Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up today
Gift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingPicnic Comma Lightning
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreA lively and accessible existentialism for our times.
What does it mean to be human in the twenty-first century? How do we be real people in a world of online personas and "authentic" simulated experiences? In this innovative examination of our present reality, award-winning writer Laurence Scott charts the ways our traditional mental models of the world have started to fray.
Effortlessly applying philosophy to the quotidian, Scott "makes banal things shimmer with meaning" (Guardian). He ponders how ubiquitous cameras reframe our private lives (an event only exists once someone posts the video), how mysterious algorithms undermine our attempts at self-definition through their own data-driven portraits, and what happens in those moments when our illusions of reality are ruptured by incontrovertible facts (like the death of a parent or a bolt of lightning).
Virtuosic and intellectually delightful, Picnic Comma Lightning is an astounding account of how we have started to make sense of our strange new world.
Laurence Scott's essays and criticism have appeared on NewYorker.com and in the Guardian, the Financial Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. He is a lecturer in writing at New York University in London, and lives in London.