Book Talk | D. Graham Burnett | Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement

The Institute for Public Knowledge will host an event with historian of science D. Graham Burnett on Monday, February 9 (5:30-7:00 PM). Burnett is the co-editor of Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, and he will discuss his work with Chris Hayes and Natasha D. Schüll.

D. Graham Burnett is an assistant professor in the history department at Princeton. His first book, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (2000), examines the relationship between cartography and colonialism in the nineteenth century. He is also the author of Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (2005), A Trial By Jury (2001; Japanese edition 2003), Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (2007), and The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century which came out in 2012. In 2018, he published the co-authored KEYWORDS;…Relevant to Academic Life, &c., and in 2021, he co-authored, and co-edited a work of speculative historiography, In Search of the Third Bird (Strange Attractor, 2021), which represents more than a decade of collaborations with artists and scholars interested in material culture, archival poetics, and the history of “experience.” Twelve Theses on Attention (The Friends of Attention with Princeton University Press, 2021), co-edited with Stevie Knauss, offers an analysis of the politics of “joint attention” in the era of surveillance capitalism. Burnett has written essays and reviews for a variety of publications, including the New Yorker, Harpers, the Economist, the American Scholar (where he served two terms on the editorial board), Daedalus (where he was a contributing editor), the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Republic.

Chris Hayes hosts the Emmy Award-winning “All In with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC, where he is also host of “Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast.” He is also editor-at-large of “The Nation” and author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (Penguin Random House, 2025) A Colony in a Nation (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017), and Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (Crown Publishing Group, 2012). Hayes is a former Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. From 2008-2010, he was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. From 2005 to 2006, he was a Schumann Center Writing Fellow at In These Times. Since 2002, Hayes has written on a wide variety of political and social issues, from union organizing and economic democracy, to the intersection of politics and technology. His essays, articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, The Nation, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, The Guardian, and The Chicago Reader.

Natasha D. Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her 2012 book, ADDICTION BY DESIGN: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton U Press) parses the intimate relationship between the experience of gambling addiction and casino industry design tactics, showing how architectural, atmospheric, ergonomic, audiovisual, and algorithmic-computational techniques are marshalled to suspend—and monetize—gamblers’ attention. Her current book project, KEEPING TRACK (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, under contract), explores the rise of sensor-based, digital technologies of the self and the new modes of introspection, self-care, and self-regulation they offer. Schüll’s documentary film, BUFFET: All You Can Eat Las Vegas, has screened multiple times on PBS and appeared in numerous film festivals. Her research has been featured in 60 Minutes, The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, and other outlets.