Rachel Z. Arndt
Beyond Measure
Beyond Measure
Rachel Z. Arndt, author of Beyond Measure
With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Rachel Z. Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the standardized height of kitchen countertops; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute. “How much can data tell us?” Arndt asks, challenging us to consider the simultaneous comfort and absurdity of our exhaustively quantified—yet never entirely quantifiable—lives.
Beyond Measure has been called "a delight to read" (Publishers Weekly) and "beautiful in an intricate, knotty way" (The Collapsar). The book was included in Bookriot's "50 must-read contemporary essay collections" and The Chicago Review of Books' "The Best New Books of April 2018."
With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Rachel Z. Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the standardized height of kitchen countertops; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute. “How much can data tell us?” Arndt asks, challenging us to consider the simultaneous comfort and absurdity of our exhaustively quantified—yet never entirely quantifiable—lives.
Beyond Measure has been called "a delight to read" (Publishers Weekly) and "beautiful in an intricate, knotty way" (The Collapsar). The book was included in Bookriot's "50 must-read contemporary essay collections" and The Chicago Review of Books' "The Best New Books of April 2018."
Rachel Z. Arndt is the author of the essay collection Beyond Measure (Sarabande, 2018). She received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MFA in nonfiction from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and nonfiction editor of the Iowa Review. Her writing has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Quartz, The Believer, Fast Company, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.