In July of 2007, Bible translators from a dozen Nigerian languages came together in the rural town of Bayara, Nigeria, for a three-week workshop to begin translating the Gospel of Luke. They gathered in a steel-roofed school building with a number of outside consultants—some Nigerian, others American and British.

At the end of Friday, July 27, they had wrapped up their first week of work and made plans to unwind. Multilingual collaboration is taxing, and everyone was eager to eat dinner and ...

When Kevin Gary tells people he researches boredom in the classroom, they always respond the same way: “Man, that sounds really interesting.”

He gets the joke. Boredom sounds boring. But as he argues in his new book, Why Boredom Matters, that feeling of restlessness has bothered people for a long time. And how we respond to tedium says something essential about our ideas of what it means to be human and what it means to live a meaningful life.

He argues that if we want people to flourish ...