Just books and thinking. And bicycles.
Excellent article! I have been doing a bit of hand-wringing over the last few weeks about reducing my online activities and presence. Your well-written piece provides all the intellectual, and quasi-emotional, support I need to flip the switch into the off position.
One question, though. Did you inform friends and “followers” of your impending departure or did you just leave?
Cheers!
A lovely, thoughtful essay.
(And I got here via facebook, for which I am grateful.)
I’ve been off FB since July 1 and guess what I’ve been doing? Reading voraciously…like I used to before SM took over my life (including your book, Edan! Which was incredibly compelling). Anyway, I miss it the way I might miss being at a great party but not enough to go back. I deleted my account and the people who love me and are my friends are still in my life. In fact, we talk on the phone and share our real lives. I don’t know if you are still “off” but I’m thinking about leaving Twitter too. Merry Christmas!