Joshua Glenn: Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based journalist and
scholar. He has labored as a bicycle shop manager and skateboard
courier, a busboy and barrel-washer, a researcher and teacher, a
handyman and housepainter a bartender and espresso jerk, and also
as a magazine and newspaper editor. The only work he has ever done
was: publishing Hermenaut, an intellectual zine; contributing
regular columns to Feed.com, The Idler (UK), Britannica.com, The
London Observer, and The Boston Globe's Ideas section; and editing
Taking Things Seriously, a 2007 collection of essays and photos
devoted to oddly significant objects.
Mark Kingwell: After some years of graduate education in Britain
and the United States, Mark Kingwell found he had inadvertently
perfected a form of idling for which he could get paid. He is
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a
contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, and has written for
publications ranging from Adbusters and the New York Times to the
Journal of Philosophy and Auto Racing Digest. Among his twelve
books of political and cultural theory are the national
best-sellers Better Living (1998), The World We Want (2000), and
Concrete Reveries. In order to secure financing for their continued
indulgence he has also written about his various hobbies, including
fishing, baseball, cocktails, and contemporary art.
"It fulminates most entertainingly against labour and industrial amusement, pays happy respect to its guiding spirits Lin Yutang and Henry Miller, gambols gaily in etymological thickets ("otiose" is drawn from the Latin for the noble concept of leisure), and poses crucial questions for further research ("whether snoozing is more akin to dozing or napping")."--The Guardian "This delightful chapbook proffers a puckish twofer: a whimsically learned defense of indolence and flaneurship...and an engagingly etymological lexicon of loafing, past and present."--The Atlantic "Mark Kingwell's splendidly informative, substantial introductory essay tells us much about the multifarious benefits that accrue to those who idle; it alone makes The Idler's Glossary worth reading."--Nigel Beale
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