{ "item_title" : "Hanging Out", "item_author" : [" Sheila Liming "], "item_description" : "Hide your phone, stop hustling for a second, and read this passionate argument for the importance of unstructured pre-digital hang. --People Loneliness is an epidemic; it feels harder than ever to connect with others meaningfully. What can we do to remedy this? Sheila Liming has the answer: we need to hang out more. With the introduction of AI and constant Zoom meetings, our lives have become more fractured, digital and chaotic. Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time shows us what we have lost to the frenetic pace of digital life and how to get it back. Combining personal narrative with pungent analyses of books, movies, and TV shows, Sheila Liming shows us how the new social landscape deadens our connections with others -- connections that are vital to both self-care and to a vibrant community. Whether drinking with strangers in a distant city or jamming with musician friends in an abandoned Pittsburgh row house, Liming demonstrates that unstructured social time is the key to a freer, happier sense of self. Hanging Out shows how simple acts of casual connection are the glue that binds us together, and how community is the antidote to the disconnection and isolation that dominates contemporary life. The book conceives of hanging out as a way to reclaim time as something other than a raw ingredient to be converted into productivity. --New York Times Rich with illuminating stories. --Slate We could all use more of that blissfully unstructured social time, posits Sheila Liming in the well-considered series of arguments found in Hanging Out. --Reader's Digest Opens with a simple and expansive account of what hanging out is ... Liming dedicates much of the book to stories from her past. She has lived an interesting life, and she tells these stories well. --Washington Post Sharp and vivid writing ... a layered exploration of social dynamics that contains some textured literary criticism. --Bookforum More books about hanging out, less about productivity please. Sheila Liming sees the gap in our thinking about time, and the true worth in spending it in an unstructured fashion with members of our community. --LitHub", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/68/589/005/1685890059_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "27.99", "online_price" : "27.99", "our_price" : "27.99", "club_price" : "27.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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Sheila Liming’s Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time is a thoughtful manifesto on the inherently subversive and joyous act of socializing. In seven chapters about different types of hanging out (“Dinner Parties as Hanging Out,” “Hanging Out on the Job,” etc.), Liming explores the fading art of leisure and its cultural roots. Liming defines hanging out as a conscious act of refusal in a production-obsessed society. “Hanging out is about daring to do nothing much,” she writes, “and, even more than that, about daring to do it in the company of others.” She acknowledges that it is a peculiar time—amid the COVID-19 pandemic—to call for a return to the in-person hang, but this context is precisely why we are realizing the importance of spending idle time in physical communities. We cannot let corporate capitalism snatch away what is left of our free time, Liming argues. “Time is being stolen from us—not for the first time . . . but at newly unprecedented rates.” Hanging Out reads as a chattier, slightly more precious version of How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. The book embraces its call for intentional meandering with wide-ranging references and a loose narrative structure. An English professor, Liming is unsurprisingly the most compelling when she incorporates literary criticism into her treatise. While the personal stories drag, the fiction references crackle. This is particularly true in her analysis of “party literature” in the chapter “Hanging Out at Parties,” in which Liming looks at several 20th-century novels and examines the different ways parties have functioned as social mechanisms. What is quickly revealed in Liming’s contemplative writing is that hanging out—and all of its possible ramifications, limitations and effects—is too enormous a subject to comprehensively discuss. Instead, Liming uses her time to argue for the importance of mingling with others and finding time, even in an increasingly virtual world, to enjoy the hang.