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Book Launch

Book Launch | Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self

09/27 Wednesday | 6pm

NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites to you to join for a conversation with Natasha Dow Schüll and Manoush Zomorodi on Zomorodi’s new book Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. 

In 2015 Manoush Zomorodi, host of WNYC’s popular podcast and radio show Note to Self, led tens of thousands of listeners through an experiment to help them unplug from their devices, get bored, jump-start their creativity, and change their lives. Bored and Brilliant builds on that experiment to show us how to rethink our gadget use to live better and smarter in this new digital ecosystem. Manoush explains the connection between boredom and original thinking, exploring how we can harness boredom’s hidden benefits to become our most productive and creative selves without totally abandoning our gadgets in the process. Grounding the book in the neuroscience and cognitive psychology of “mind wandering” what our brains do when we’re doing nothing at all―Manoush includes practical steps you can take to ease the nonstop busyness and enhance your ability to dream, wonder, and gain clarity in your work and life. The outcome is mind-blowing.


Manoush Zomorodi is the host and managing editor of “Note to Self,” “the tech show about being human,” from WNYC Studios. Every week on her podcast, Manoush searches for answers to life’s digital quandaries through experiments and conversations with listeners and experts. She has won numerous awards for her work including four from the New York Press Club. In 2014, the Alliance for Women in Media named her Outstanding Host. 

Natasha Dow Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her recent book, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press 2012), draws on extended research among compulsive gamblers and the designers of the slot machines they play to explore the relationship between technology design and the experience of addiction. Her next book, Keeping Track (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, expected late 2018), concerns the rise of digital self-tracking technologies and the new modes of introspection and self-governance they engender.

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