This one is for the Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman fans: “The medium is the metaphor” > “The medium is the message”

As a thought experiment, I’ve been updating the references in a few passages from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). What do you think?

Most writing about the Attention Crisis is gloomy, for good reason. But I appreciate this little book by Prof. Alan Jacobs because he highlights the rewards that come from the struggle of deep reading, as in this passage:

the Onion needs to update this for 2026 to mention AI summaries & give us one cause it’s too long

I love this new term “critical ignoring” because it points to yet another benefit of print. Our phones flood us with an endless amount of low-quality info that’s incredibly hard to ignore. By contrast, a physical book is a single-purpose device that excludes the background noise and lets you focus.

Eighty-four percent of Americans say they’ve adopted analogue habits to create boundaries with screens. Writing in notebooks leads the list at 32%, followed by reading printed books at 31% and using paper calendars at 28%.

While a lot of folks are understandably concerned about the loss of mass market paperbacks, there’s perhaps a more positive interpretation of this story. 🧵 1/5

Oh man, extremely interested in this one 👀

Among the many topics missing from this piece is any discussion of the medium. Harry Potter was a print phenomenon, with most readers encountering the books in physical form, and huge in-person launch events. It’s not only that politics have changed. It’s that we’ve become increasingly disembodied.

This news means a lot to me. I'm writing my first nonfiction book, THE POWER OF PRINT, about why we think differently with paper versus screens, and why we should all aspire to reclaim our print brains. Coming 2027 from St. Martin's Press. @stmartinspress.bsky.social

How can we expect 13-year-olds to focus on their assignments when a glut of entertaining video content is just a tab away? Digital tools have their place, particularly for student research, but sometimes a paper worksheet or handwritten response are simply better tools for deep learning.

Anyone marking Wikipedia's 25th anniversary today can believe it’s an incredible success story for commons-based peer production and that there're aspects of the site that sometimes piss them off. Let's hope it lasts a while longer. My latest for WIRED:

Microblogging is just a catastrophically bad form of human interaction. If you sat down to design a system specifically meant to make people act out and create harassment mobs, you'd be hard pressed to build something more effectively toxic.

Anyone else conflicted by this Atlantic essay? I agree with the author that the “democracy depends on reading” line won’t be effective. Then again, promoting reading as a “vice” seems like a mistake, especially now as so many folks are starved for wisdom/virtue/healthy pleasures.

As we start 2026, I’m grateful for the sharp, thoughtful people I’ve met on Bluesky, but I also want to keep in mind what my favorite contemporary philosopher says about posting:

Gotta love the do-it-yourself gumption in Adler’s 1940 guide How to Read a Book. “With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more.”

One of the underrated benefits of print is the variety of forms. Heavy textbooks, faintly musky paperbacks, pocket-sized primers… Whereas digital tools tie the experience to a single, uniform environment. The knowledge sticks less, and we struggle to transfer what we’ve learned to other contexts.

We all know McLuhan’s, “The medium is the message.” He also said, “As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation.” By his logic, AI was always going to flip the framework, producing new appreciation for analogue forms. Let’s hope we make the most of the reversal.

Does anyone else bristle at this framing? WSJ says blue books are “torturing” students with hand cramps, and “nobody likes them.” Listen, students have been outsourcing everything to AI and cheating their way through college. Blue books should be celebrated as a return to authentic human learning.

We can form intense ties with analog objects over years of use. That’s why Flaubert asked to be buried with his inkwell. But digital tech is mostly disposable. We value its connection to the infosphere, not the thing itself. No one’s dying wish is to be buried with AI glasses.

Looking to talk to people who bought a reMarkable tablet, or similar digital notebook with e-ink, and stopped using it after a few weeks or months.

Víctor Hugo, born 1802 in Eastern France, spent his teenage years filling notebooks with poetry and sketches. Eruptions from his restless mind. He developed a two-handed approach—one hand writing, the other drawing—that he’d later use while writing classics like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (cont.)

Engagement is not the same as learning. As a former DuoLingo user, I can attest that it’s a fun addictive game, but you don’t learn much. One independent study found DuoLingo users scored lower on a standardized language test than Babbel users, despite spending significantly more time on the app.

Intellectualism is the new counterculture.

Today I learned that Albert Wenger, head of the VC firm that originally backed Twitter, has this sticker on the back of his phone

Case study in the enduring power of print: BookTok creator Jack Edwards reaches millions of readers with his online videos, but always dreamed of seeing his work in physical form. He's now a books columnist for British Esquire and made a video about the thrill of tracking down a copy of the magazine

@404media.co is making a zine. “Print can totally sidestep Big Tech’s distribution mechanisms... It is a piece of physical media that can be organically discovered in the real world... we are hopeful that people like it and that we can figure out how to do more print products."

“The medium is the message.” Johann Hari on the message of printed books:

If you ask AI to describe its own writing style, it’ll say it’s too smooth, too neutral. “In fact, this is not even remotely true. A.I. writing is marked by a whole complex of frankly bizarre rhetorical features that make it immediately distinctive… It’s not smooth or neutral at all—it’s weird.”

When I argue for the benefits of physical books, people tell me that every generation misses the old ways. But no, this isn’t pure nostalgia. Yes, my dad used to complain about decline back in the 90s, but the scores weren't plummeting then. Today they're in a free fall.

-How to avoid the Redditization of Wikipedia -Jimmy Wales wrote a pretty good book about bipartisanship & Wikipedia -56% of Grokipedia entries carry the Wikipedia CC license, suggesting wholesale ingestion -GASP Talked about these topics and more for the latest "Between the Brackets" pod

1. Grokipedia borrows extensively from Wikipedia (more than half the time). 2. When Grokipedia doesn't copy Wikipedia, things get weird fast (hallucinations, citing Infowars). 3. Grokipedia seems to prefer first-person sources like LinkedIn to traditional, independent news organizations. (cont.)

At first I avoided O’Dell’s book, assuming it was mostly about chilling out. It covers that, yes, but it’s really a defense of *all* activities that aren’t commercially productive but “produce” value which can’t be measured or exploited. Bird-watching, contemplation, wandering through a labyrinth…

It’s no coincidence that people are turning to handwriting on paper more and more. A.I. models regularly steal writers’ work. Anything posted online can be ingested without consent by the machines. The physicality of handwriting is a defensive maneuver, a strategy to protect the human voice.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han has been helping me think through why we identify with certain types of things (in my case, physical books) more than others. For Han, we are living in “the age of non-things,” in which “there is something almost utopian about the notion of possession.” 1/5

At the local coffee shop this morning, reading “Non-things” and thinking about why sitting with a physical book feels so different from scrolling. There’s a calmness to print that the feed can never give you.

Needed a break from thinking about Wikipedia so I’m reading this. The author is a rare books librarian at Oxford’s Bodleian and her little guidebook is delightful.

Why do some parts of the internet seem more robustly democratic than others? "A big piece of it is that they have a higher purpose. Wikipedia editors, at their best, they really do believe that there’s something more than partisan politics—and that’s the accurate reflection of reliable sources."

Big law firms were still doing this for interviews in 2013

Key points in new Cornell Tech research: 56% of Grokipedia entries carry the Wikipedia CC license, suggesting wholesale ingestion Grokipedia’s top 100 sources include fewer news outlets and more UGC (e.g. LinkedIn scraping) Grokipedia has fewer citations overall, making it harder to check sources

If you want to chuckle about odd/delightful corners of wikipedia and hear a bunch of very funny lore behind the scenes, you should come to my show Monday in NYC! Hasn't sold out yet and anything could happen—maybe years of practicing the worm will pay off, truly who knows!!!

Social relationships: reciprocal, mutual interaction & knowledge. Parasocial relationships: one-sided emotional connection with someone who doesn't know you exist. The internet trends parasocial but it doesn’t have to. Wikipedia editors (even anonymous ones) are weirdly social by this definition.

In 2008, Google created an ad-powered wiki encyclopedia called Knol, seen as a "Wikipedia killer" amid its highly-publicized launch. And the Wikimedia Foundation gave an unbothered response that I quite like: "the more good free content, the better for the world." Anyway Knol instantly flopped

called it again

The practice of building a new encyclopedia by directly pulling entire articles from extant competitors is by no means novel (Wikipedia originally did the same with the 11th edition of Britannica). #Grokipedia may, however, be the first encyclopedia in centuries to include zero cross-referencing.

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia contains copied Wikipedia pages

wasn’t my most out-there take, but still… called it

Excellent @willoremus.com piece about the launch of Grokipedia, Elon’s historical relationship with Wikipedia, and whether AI language models (as opposed to humans) are good enough to write a trustworthy encyclopedia. On that point, I agree with @jimmywales.bsky.social Gift link: wapo.st/47PKzTd

Felt this was important to write for @slate.com to capture the experience of Wikipedia editors who were there in the room as the armed man took the stage at last weekend's Wikipedia conference. Pharos and Fuzheado showed courage & quick thinking by taking down the gunman and averting tragedy.

“We’ll be here in 100 years and he won’t.” Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, recently discussed Elon Musk’s attacks on the platform, building trust online and more. Watch, read or listen to “The Interview.” nyti.ms/48ybyEJ