How's Your Attention Span? - by Alessandra Codinha
Here We Go
SubscribeSign in
How's Your Attention Span?<br>Summer is the perfect time to reclaim it. And Jane Birkin's Birkin. And great sunglasses.
Alessandra Codinha<br>Jun 06, 2025
35
Share
I came across this Ray Bradbury quote somewhere about the increasingly pivotal skill of how to rebuild an attention span (I think he was actually talking about filling the deep well of references that a good writer needs, but it works either way):<br>I’ll give you a program to follow every night, a very simple program. For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed every night, read one short story. That’ll take you ten minutes, 15 minutes. Okay, then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry... Read the great poets, go back and read Shakespeare, read Alexander Pope, read Robert Frost. But one poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights. From various fields: archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them. I want you to read essays in every field. On politics, analyzing literature, pick your own. But that means that every night then, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay—at the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?
Honestly? Solid advice. Especially now, amidst the thrills of late spring, with summer just over the horizon and distractions aplenty. I’m having a baby in late September, I have nothing but distractions. (Like how to dress now that my torso is an entirely new shape, and how to entirely re-do my skincare routine, now that I have to take rather seriously the ingredients list. If that’s of interest, I am happy to detail further! Just let me know. Presently I spend a lot of time looking at low-rise pants, an activity I haven’t pursued since the early 2000s. And wearing these. For someone who usually lives in denim, the pant thing has been…challenging. I object to those over-the-bump jeans with the giant spandex panel on moral reasons.) But in the meantime, I’ll take any good reminder to freely read while I can.
Bumpin’ out in the Armstrong redwood grove up in Sonoma last weekend, a little Sonoma weekend guide to come! I am obsessed with it.<br>In other exciting news, I collaborated with my dear friend, the coolest woman in New York (/ really the world), Selima Salaun, on a pair of sunglass frames for her brand, Selima Optique. I first met Selima in my early days in New York when I would turn up at her exceptional Bond St store, which was around the corner from my apartment, and spend whole afternoons trying her insane vintage collection on (she has the best taste) and dreaming about the archival Hermès bags in the cases behind the counter and the endless amounts of fabulous eyewear, all of which my contributing reporter salary definitely couldn’t afford. But now we have made an addition to those cases! It’s called The Sasha. It’s a statement sunglass—the kind of thing you wear when you love your outfit and you want to be noticed. Or you hate your outfit and you want to turn it around. It’s a little vintage, a little modern, a lot classic—not for blending in. It’s a direct optimistic retort to the tiny nineties terminator frames we’re all so bored by now.1 More succinctly, The Sasha is what happened in Selima’s beautiful genius brain when I said the ideal shape for me was somewhere between the frames of JFK and Grace Kelly. (To be honest I said, “…like JFK and Grace Kelly had a baby?” You get it, right? She got it. Icons only.)<br>They come in black, white, red, and tortoise, and because she’s the best optician in New York, the lenses are perfect. All made in Paris. Check them out!
The Sasha by Selima Optique. Photo by Liz Barclay.<br>Thanks for reading Here We Go! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Subscribe
WATCHING/ READING/ OTHERWISE CONSUMING:<br>I have talked here, and in general, about Fred Rogers a lot in recent years. There’s good reason for that: Mr. Rogers was a big part of my childhood (likely yours too); there have been plenty of occasions to follow his advice to “look to the helpers” lately; and the man is probably the closest thing we’ve had to an American saint in the last century, at least on television. But after watching the new PeeWee Herman documentary on HBO, PeeWee As Himself, I feel like I should have been talking about Paul Reubens, too.<br>The sticky part of his story, as in what I’d retained these decades later, was the weirdness of PeeWee as a project—maybe too weird, for me, or my parents, who were in charge of what we watched at that age—and the later scandals, the suggestion of pedophilia and perversion and dark intrinsic wrongness (after all, he was so weird, something must be up, right?). And then instead to have Paul Reubens be revealed as such an important, subversive, devoted creative force—one whose roots were in adult, underground...