Jenny Odell

Jenny Odell has been busy lately contemplating time, not so much about how we could use it more productively, but how time, in the hands of taskmasters throughout history, has been used against us. In her latest book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Odell discusses how time, something that most of us always figured was just sort of here, ticking away, was actually created and commodified by capitalism to, among other things, squeeze every possible bit of blood, sweat and labor out of workers. 

Saving Time stands in stark contrast to most business and self-help books with similar titles, the sorts of hectoring screeds that promise to show readers how to increase their productivity by, say, “working smarter, not harder.” Similarly, Odell herself is just about as far...