2026-08-08
43 分钟The Economist
I don't know about you, but for much of my waking life, my attention is divided.
No, not divided.
It's fragmented, fragile and fractured.
I grab hold of a little piece of it, but then I've let go of a few others.
Part of it is the job.
Being a news hound was never going to be anything other than attentionally whiplashy.
And I'm not even on Instagram or TikTok or even Twitter since it became X.
Because I know how profligate I can be with my little pieces of attention
and I don't want to part with any more of them.
As protective of it as I try to be, I'm probably not thinking about attention the right way.
And you probably aren't either.
I'm Jason Palmer.
This is The Weekend Intelligence and what was I saying?
My colleague Barclay Bram has been looking into how we're all economic actors in the attention economy.
To be a rational actor, you've got to know what the medium of exchange is
and what exactly you're exchanging.
And if you can put your phone down for just one hot second
and think about it, those are actually hard questions to answer.
Hey, you.