In Praise of Boredom

In a culture where fast replies, constant stimulation and the omnipresence of social media rule the day, you might not expect that boredom is a booming business. Yet it is true: scholars from philosophy, psychology, art history, sociology and history—among others—have all tossed in their two cents on this suddenly fashionable subject, and not just by boring their own students. You can tell an academic publishing phenomenon is well and truly arrived when Routledge, that marker of all trends in the world of ideas, publishes a volume called The Boredom Studies Reader: Frameworks and Perspectives. (Full disclosure: I have an essay in this anthology.) Articles in academic trade magazines about the boredom boom have all made the same joke: is it possible that boredom will soon itself become overexposed, and hence boring?

Not yet. The subject keeps shifting its registers and modalities along with cultural and, especially, technological circumstance. The most...