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Penn Museum

Address
3260 South Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104 United States Get Directions

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  • Practicing Attention—But Why?

    Penn Museum 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Drawing on themes from her bestselling 2019 book How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell will examine anxieties about our ability to focus and the way that the issue is often emptied of social, political, and spiritual content. Like anything else, the practice of paying attention can be aimed at increased productivity for productivity's sake—or worse, an abstract valuing of mental "performance." She will argue that much of modern advice regarding the practice of attention is inadequate because it misses the role of purpose, commitment, and love. A book signing will follow the lecture and Q&A.

    Free

  • Truth and the Novel, author Geraldine Brooks

    Penn Museum 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth, said Albert Camus. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks spent half her life as a journalist, running after the truth in difficult places where despots and warlords were desperate to obfuscate. Later she turned to fiction, but her novels always hew as closely as possible to historical truth. In the Wolf Humanities Center's 2025 Dr. S.T. Lee Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities, Brooks will discuss her process as a novelist and how it is informed by the toolkit she acquired as a foreign correspondent covering conflicts in the Middle East, Africa,

    Free