Pay Attention

A day in the inner and outer lives of a college professor, blogger, divorced father, thinker, and yearner.

 

What would it feel like to wake up inside the head of someone who writes about science for a living? John Horgan, acclaimed author of the bestseller The End of Science, answers that question in his genre-bending new book Pay Attention, a stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of his alter ego, Eamon Toole—a blogger, college professor, and divorced father.

This work of fact-based fiction, or “faction,” follows Toole as he wakes up in his rented apartment in upstate New York, meditates with the mantra “Duh,” commutes via train and subway to an engineering school in New Jersey, teaches a William James essay on consciousness to freshmen, squabbles about Thomas Kuhn with colleagues over lunch, takes a ferry to Manhattan and spends the evening with his bossy, Tarot-reading girlfriend, Emily, on whom he plans to spring a big question. Throughout the day, Toole struggles to be rational while buffeted by fears and yearnings. Thoughts of sex and death keep intruding on his ruminations over quantum spookiness, the neural code, the Singularity and free will. Pay Attention is a profane, profound meditation on the entanglements of our inner and outer worlds and the elusiveness of truth.

John Horgan, an award-winning science journalist, is Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. He is the author of The End of Science, a U.S. bestseller translated into thirteen languages; and Mind-Body Problems, which he made available online for free. Horgan has written for the New York Times, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, Slate, and other publications. He writes the popular Cross Check blog for Scientific American and produces “Mind-Body Problems” for the online talk show Bloggingheads.tv.