Podcast: The Hedgehog and the Fox
Episode: Jennifer Howard: Clutter: An Untidy History
Pub date: 2021-02-11

Notes from The Audio Browser:

Interview with the author of a history of clutter. She became interested in this topic after spending two years clearing out her mother's overflowing house after a health crisis, and ended up delving deeply into why wealthy nations struggle so much with stuff. When did having possessions go from being a pleasure to being a problem? It can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. There are environmental and psychological aspects to all of this accumulation, too, and by the end of the episode listeners will be itching to declutter

In this episode, we delve deep into clutter with Jennifer Howard, author of a recent book entitled Clutter: An Untidy History.

This book is for you if you have a closet that will no longer close because it is so crammed with clothes, or a garage piled with boxes you keep meaning to sort, or a storage unit that you pay for every month without having an exit strategy. Maybe it’s especially for you if you have an older relative with a house piled high with belongings that you know they will never get rid of and you have a growing sense of dread that one day you are going to have to roll your sleeves up and tackle it... Jennifer talks about her own experience of clearing her mother's house and, more broadly, why we seem to have an increasingly vexed relationship with our (many) possessions.

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