Fists are flying this week, and not just on Reacher. This new period series from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight sets up in the bare knuckle boxing scene of London’s East End in the 1880s. Malachi Kirby plays Hezekiah Moscow, a promising Jamaican pugilist who attracts the backing of a criminal ringleader who’s known as the Queen of the Forty Elephants and played by Erin Doherty. Stephen Graham co-stars as Sugar Goodson, an established boxer determined to block Hezekiah’s rise. Friday, Feb. 21, Hulu.

by Chris Hayes

Chris Hayes isn’t the first author to ring an alarm about what the internet age is doing to our minds, said Sylvie McNamara in Washingtonian. Even so, the MSNBC anchor’s provocative new best-seller “stands out for its bombastic argument that we’re currently experiencing an economic upheaval on the scale of the industrial revolution.” To Hayes, that earlier revolution had the effect of turning individuals’ time and effort into a commodity to be sold for a wage. Our current economy, by contrast, runs on the commodification of our attention—on turning eyeballs into dollars so aggressively that the defining experience of our age is, as he writes, “a feeling that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will.” The Sirens’ Call makes that intimate interior drama palpable. At the same time, it “takes big swings.” 

“Hayes’ analysis is at its sharpest when he examines the structural design of our digital economy,” said Rhoda Feng in The American Prospect. He likens the feeds on social media apps to slot machines that hook users on easy, ephemeral rewards, and he’s particularly critical of Apple for unleashing the smartphone era and of Amazon for creating a retail megalith by prioritizing data collection above product quality. Refreshingly, “he isn’t perched above the fray.” He admits that he spends most of his own waking hours worrying about how to grab viewers’ attention, and many other hours surrendering to the pull of his phone screen. And while he’s short on solutions to the problem he describes, he reminds us that it’s not enough to reclaim control of our attention individually; we need reforms that break social media’s hold on us all. 

But maybe we have no reason to panic, said Daniel Immerwahr in The New Yorker. After all, past generations have “freaked out about the brain-scrambling power of everything from pianofortes to brightly colored posters.” There’s also plenty of evidence that our attention spans haven’t shrunk. Labor productivity in the U.S. has risen throughout the internet age. Book sales are holding steady, and when Americans aren’t reading books, they’re watching dense, long- form TV dramas, playing 75-hour video games, and, unfortunately, diving deep into conspiracy theories that demonize one group or another. In short, “ours is an era of obsession as much as distraction.” While the case Hayes makes is “thoughtful, informed, and disquieting,” he misdiagnoses the troubles of our age and how those troubles are tied to our smartphones. “The overheating of discourse, the rise of conspiratorial thinking, the hollowing out of shared truths: All these trends are real and deserve careful thought. The panic over lost attention is, however, a distraction.”

The novelist who conjured trippy dreamscapes

Tom Robbins didn’t produce novels so much as mind-­altering experiences. The countercultural author, who partially credited LSD with unlocking his creativity, unspooled shaggy but wondrously stylish tales that encapsulated the free-wheeling psychedelic age. His debut, 1971’s Another Roadside Attraction, featured the mummified corpse of Jesus at a roadside hot-dog stand; 1980’s Still Life With Woodpecker takes place within a pack of Camel cigarettes. His books swirled with loopy metaphors—“Word spread like a skin disease in a nudist colony,” he wrote in Skinny Legs and All—and prioritized vibe over plot. “I’ve always wanted to lead a life of enchantment,” he said in 1977, “and writing is part of that.” 

Raised largely in Richmond, Va., Robbins “showed a penchant for writing from a young age,” regaling his mother with stories, said Rolling Stone. He enrolled at Washington and Lee University to major in journalism but dropped out after two years. After Air Force service in Korea, he decided to move to Seattle, because it was “the farthest place from Richmond,” and started working there as an art critic. But he’d always wanted to be a novelist, and “two distinctly Sixties experiences”—his first acid trip in 1963 and a Doors concert in 1967—returned him to his calling. Another Roadside Attraction “sold poorly at first,” said The Seattle Times, “but word of mouth spread throughout the counterculture and it became a phenomenon.” Five years later came his best-­seller Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which featured “a bisexual heroine with an adventurer’s heart and outrageously large thumbs.” The book only grew in popularity, and in 1993 was made into a film starring Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves. 

While Robbins wrote a book about every five years, “critics increasingly demeaned him as a relic of the 1960s,” said The New York Times. He responded by keeping “his growing army of fans at arm’s length,” rarely venturing far from his home in La Conner, Wash. In his 2014 sort of-­memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie, he railed against “foul-spirited critics,” telling them “scurrilous attacks have been known to backfire.” And he rejected the suggestion that his whimsy was shallow. “There’s nothing the least bit frivolous about the playful nature of the universe,” he said. “Playfulness at a fully conscious level is extremely profound. In fact, there is nothing more profound.”