Books like Doing nothing by Tom Lutz

An accessible guide that argues attention is the most valuable resource in our data‑driven world and offers practical ways to reclaim it for deeper reflection, ethical work, and political activism.

Bill Bryson chronicles the iconic summer of 1927, when booming markets, technological breakthroughs, and cultural milestones set America on a new worldwide stage.

Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the Idler, argues that embracing leisure and rejecting a rigid work ethic unlocks happiness, creativity, and a fuller experience of life.

In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays compiles Bertrand Russell’s 1935 essays that challenge conventional work habits, analyze political ideologies, and examine social, economic, and architectural issues through a philosophical lens.

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public.Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion.At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.From the Hardcover edition.

On Doing Nothing invites readers to discover how deliberate idleness fuels creativity, drawing on voices of artists, writers, philosophers and eccentrics.

American studies scholar and former deejay Alice Echols captures the experience of the Disco Years--on dance floors, at the movies, in the streets, and beneath the sheets. Disco may have presented itself as shallow and disposable--the platforms, polyester, and plastic vibe of it all--but the disco scene carved out a haven for gay men who reclaimed their sexuality on dance floors where they had once been surveilled and harassed; it thrust black women onto center stage as some of the genre's most prominent stars; and it paved the way for the opening of Studio 54 and the viral popularity of the shoestring-budget Saturday Night Fever, a movie that challenged traditional notions of masculinity, even for heterosexuals. But while exploring the cultural milieu, Echols never loses sight of the era's defining soundtrack, which propelled popular music into new sonic territory, influencing everything from rap and rock to techno and trance.--From publisher description.

Mark Edmundson examines how the Gothic permeates American culture—from literature and film to politics, media, and therapy—while questioning the era’s fascination with self-reinvention.

An informal and personal description of the rise and fall of comic books in the '40s and '50s, with a focus on the Educational Comics (E.C.) company run by Gains, father then son (M.C. then William). The fall came in two steps, the first in the '40s and aimed at crime comics, and the second in the '50s and aimed at almost all comics, but with emphasis on horror comics.

A social critique of the Internet, the economic downturn, and post‑industrial culture, examining the human costs and unintended consequences for artists and cultural workers amid the shuttering of bookstores, collapsing newspapers, and music piracy.