Lisa Mendelman

Bio

Lisa Mendelman is Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Menlo College. She works in the medical and digital humanities, with a particular focus on gender, race, and affect in twentieth-century America. She is the author of Modern Sentimentalism: Affect, Irony, and Female Authorship in Interwar America (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Contributions

The Quantified Self

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The information superhighway is paved with good intentions. This thought occurred to me earlier this summer, as I drove the Silicon Valley corridor of 101. “The first survivor of Alzheimer’s is out there,” one billboard declared. “Hello marijuana, goodbye anxiety,” announced a second (the company, Eaze, hand-delivers the substance, à la Instacart). “No data left behind,” avowed a third. Perhaps because I was headed to the ALA to deliver a paper on Edith Wharton’s satire of interwar scientific culture, Twilight Sleep, the third struck me as particularly ludicrous and problematic.