Two Weeks of The Great Indoors
Thanks for all the support!
The Great Indoors has been out for two weeks now, and I have been humbled by and grateful for the response. If you’ve been buying, reading, or helping to spread the word—thank you, thank you, thank you.
I do have one more request to make, however: If you read the book, it would be a huge help if you’d consider leaving an Amazon rating or review.
I won’t do this in every forthcoming newsletter, but I did want to take this opportunity to collect some of the press the book has been getting.
Reviews
Molly Young, the literary critic at New York, gave The Great Indoors a lovely review. I was especially delighted by this part:
In order to enjoy one of these books, you need to trust the author’s ability to responsibly synthesize specialized knowledge that lies outside of her, and your, expertise. You need to know in your soul that the author is not the type of person to cite Wikipedia as a source or become enveloped in a plagiarism scandal one instant after you finish reading her book. I am glad to report that Anthes passes the trustworthy test. Her sources are respectable and diligently noted. My margins were covered with scribbled WTFs not because she was drawing deranged conclusions from misinterpreted studies but because the book contains piles of cool facts that are actually, from what I can tell, facts.
Thank you, Molly! The book has also been reviewed in The Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall), Science, and Undark.
Interviews
I’ve been doing a bunch of radio, podcast, online, and print interviews. Here are a few highlights:
I did a brief interview on NPR’s “Marketplace” about how the office environment affects employees. There’s also an excerpt from the book here—about whether architecture can extend our lifespans.
I also had a lovely conversation with Alison Stewart on WNYC’s “All of It.”
I did a Q&A with Shannon Palus at Slate, which you can read here.
Indoor Ephemera
I love this: “South Korea distributes 'pet plants' to fight COVID depression”
Covid-19 and the new elevator etiquette
The use of solitary confinement has reportedly increased by 500 percent as prisons scramble to contain the coronavirus.
Two very good recent pieces on the need to rethink nursing homes--and the entire model of senior care in America: “The American Nursing Home Is a Design Failure” in New York and “It's Time for an End-of-Life Discussion About Nursing Homes” in Wired.
“As America struggles to reopen schools and offices, how to clean coronavirus from the air”
The New York Public Library has released “a collection of audio landscapes that evoke some of the sounds of New York City. Missing Sounds of New York, a partnership with creative agency Mother New York, is a love letter to NYC, connecting New Yorkers around the familiar sounds of urban life that they love and miss during this unprecedented time of social separation.”
Bonus Interspecies Animal Content
I couldn’t decide between these two videos, so you get the gift of both:
Best,
Emily
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The Great Indoors is now out! You can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, IndieBound, or your local independent bookstore.
You can read more of my work at my website and follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads. (You can follow me on Facebook, too, I suppose, but I rarely post there.)