Excited to finally share what I’ve been working on for 2+ years. Saving Time (out in March 2023) is my attempt to tell the story of how time became money, and to learn to see it as something outside the world of work and profit.
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Time was on my mind even before I wrote How to Do Nothing, but became more pressing afterward, when one of the most common responses I heard from readers was, “I would love to do nothing, but what if I don’t have time?”
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This question led me to the relationship of time to power. What I didn’t expect was the depth of the roots this story shared with that or the climate, and the burned out feeling of racing against the clock at the end of time.
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I structured the book to take readers with me on a day-long road trip from my home in the Bay Area — e.g., we think about industrial time at the Oakland port, touch geological time at a rocky beach, and explore different languages of time at a community library in San Francisco.
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I’ve also included photos and illustrations to try and make seemingly abstract ideas about time more concrete, to show how they shape the material world we live in.
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Saving Time is my sincere effort to imagine an individual and collective relationship to time that is liberating, not deadening — and with it, a world alive with agency and meaning beyond the transactional.
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It is, as I put it in the introduction, my “panoramic assault on nihilism. I wrote it in an effort to be helpful, but also for myself, as the largest gesture of hope I could muster.
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This book isn’t out until March, but the preorder link is in my bio for now. I humbly hope you can find the time~
"To me, the key correlation between writing and basketball is that you have this compulsion and it defies logic, in a way, because you just do it. And it’s going to be hard; it might suck. But nonetheless, this is the hill you’re going to die on." —Marcus Burke
In our Sports Issue, Jenny Odell speaks with writers and artists about the role that athletics and training play in their creative lives—featuring @marcus_burke_author , @ro.kwon , @danielgalarcon and @alexismadrigal . Read it now at the link in our bio.
Illustrations by @chuanming_ong .
really happy to see my essay on rosa luxemburg’s herbarium in the latest issue of @readlux (in very good company). this piece gave me a chance not only to consider her beautifully pressed specimens, but also to read her letters from prison(s), a surprising mix of political fervor with descriptions of clouds and mentions of “the titmouse with whom I am friendly.” you’ll need a subscription to read it online, but imho lux is something very worth subscribing to. I can’t remember the last time I read a magazine cover to cover 🫨
“Walking was reading, and every wrinkle had a meaning. Looking up and around in the way I had just learned, I could really see the whole thing: the movement of rock, the impression of water.” — @jennitaur
Spending time with a landscape opens us to the language it speaks. Can we quiet our own voices enough to hear what the Earth has to say? This week, Jenny Odell takes us on a walk through the folds and furrows of her Oakland neighborhood, listening for the memories embedded in the shape of her surroundings. Sensing the language of her local terrain, she begins to tune in to the age-old conversation between rock and water. By cultivating this sustained attention, Jenny shows how we can ask a place, as we would a person, what is your story?
Read or listen to “Reading the Rocks” by Jenny Odell. (link in our profile)
Artwork by Sophie Tivona @sophietivonaillustration .
In 2017, artist and “Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock” author Jenny Odell came across the expansive collage practice of an artist who went by the mononym Jess. Taken by his untraditional use of pre-existing materials, Odell remained intrigued by his practice, which was marked by an undefined, searching quality that invited viewer interpretation.
For this edition of #PWBroadcast’s 13 Ways of Looking series, Odell follows Jess’s life and career to reflect on collage and the very practice of searching, finding, and filing in a world proliferated with information. Read the full article at the link in bio.
