The Cultured Girl

It’s becoming more and more acceptable—almost expected—for cultured girls to slack off a little between between college and “adulthood,” whether that means taking six months off to travel or bouncing around aimlessly between jobs. After all, don’t all successful, creative people have a little bit of slacker in them? That’s the premise behind Tom Lutz’s entertaining book, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America. The funny and fascinating chronicle traces the concept of laziness from Adam and Eve to the ancient Greeks to the Beatnik movement and Generation X. It’s full of fun tidbits, like the fact that Benjamin “Time is Money” Franklin took “air baths,” which involved lying nude on his bed for at least one hour a day. The book itself is a sort of lazy person’s education: In a mere 360 pages, you can brief yourself on such important historical subjects as the Calvinist movement and Marxism. Sure, we all have to work for a living, but if you believe Lutz, everyone needs some slacker time too.