Stanford University

Site in California (Literary), United States.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
How to Do Nothing — Reader’s Companion	Jenny Odell	setting	The author teaches at Stanford and describes students’ overwork, the ‘duck syndrome’ and the ‘Stanford Memes for Edgy Trees’ page as signs of precarity and fear that erode capacity for refusal.

How to Do Nothing — Jenny Odell (2019)

Source: How to Do Nothing — Reader’s Companion · How to Do Nothing · Readwise highlight

Back in 2013, students in my first art classes at Stanford were surprised that I didn’t know about “Stanford duck syndrome.”

• Role: setting
• In the book: The author teaches at Stanford and describes students’ overwork, the ‘duck syndrome’ and the ‘Stanford Memes for Edgy Trees’ page as signs of precarity and fear that erode capacity for refusal.
• Why it matters: The campus supplies a present-day case of the shrinking ‘margin’ for refusal; it is her workplace, so partly incidental to a general argument.