Rewilding Attention with D. Graham Burnett

We all know our attention is being competed for — but historian of science D. Graham Burnett calls it something more alarming: a "civilizational biohack." In this episode, we talk with Burnett, a Princeton historian of science and co-founder of "The Friends of Attention," about the movement to liberate our minds from the 17-trillion-dollar attention economy. He draws on surprising sources — the German Romantics, St. Augustine, Simone Weil, Henry James — to argue that we've lost touch with older, richer forms of attention. And he makes the case that reclaiming it will require more than screentime apps or digital detox – it’ll take collective resistance. Plus: why your Pilates class, your evening needlework, or your walk with the dog might already be forms of radical attention — and how reframing everyday activities can make ordinary life feel richer, more mysterious and more full of wonder.

• “Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement”
• The Friends of Attention
• The Strother School of Radical Attention
• D. Graham Burnett website

Transcript

Anne Strainchamps: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strainchamps.

Steve Paulson: I'm Steve Paulson. We talk a lot about wonder on this podcast as an experience and also as a practice.

Anne Strainchamps: Because the feeling of wonder — that combination of amazement, joy, reverence, awe — that's not something you can just order up like a package from Amazon.

Steve Paulson: You have to keep yourself open to it. Be curious. Notice beauty. Get outdoors.

And that's harder to do in today's attention economy.

Anne Strainchamps: Many of us feel a little less open to wonder these days, a little too stressed out for awe and mystery. And maybe that's not only because our email is piled up and our screen time has ballooned, but because our attention is being fracked.

1. Graham Burnett: What's happened in the last 15 years represents a historically unprecedented innovation. The rise of a $17 trillion suite of corporations who have as their primary business model extracting value from us, from our minds and our eyes. It's a civilizational biohack.

Anne Strainchamps: D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science and an attention activist, and he's one of the primary founders of a group called the Friends of Attention that's building a movement to reclaim our attention.

Steve Paulson: We all know by now that in today's global marketplace, attention is money. Big tech and the entertainment giants — Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon — they're all competing for our eyeballs. And there are a lot of very sharp critics out there, people like Chris Hayes, Tim Wu, Jonathan Haidt, who've done a lot to point out the damage. So what's different about Graham Burnett's take on all this?

Anne Strainchamps: A couple of things. One is the emphasis on the need for collective resistance to what he calls human fracking. That's a term I love, and we'll talk about it in a minute. That group that I mentioned, the Friends of Attention, just published a book-length manifesto called Attensity, which he co-authored. They also have a nonprofit called the Strother School of Radical Attention.

Steve Paulsons: Radical attention. What is that?

Anne Strainchamps: The kind of attention that doesn't involve looking at a screen.

Steve Paulson: Really? So if I go out weeding the garden, playing tennis, cooking, riding my bike?

Anne Strainchamps: Yeah, any of those, depending on the kind of intention you bring to it, sure. So the other thing about Graham is that he's a historian of science at Princeton. He's working on a book about how researchers in early psychology labs developed a somewhat warped idea of attention. And he wants us to recapture older, deeper forms. So we wound up talking about the German Romantic movement and Saint Augustine, the radical French mystic Simone Weil, even Henry James.

Steve Paulson: Okay, let's listen.

Anne Strainchamps: Graham, I have a friend, a philosopher and critical theorist who was very active in SDS in the 60s and 70s. One of my favorite stories that she has told me is about being at one of the big anti-war rallies and hearing a speech where one of the recurrent refrains was, “Name the system.” Because once it's been named, you can't unsee it. So you have a name for the system that fuels the attention economy — fracking. Will you tell me about attention fracking?

1. Graham Burnett: Yeah, yeah, human fracking, attention fracking. That's, in a sense, the enemy. The hyper-intensive, technologically sophisticated, deep-pocketed project to commodify our attention. To turn our ability to be with the stuff we care about, with each other and with the world — to turn all that into cash money for a small number of large corporations. And we call that human fracking.
2. Graham Burnett: And we use that language of fracking. I mean, you can see it immediately, that's why the language hits with people. Petroleum fracking isn't just drilling a hole and waiting for some oil to spurt up. There's no more of that kind of oil out there. Petroleum fracking is about pumping down into the earth high pressure, high volume solvents, detergents, to break up the deep tectonic architecture of the planet and force to the surface a kind of monetizable spume of natural gas and crude.

Anne Strainchamps: I confess, I did not know that that's how fracking works. But it works so beautifully as a metaphor for this attention world, where anytime you're in front of a screen, you information just coming at you in a way that’s too much to take in, as though it is going to kind of pulverize or chop your attention up into little tiny shards.

1. Graham Burnett: Yeah, and the harms are parallel too. We know that hydrocarbon fracking leads to tectonic instability, mini earthquakes, groundwater pollution. Human fracking destabilizes us as individuals. It harms our kids. And I think a lot of us feel that the effects of these hyper-intensified extractive attention economies is also the destabilization of our civic life.
2. Graham Burnett: It turns out that deliberative democracy demands certain kinds of attentional habits and practices. And if you successfully mash that stuff up, crunch it and crack it and destabilize it, you can actually undermine people's ability to function together in community.

Anne Strainchamps: It's so ironic because from the beginning, digital technology was marketed to us as an attentional good. It promised more efficiency and efficacy at work. We'd have richer lives with scalable communities, all the people you've ever known and loved in one place. And then it did exactly the opposite. Instead of efficiency, we got distraction at work. We got impoverished personal relationships. We got an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. How is it that the thing that promised one thing gave us exactly the opposite?

1. Graham Burnett: I would put it this way. At no time in human history has every human being been more directly and intimately connected to every single other human on the planet. And at no time in human history have people so roundly and universally expressed mounting anxiety around loneliness, isolation, and despair.

Anne Strainchamps: That's the paradox!

1. Graham Burnett: It sure is. Now, how did this happen? Human fracking. The business model is the problem. Though these look like connectivity technologies, the underlying business model is maximizing time on device in order to aggregate and auction eyeballs. The AI systems that drive the algorithmic feeds, they optimize simply for what holds you on the device.
2. Graham Burnett: And a long conversation with a friend does not do that as well as a rapid-fire sequence of rage bait, or something a little louche, and then something that you were kind of curious about, and something that you're worried your friends will have seen but that you're going to miss. It turns out that you can maximize time on device better by deploying targeted strategies that climb down the brainstem in a human and play to our baser reflexive urgencies.

Anne Strainchamps: Is there a moment where it all went wrong? Because I'm old enough to remember when people were talking about the information superhighway and how exciting and wonderful it was going to be. The people who founded the digital infrastructure we live with had great dreams and visions. They thought it was going to bring the world together. We were going to spread love everywhere. We'd all be connected. They didn't mean it to turn out this way.

1. Graham Burnett: Yeah. I think different people would answer that question different ways, but there are a couple of moments you can point to. The commitment to an advertising revenue model for much of the largely free internet. The invention of the pop-up ad. The beginning of the internet architecture that permitted consumer profile data to be aggregated such that consumers could be sold as marketing packages to prospective advertisers. Each of those represents a deepening of a certain sort of extractive commercial model.
2. Graham Burnett: But I would just want everybody to remember, all of history amounts to these complex stories of wins and losses. Like the example of the 19th century, which has shaped so much of our thinking about technological change. In the 19th century, what was commodified and brutalized was the labor of the body. And what's being brutalized now is nothing more or less than our minds. What's being commodified is literally the core indices of personhood — our ability to care, to desire, to be in contact with the people we love. All those things are being squeezed for cash value and compromised at the same time. And it's no wonder that we feel unwell in new ways as individuals and as communities.

Anne Strainchamps: This was only possible thanks to an awful lot of scientific research that was done on attention, like the ability to track where our eyeballs go on a screen and to figure out how to put a price on that. That didn't just happen, and it wasn't just a bunch of guys at Microsoft who figured it out. So tell me how this happened, because I know that's a subject you're spending a lot of time on.

1. Graham Burnett: I have been working for maybe six or seven years now on a book that looks at how laboratory scientists studied human attention over the last century or so. And one of the really amazing things to come out of that archival investigation is the revelation that a huge amount of the money that was supporting the scientific study of attention came through the military-industrial complex.

Anne Strainchamps: Surprise, surprise.

1. Graham Burnett: The attention that was of interest in those settings turns out to be a pretty specific kind of attention — the kind you need if you're going to successfully shoot down a MiG, or if you're going to successfully monitor a radar screen for multiple hours.

Anne Strainchamps: I mean, these are all studies where you put somebody in front of a screen — a kid or an adult — you put them in front of a screen and you say, count the number of times you see, I don't know, a raccoon jump across the screen. And meanwhile, we're going to pump loud noise into your head or distract you in some way or another. And let's see how long you can hold on to the picture of the raccoon.

1. Graham Burnett: That's basically exactly it. We want the best radar screen monitors in our Navy that you can get. How do we test for optimal capacity, and what kinds of things can we do with these young men that will make them better at staring at screens for longer and longer periods of time? Oh, it turns out that amphetamines help. Great, let's use a little bit of amphetamine now and again. These were the kinds of experiments that were being done.
2. Graham Burnett: And big picture, what one sees in that research is that a thing that gets called human attention — track and trigger, screen vigilance — is sliced and diced in ways that set up the pricing of attention in the emerging attention economy of our times. Now, what's really important is that people remember that that attention-span, instrumental, operational kind of attention is not the sum total of human attentional abilities.

Anne Strainchamps: It's one kind of attention.

1. Graham Burnett: Exactly. But it is not obviously the kind of attention that permits us to live rich, flourishing, meaningful lives. The solution lies in our actually remembering that our real attention is so much more and so different, in our ability to rewild this monoculture of our attentional lives. And we give some very specific practical ways that people can do a kind of an inventory of when in their lives they feel good and close to the world and other people and the things they care about. Because it turns out, wherever you feel good like that, that was something you were doing with your attention. But you're going to need to protect that, because the frackers are coming for it.

Anne Strainchamps: So I wake up in the morning and I know that I will feel better if I reach for a book or I sit with my thoughts or do anything other than reach for my phone. Nine mornings out of 10, I lose that battle. It is exactly like trying to resist alcohol or any other substance. And the sense of shame and personal guilt is the same too. Like, I cannot believe I have so little willpower, so little self-discipline. Help me think about that, because I am not unique in this. This is a message we all get all the time — that there is something wrong with us individually, that we are so attached to our phones.

1. Graham Burnett: So let's do some work to convert that sense of private shame into political angst. Because what's going on here is nothing more or less than an unprecedented biohack at the scale of society. It's a civilizational biohack by six or seven large corporations. The most powerful AI, the deepest pocketed private equity, and the largest and most sophisticated military-grade technologies ever aggregated. You're going to lose that battle. So it's going to take us coming together in a version of the movement that changed our relationship to the environment. I mean, in 1920, the environment wasn't even a thing. By 1960, you could start to hear people being like, no, no, the environment is a shared good. We need to remember that our attention is a shared good, that there are bad actors who are willing to despoil that shared good for bottom-line profits. And we have to be able to say together, no to that.

Anne Strainchamps: So what does liberated attention look and feel like? We'll be right back.

Steve Paulson: Hey, it's Steve. I am so glad you're with us. And I have a favor to ask. This is a new podcast and we're really hoping to reach more listeners. So we'd love for you to tell your friends about Wonder Cabinet, and it will really help when you give us a good rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. And if you're not already subscribed to our newsletter, you can sign up at wondercabinetproductions.com.

Anne Strainchamps: I'm Anne Strainchamps. I'm talking with D. Graham Burnett about what's wrong with the way we've been thinking about attention.

Anne Strainchamps: Graham, the way we think about attention has often been through a religious or a spiritual frame. Mindfulness meditation made it our individual responsibility to get to the mat or the meditation cushion. And before that, there were centuries of religious instruction in multiple religions that taught people that we are responsible for the state of our souls – and I can hear echoes of Puritan ministers in colonial New England here. So with that kind of historical and cultural background, do you think we're kind of primed to think of this as a personal interior problem?

1. Graham Burnett: So the individual struggle for attention is a long story that has been prepped across a suite of different cultural practices, including religion, which has moralized our attention. This starts to get in the weeds a little bit, like in intellectual history, but it's very juicy. I'll do a second on it if you want to groove on it. Should we do some of this?

Anne Strainchamps: Yeah, go for it.

1. Graham Burnett: So, indeed, intellectual historians have written some super interesting stuff historicizing selfhood and arguing that there are actually quite different understandings of the self in the 5th century and the 14th century and the 18th century. And some of the most interesting moments in which apparently new ideas of selfhood emerge can be correlated with shifts in the understanding and practice of attention.

Anne Strainchamps: That's interesting. So what if you go back to the German Romantics, when the concept of an individual self and the longing for the freedom of that individual self — that's really when that idea first gets developed. What are the attentional practices that happened at that moment?

1. Graham Burnett: It's a great question. And indeed, some of the most powerful moments that those Romantics had — that shivering sense of interiority — was when they were placed in front of works of art, looking at them.

Anne Strainchamps: Or landscapes, right? This is the experience of the sublime. You get all these German Romantic painters and writers who are hiking up the Alps or standing in front of the Alps or looking at oceans or whatever. They're all in love with the sublime.

1. Graham Burnett: Yeah, and in my class at Princeton, I do a whole section on the sublime as an attentional habit or mode.

Anne Strainchamps: Wait, wait, what do you mean? Like, if I want to have an experience of the sublime, is that something I can cultivate?

1. Graham Burnett: Yeah, I mean, for Kant, who's certainly one of the most important theorists of the sublime, it's a very specific reaction to a sensory experience. And its shape is like this: You are standing in front of a gigantic wave breaking on a rocky coast. You have a powerful feeling as you look at that gigantic wave. That feeling is a sort of a two-step feeling.
2. Graham Burnett: First, you're like, wow, that wave is so huge. It would crush me like a tiny little grape.

Anne Strainchamps: So there you get the fear.

1. Graham Burnett: And then the second movement of the sublime is, “But wait — gigantic and powerful as that thing is, I am still greater. Because I have an infinite soul and the capacity to be self-conscious, and that makes my world infinite in a way that transcends even the gigantic tsunami wave that's about to mash me.”
2. Graham Burnett: So those double moves — of, “Wow, I'm so tiny and insignificant before the enormous grandeur of that mountain or wave.” And then that second move, “Wait, I'm still more ginormous than that ginormous thing.”

Anne Strainchamps: I would have said that in that moment, standing in front of this giant wave — it is your mind that encompasses the wave. You are thinking about it. The wave exists as a material object, but it also exists inside your own mind. Therefore, your mind is bigger.

1. Graham Burnett: Yes. I mean, attention as a language in which we can articulate something transcendent about our natures and our being — that speaks to the richness of attention in our tradition. And the anguish of our moment is the rising to predominance of this much thinner, track-and-trigger, quantifiable, metrical, instrumental concept of attention has, in my view, more and more cut us off from the existential richness of our inheritance, and that's part of why we feel unwell. I don't want this to sound too abstract, but I mean, even take someone paradigmatically beautiful on attention, like St. Augustine, to move into a spiritual language.

Anne Strainchamps: What did St. Augustine say about attention?

1. Graham Burnett: So, for Augustine in Book 11 of the Confessions, which is a meditation on time and addressed to God, the young Augustine — he's not that young, but Augustine writes, “You know, God, You understand this thing about what it's like to be a human person like me. You understand that all of us humans, we live sort of smeared across time. We're in the present, but we are often thinking about the future, but we're haunted by the past. And You, God, who art infinite and eternal — You're not in time this way like we are. That's a mark of our fallenness. And God, what I want to do when I pray is gather myself up into a kind of focus that would permit me to escape from my smearedness in time.”
2. Graham Burnett: So for Augustine, true contemplative attention unites us with God and is the way we catch a glimpse of our own participation in eternity. Magnificent and strange and rich idea. And I don't mean to say, we should all be doing this, but it is a shocking reminder of, in a sense, how thin our current worry about attention spans are.

Anne Strainchamps: You're making me think about Simone Weil, the French mystic, who talked about attention as the rarest and purest form of generosity. Attention as a gateway to the divine. For Simone Weil, attention is a form of love. I'm also thinking about Mary Oliver, the poet, and her much quoted, beautiful Instructions for Living a Life: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” You know, we know this!

1. Graham Burnett: We do. And 21st century capitalism has figured out how to jam its bloody siphons directly into those pressures inside us in order to monetize it. But Simone Weil is one of the true fore-fighters in the attention liberation movement. She's the spirit that presides over the text that the Friends drafted called the “12 Theses on Attention,”, which is out there in the interwebs. Everybody can find it. It's been translated into like a dozen languages at this point.
2. Graham Burnett: And you give that beautiful proposition of hers that pure attention is the rarest form of generosity. Attention to a person who's afflicted, attention to the suffering of others, is for her the deepest and highest act of morality. Ethics consists basically, for her, in our ability to give our attention to those who are afflicted. And she lived her own life in a really extraordinary and ultimately kind of maddening commitment to that impossible vision. Her work was theorized a little more soberly by the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, who's another person who's really worth thinkingnabout. And I don't think it's exactly an accident either that you have a striking line of powerful female thinkers who have spoken richly to attention. A little less interested in sort of stabbing things and carrying things off, and a little more interested in staying with the world.
3. Graham Burnett: And we at the Friends of Attention – a couple of years ago we created a whole kind of radical school in Brooklyn called the Strother School of Radical Attention, doing courses and workshops.

Anne Strainchamps: What do you do? What does it mean to teach or to study radical attention?

1. Graham Burnett: Well let me just say that when we run these workshops and people ask, “What is attention?”, one of the things that the facilitators will often point to is this beautiful section in a Henry James novel called “Wings of the Dove,” in which James depicts a very busy, prominent medical doctor meeting with a terminally ill woman who's very anxious. And James describes the doctor placing on the table between them, crystal clean, the empty cup of attention. He figures attention as an empty crystal goblet that is placed between us.

Anne Strainchamps: That is such a beautiful image,

1. Graham Burnett: It's all imminence. It's all what's about to happen.

Anne Strainchamps: It's the negative space. Like Keats' negative capability, where everything is potent and present precisely by not being there.

1. Graham Burnett: Human attention includes just staring out the window when you wake up in the morning and daydreaming.I'm thinking about a beautiful book by Paul North, a book called “The Problem of Distraction,” in which he argues that real attention is found in the interstices, in the gaps. Meaning: if I'm the teacher and I'm looking out there and there's that boy in the back of the classroom who's staring out the window and I say, “Hey, you're not paying attention!” Meaning you're not up here memorizing SOHKAHTOA in trigonometry – well, I’m the fool at the front of the room, because that boy staring out the window is deeply ensconced in some reverie.

He's pure attention in the sense that he's become absent to himself. And so you asked earlier, what do we do at the school? That’s at the heart of the work of the Friends of Attention. We define ourselves as a community that is interested in forms of attention that are resistant to commodification.

1. Graham Burnett: We're building a national coalition of folks who think in these terms. If you go to the website of the School of Radical Attention, there's a section under “Get Involved” that’s an atlas. We just launched it a few weeks ago, and already, there's hundreds of folks all over the country and the world who say, “Yes, we are a bunch of philosophers who meet in a bar in Joshua Tree, and we are attention activists.”
2. Graham Burnett: Or, “We're a set of textile artists who like to knit and crochet, and we're in the Pacific Northwest. We're attention activists.” And “ We play board games down here in Texas. We do it on Wednesday nights. It's like a no-devices board game evening.” And they're all identifying whatever it is they're doing, from rock climbing to surfing to reading Plato, as under the banner of attention activism. And that's the kind of movement energy we need to fight the frackers right now.

Anne Strainchamps: So I wanted to talk with you for this podcast because I'm interested in how and why the world has come to feel less wonder-filled. The German sociologist Max Weber's notion of the disenchantment of the world has always really rung true for me. But my own view is that the world itself didn't change. The world didn't somehow lose its capacity to enchant. We changed. People did. How do attention and wonder connect?

1. Graham Burnett: What an amazing, rich, and important question. The first thing I would say is, I believe deeply that wonder is a form of resistance to the pernicious dimensions of what Weber identifies as disenchantment. The second thing I would say is that your show is about wonder in beautiful ways. And as you know, I've been an editor for practically 20 years at a magazine called Cabinet that derives its name from the tradition of the wonder cabinet.

Anne Strainchamps: Wonder cabinets!

1. Graham Burnett: And so wonder cabinets are a distinctive kind of space for the cultivation of wonder — cathedral-like spaces for attention as enchantment. So I do think that cultivation of the right forms of attention has a relationship to enchantment.
2. Graham Burnett: Now, I'm going to say something else that makes the story a little bit more complicated. Like, I could leave this out if I wanted the story to be simple, but hey, let's see what your listeners think. One of the very interesting facts about the history of advertising is that the history of advertising is very much a history of different kinds of enchantment. Across the 19th into the 20th century, and well into the 21th century, who was really selling enchantment? It was Disney. And for that matter, it was Pears Soap.

Anne Strainchamps: Coca-Cola and Henry Ford.

1. Graham Burnett: So one of the primary discourses of enchantment in modernity has been the consumer discourse of selling dream lives as a component of consumer product.

Anne Strainchamps: In some ways, there's something beautiful about that. It's kind of like the democratization of wonder and the marvelous. It's no longer just the purview of aristocrats or incredibly wealthy people. You too can have a beautiful bar of Pears soap in your bathroom, or a car that will take you anywhere!

1. Graham Burnett: And so what happened to the enchantment function of the world of advertising? And was it ever really a good thing? Maybe it was a form of enchantment of which we should always have been quite skeptical? This is a live topic among folks who do cultural studies. There are those who are on the side of Just Say No to these ersatz, fake forms of enchantment that are purveying illusion. And there are those who are more sympathetic to the lived lives of fantasy that capitalism has always spangled as it faced its mass populations. I have my own views on this question, but I'm not going to sort of crank out, here's the D. Graham Burnett position on this.

Anne Strainchamps: Well, maybe a good analogy is the difference between food that’s nourishing and ultra-processed foods – which are unbelievably hard to resist. They're engineered to take advantage of our hardwired taste for fat and sugar and salt.

1. Graham Burnett: It's such a powerful analogy, and I want to thank you for bringing it up. I'm going to offer a slightly different idea: neither disenchantment nor enchantment can save us. Which is to say, neither facts nor stories is enough. The scientists who are like, “just the facts here, baby” — thank you, but that's not enough. And the fantasists who are like, “sit down, let me tell you a story” — not clear that they're always on our side.

Anne Strainchamps: So what is?

1. Graham Burnett: I mean, this is the hardest question of all! And if I had an answer for what that meant in terms of “do this at 10 o'clock on Tuesday morning,” you should be terrified and back away. So I don't have that kind of answer. But I do not want those answers being fed to us by five tech bros running $17 billion worth of assets out in Silicon Valley.

** **Anne Strainchamps : D. Graham Burnett co-founded the Friends of Attention, co-authored Attensity, the manifesto of the attention liberation movement, and directs the Strother School of Radical Attention. In his other life, he is a historian of science at Princeton.

Steve Paulson: So I find this history fascinating. I mean, lots of people are talking about the attention economy, but I've never heard anyone connect it to the German Romantics or St. Augustine. But I do wonder where that leaves us today. What was your takeaway from talking with him?

Anne Strainchamps: I took it as an invitation to think about some of my daily and weekly activities as different forms of attention. For example, the Pilates class I take three times a week — it's all about paying attention to subtle movements in my spine and my hips and my shoulders and the muscles that otherwise I don't even think about. And the quality of that attention, what it feels like to pay that kind of attention, that's probably the real reason I keep going back.

And then if I think about the needlework that I do at night to unwind, that's another kind of attention. It's located in my hands. It's very sensory and tactile. It's all about paying attention to the details of color and texture. I suspect that most of us have more experiences of what Graham would call radical attention than we might think. I mean, you take the dog for a walk every day. You ride your bike. You cook dinner. Maybe it would be an interesting exercise to try to describe the quality of your attention during some of those everyday activities.

Steve Paulson: You know, those sound like wonder practices!

Anne Strainchamps: I found that it made my mundane daily life seem richer and in some ways almost mysterious.

Steve Paulson: One thing I really like about this is you're saying you don't need a meditation practice to enhance this sense of attention. These things we do every day can really add wonder to our lives.

Anne Strainchamps: If you shift how you think about them, yeah. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Wonder Cabinet, brought to you from two places we love — Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershire, Vermont. I'm Anne Strainchamps.

Steve Paulson: I'm Steve Paulson. Our audio engineer is Steve Gotcher, and our digital producer is Mark Riechers. We'll be on vacation for the next couple of weeks, but we'll be back with a new episode on June 13th.

Anne Stainchamps: Until then, be well.