““Everything That Can Happen In a Day” is based on the author's email list/tumblr blog, where he “gave away” ideas to inspire his readers to act. Some of the readers sent in photographic evidence of their actions.
This sounded intriguing, until I started reading, and quickly discovered the bulk of these “open source” ideas amounted to a collection of hackneyed teenage pranks, e.g.: Put an "Out of Order" sign on an ATM... Cut a dollar bill in half... Write a message on a dollar bill... Fax a note to a random business... Pick wildflowers from private property... Mail envelopes to fake address in different countries in order to have it returned to you... Send a package to a fake address … Send an art package to the White House... (At this point the reader begins to wonder if the author was beaten up by a postal worker as a child, as he really seems to particularly enjoy inconveniencing mail carriers.)
Mixed in among the list of stunts were challenges to set up odd situations for the express purpose of photographing them; the predictable responses come across as a high-concept version of 'planking' e.g. Take a self-portrait of your head in a tree... Take a photo of a friend jay-walking... Take a photo of a friend climbing a fence... and so forth, ad nauseam.
The seventy-seven ideas are printed one to a page in large print, and adding the full-page photo responses fleshes this out to just one hundred and forty-five pages; and yet somehow the book still seems much longer than its shallow premise requires. ”
