Latest News: Posts Tagged ‘desperately’

DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT reviewed in Vice

Tuesday, October 30th, 2018

Read the full article here.

“Fight Club of the Soul” – CARL CEDERSTRÖM and ANDRÉ SPICER discuss DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT on BBC Radio 4

Thursday, July 19th, 2018

Are we pursuing happiness, or is the happiness industry pursuing us? And if our model of hedonism isn’t working, how do we hack our happiness back? Leo Johnson goes on a year-long journey to pick up life lessons of happiness from modern day practitioners of radically different philosophies.

Listen to the full interview here.

“Hilarious and sometimes frightening.” DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT reviewed in Tri-City News

Friday, June 15th, 2018

Desperately Seeking Self-improvement: A Year inside the Optimization Movement by Carl Cederström and André Spicer is a hilarious (and sometimes frightening) account of how they spent a full year dedicating each month to a different way of improving themselves.

Read the full article here.

“We’re living in a culture characterised by competition, where the idea is that we can manage through extra strong faith in ourselves.” CARL CEDERSTROM interviewed in Business Insider

Wednesday, June 13th, 2018

Ever since Dale Carnegie launched his ground-breaking book How to Win Friends and Influence People in the middle of the Great Depression, self-help books, methods, seminars, and recently apps and web sites have evolved into an industry earning billions each year.

Carl Cederström, Associate Professor of organization studies at the University of Stockholm, and professor André Spicer at the Cass Business School of London, decided to try them all.

Read the full article here.

“Whether we ask how or why we wish to optimize ourselves, Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement has plenty to say in response.” – DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement

Thursday, June 7th, 2018

Even for Carl Cederström and André Spicer, professors at leading business schools, their resolution for 2016 was remarkably ambitious. They set out “to understand why people would be spending their lives trying to become better, faster, stronger” – that is, to understand why people make resolutions at all. The resulting book’s twelve chapters correspond to twelve months of self-optimization testing. Each has a set theme: productivity, the body, the brain, relationships, spirituality, sex, pleasure, creativity, money, morality, attention and meaning.”

Read the full review here.

André Spicer in conversation about DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT with the Catskill Review of Books

Monday, March 26th, 2018

Listen to the full interview here.

“Cederström and Spicer’s book is nothing short of hilarious.”: DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books

Monday, March 19th, 2018

This contemporary tension — where most of us live between small-scale personal empowerment and large-scale social disempowerment — makes Carl Cederström and André Spicer’s new book Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement timely and enlightening. It captures the alluring and often insidious desire to be better, especially in an era where things couldn’t seem to be worse.

Read the full review here.

“Very funny—and also very painful and even a little disturbing”: Mindful magazine review DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT

Monday, March 12th, 2018

This book, which chronicles their improvement schemes in daily journals running in parallel, leads them to some very funny—and also very painful and even a little disturbing—places. Do not try this at home.

Read the full review in the latest print issue of Mindful magazine by subscribing here.

“I’m Very Good at Sex.” DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT in the Literary Review

Tuesday, February 6th, 2018

Read here.

The New Yorker calls DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT “a comically committed exploration of current life-hacking wisdom in areas ranging from athletic and intellectual prowess to spirituality, creativity, wealth, and pleasure.”

Tuesday, January 9th, 2018

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DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT is recommended at the Times Higher Education Supplement

Thursday, December 14th, 2017

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CARL CEDERSTROM and ANDRE SPICER appear on The Current, on CBC Radio

Wednesday, December 13th, 2017

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The Independent calls CARL CEDERSTROM and ANDRE SPICER “intrepid explorers of the outer limits of self-optimisation.”

Wednesday, December 13th, 2017

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An excerpt from DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT appears in The Idler, in which CARL CEDERSTROM “attempts to optimize his pleasure.”

Monday, December 11th, 2017

Read here.

“How Business Bullshit Works.” ANDRE SPICER in The Guardian

Monday, December 11th, 2017

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DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT is cited in the Financial Times

Wednesday, November 29th, 2017

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CARL CEDERSTROM is interviewed at The Pool

Wednesday, November 29th, 2017

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The Guardian calls DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT “an absurdist masterpiece.”

Tuesday, November 21st, 2017

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Kirkus calls DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT “a good-natured, thoughtful, and often comic joyride.”

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2017

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Publishers Weekly chooses DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT for its Big Indie Books of Fall 2017

Friday, August 25th, 2017

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