Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can Fight Back. Highlight

Consider a simple exercise known as “Attention in Place,” inspired by the work of the experimental writer Georges Perec. For his short work, “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris,” Mr. Perec sat at a corner cafe in his beloved city and over the course of three days recorded everything he saw, with particular attention to the supposedly mundane (what he called “infra-ordinary”) events that might under normal circumstances have gone unnoted.

In our much shorter exercise, after reading an excerpt from Mr. Perec’s work, participants head out into the neighborhood and spend 30 minutes jotting down their observations of absolutely whatever unfolds in the world around them.