The Case for Chilling

Sheila Liming, the author of “Hanging Out,” argues that unstructured time is essential to our cultural vitality. Down with calendar invites; long live the bocce league.

Hanging out: It’s a loose social dynamic in which people spend unstructured time together with no set agenda. (Did you need a reminder? Has it been a minute?)

The shortage of idle hangs in our culture is what inspired Sheila Liming, an Edith Wharton scholar, writing professor, professional bagpipe player and devoted socializer, to write “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time.” The book conceives of hanging out as a way to reclaim time as something other than a raw ingredient to be converted into productivity. Just as she does in her book, in a recent video interview from Vermont, Professor Liming made a philosophical argument for the chillest of human interactions.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

(read the rest at the link above)