Odell’s first book...echoes...a collage (or maybe it’s a compost heap) of ideas about detaching from life online, built out of scraps collected from artists, writers, critics and philosophers ... Then, summoning the ideas of others, she goes on to construct a complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto ... She has a knack for evoking the malaise that comes from feeling surrounded by online things ... But her book is least convincing when she suggests that meaningful political change would follow if the strategies she has adopted were taken up en masse. Though she acknowledges that she’s lucky to be able to exercise the freedom to while away the hours in her favorite rose garden or to go bird-watching, Odell seems to disregard just how individualistic her strategies are. She lives an artistic life, one that lends itself wonderfully to aesthetic expression but is less useful in the political realm. And yet Odell’s book...has the potential to improve a reader’s behavior.

The parallel Odell draws between the two struggles—for private, mental space and public, communal space—is characteristic of her method. She routinely finds formal similarities among seemingly disparate phenomena, thereby bringing them onto the same plane ... Odell’s great strength as a writer is her ability to convey art’s unique power without overestimating or misstating its social impact ... Searching for a word to describe the form Odell’s chapters take, I first typed thicket. Actually, they are more like the Rose Garden. Throughout, she samples frequently and generously from poetry, philosophy, biography, fiction, nature writing, and art. And she has tended this work carefully, shaping it into branching conceptual paths that frequently crisscross one another ... Ultimately, what sets her book apart from self-help is not a less quixotic set of demands but a more life-affirming endgame.

If Jenny Odell...were a different writer and a different thinker, she’d take the route many others have and tell you the solution to these anxieties is to unplug ... Instead, she proposes a collective shifting of attention that results in a more considered awareness of how we relate to the physical world, to others, and to ourselves. The way to achieve this, she says, is to grow comfortable doing nothing ... luckily, Odell knows it’s both tired and banal to devote a book to urging readers to do so ... Odell takes several approaches to her argument for such a mass movement, threading ruminations on urban theory, technodeterminism, personal experience, and Marxist thought throughout. Amid the book’s roughly 200 pages, many will be pleased to find, she devotes hardly any space to familiar refrains about the relentless news cycle in the Trump era ... By resisting the popular impulse to use Trump as the nucleus of any theorizing about our present moment, Odell is able to outline a much bolder proposition for political resistance.

It’s common, now, to be queasy about tech addiction on an individual level. But Odell’s concerns are more expansive — they transcend not just the individual, but the species. Her diagnosis? Every day, we are robbed of our capacity for meaningful, sustained thought by companies that mine our attention for profit ... How to Do Nothing is not a self-help book. It is light on specific, practical suggestions, and the few it offers can feel vague and unsatisfying ... At its best, How to Do Nothing mimics the experience of walking with a perceptive and sensitive friend, the kind of person who makes you feel, in your bones, that it’s a miraculous gift to be alive at all.

In writing about doing nothing, Odell could have given us a self-obsessive and self-indulgent tome or, conversely, a sanctimonious or pedantically utopian work. But she sails with capable ease between subjectivity and arid theory with the relatable humanity of her vision. Although she doesn’t strike the pose of a radical, there is a radicalism in her program of doing nothing that transcends normal classification. It’s at once a kind of political ideology, a spiritual practice, a moral imperative and an aesthetic reconception of the world as it can be when attention isn’t monetized, weaponized and atomized. It’s a form of liberation that doesn’t frame itself in direct antagonism to something else so much as it calls for a radical refocusing of attention toward the world around us.

Not unlike the winding Mokelumne River whose banks Odell walks during her research, the writer herself often meanders. Topics range from performance art to Bartleby The Scrivener to bioregionalism to noncommercial social media platforms; a little too frequently she bases her arguments in metaphor ... her wandering is part of the point. How To Do Nothing presents, and affords, the kind of deep, ruminative thinking that can only occur over an extended period of time and outside of social media ... That one can finish the book without a strong sense of what to do also appears intentional.

The book is clearly the work of a socially conscious artist and writer who considers careful attention to the rich variety of the world an antidote to the addictive products and platforms that technology provides ... she sails with capable ease between the Scylla and Charybdis of subjectivity and arid theory with the relatable humanity of her vision ... In one of the book’s most persuasive sections, Odell discusses the Greek philosopher Diogenes ... Her portrait of Diogenes is instructive in an unexpected way for understanding the art of doing nothing.

While the reporting in the piece is breathtaking, the experience of scrolling through 'A Business With No End'...has its own power, mimicking the hallucinatory feeling of Odell discovering and yet not fully pinning down all of these connections ... How to Do Nothing marks an important turn in Odell’s work: the attempt to find some peace and quiet in the midst of the Internet’s chaos by imagining a new mind-set and new ways of living ... This is not to say that she doesn’t devote plenty of space to withering criticism of Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, tech libertarianism, or Silicon Valley’s design fetish; she does, and all of it is sharply composed ... While Odell’s work has always been interested in how technology rewires our conception of the built environment, the belief in the natural world she espouses in How to Do Nothing illustrates a shift in her interests ... As a result, her book is less concerned with confronting these structures head-on ... How to Do Nothing accomplishes something that neither the recent wave of Internet histories (Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants) nor the popular self-help books on digital detox have achieved. Odell helps readers discover ways of living outside the Web that are still richly alive ... Odell’s wide-ranging intelligence and curiosity make reading this book an escape of its own.