Caleb Smith Livres

"When did the age of distraction begin? It might seem like a new problem, a symptom of our digital addictions, but distraction was already a source of deep concern in American culture two hundred years ago. As the industrial market economy emerged, nineteenth-century observers saw the signs: Workers were wasting time, daydreaming on the job, and the public's attention was overstimulated by new media and consumer trends. In response, social reformers designed innovative systems of moral training for the masses. Religious leaders organized far-reaching Christian revivals. And spiritual seekers like Henry David Thoreau experimented on themselves, practicing regimens of simplified living and transcendental mysticism. From the solitary confinement cells of the earliest penitentiaries to the shores of Walden Pond, disciplines of attention became the spiritual exercises of a distracted age. Through twenty-eight short passages on reform, religion, and literature from the strange and beautiful archives of this nineteenth-century attention revival, Caleb Smith reads with an eye for both language and power. Disciplines of attention, he argues, often reinforce a morally conservative social order. At the same time, exercising more careful control over our own attention promises to give us some distance from the consumer marketplace-and, today, from the algorithmic manipulations of the online attention economy. Smith writes with vigilance about the history of coercion, but also with guarded hope about practices of attention, including reading itself. From the benefits of attentive reading to the darker side of enforced attention in prisons and reformatories, this book examines distraction as a moral, political, and economic problem with a long and illuminating history"-- Provided by publisher

Wie die Kanninchen von Peacebunny Island Herzen heilen Im Alter von acht Jahren entdeckt Caleb Smith seine Liebe zu Kaninchen und erkennt in ihnen Potenzial für mehr: Sie machen Freude und können trösten. Wenig später ruft er ein Programm ins Leben, um auch anderen durch seine Tiere Trost, Wärme und neue Hoffnung zu schenken. Caleb rettet ausgesetzte Kaninchen, beginnt eine Zucht seltener Rassen und verleiht seine hoppelnden Freunde an Familien als "Haustiere auf Probe". Schließlich gelingt es ihm, eine kleine Insel zu kaufen, auf der sich seine Kaninchen frei bewegen können und für den Einsatz als "Therapie- und Trosttiere" geschult werden: Peacebunny Island. Dieses Buch erzählt die außergewöhnliche und warmherzige Geschichte eines jungen Mannes, der uns daran erinnert, dass Liebe, Hoffnung und Freundlichkeit stärker sind als die Dunkelheit in dieser Welt.