Author: Chris Bodenner

by Chris Bodenner

Sue Thomas’ post is making me pine for the wilderness:

This year some people might consider the idea of a digital detox vacation. Perhaps a trip to the Scottish Highlands, where communities deprived of decent broadband are wondering whether to market themselves as digital-free destinations in an attempt to flip a lack of poor reception into “meaningful and emotional experiences”. A digital detox can be simply achieved by disconnecting yourself from the internet and turning off your phone for short bursts of time to flush out the anxiety infesting your poor wired mind. Digital detox coach Frances Booth lists the benefits of switching off including reduced stress, an increased sense of calm, better sleep and a sense of freedom.

But is it worth the bother and expense?

Some hardliners go offline for a whole year, but usually only to write a book about it. Or you might purchase a detox vacation in some area of wild natural beauty where others take control of your consumption by confiscating your kit and enticing you towards other kinds of social and unwired interactions. The Caribbean island of St Vincent and the Grenadines offers a digital detox holiday package where travellers exchange their smartphones for a guidebook explaining how to function without technology and a life coach to help them through it. And in northern California, Camp Grounded says it helps visitors to “disconnect from technology and reconnect with yourself”.

However, in line with her book on the benefits of technobiophilia, Thomas suggests that the ideal escape “offers not detox but intoxication – with both nature and with digital life.” Apparently even Dish features can provide a respite:

[I’ve come] across a number of influential and widely cited experiments which demonstrated the positive effects of nature on physiological and mental health. But a considerable amount of their data came from subjects looking at still or moving images, such as window views, … rather than going outdoors.

So in lieu of that detox:

San Juan, Puerto Rico, 9.48 am

(Top photo by Ruben Brulat. See many more stirring images from his series here. Read more Sue Thomas at the The Conversation.)

by Chris Bodenner

Dave wrote the definitive book on the Columbine shooting, which is about to have its 15th anniversary next month:

Columbine won the Edgar Award, Barnes & Noble’s Discover Award, the Goodreads Choice Award, and several others. It spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and made two dozen Best of 2009 lists, including the New York Times, LA Times and Publishers Weekly. Columbine was declared Top Education Book of 2009 by the American School Board Journal. Cullen spent ten years writing and researching Columbine. He has written for New York Times, BuzzFeed, Times of London, Newsweek, Guardian, Washington Post, Slate, Salon, and Daily Beast and is a frequent television analyst. He is currently working on a book about two gay colonels, who he has followed for twelve years.

Here’s more about that forthcoming book, Soldiers First:

This book began for me in 2000 with a long piece on gay soldiers for Salon. I spent five months with a group of them in Colorado Springs and was stunned to discover how their world was completely different than what I’d seen, heard and described on the outside. It was easy for them to find quick, meaningless sportsex under the policy, but nearly impossible to find a boyfriend. So we named the first half of that piece: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Fall in Love.” It was the best thing I ever wrote prior to my first book and it won the GLAAD Media Award for best on-line story of the year. The article was published in two parts, here and here.

Among the scores of good reviews for Columbine came from The LA Times’ David Ulin:

Forget everything you thought you knew. The girl who professed her faith in God before being gunned down in the library. The Trenchcoat Mafia and the feud between the goths and jocks. The idea that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold — the two Columbine High School seniors who, on April 20, 1999, killed 12 of their fellow students and one teacher in what was, at the time, the worst school shooting in the history of the United States — were disaffected, unpopular, motivated by resentment or revenge. Even the fact that the killings took place on Adolf Hitler’s birthday was a coincidence: The boys had planned to do it a day earlier but hadn’t been able to get the ammunition in time.

All of this, Dave Cullen notes in “Columbine,” his comprehensive account of the tragedy and its aftermath, is the story we’ve been given, the mythic version, the one that (if anything can) aspires to make a kind of sense. It’s a rendering in which the pieces fit together and the terror of the day is mitigated by small moments of redemption, whispers of epiphany and grace. The problem, however, is that none of it happened — or more accurately, none of it happened exactly like that.

A more succinct review:

Just read @DaveCullen‘s remarkable book “Columbine”for the second time. So well researched and well written. Essential reading.

— Anderson Cooper (@andersoncooper) January 26, 2014

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