Spending too much time online will have catastrophic effects on your mental & emotional health. You need to be taking walks and talking to other people. You need to feel grass under your feet and wind on your face. You were made to live an embodied life.

Spent the day wandering through rain-soaked Seattle, and in a used bookstore found several volumes of medieval art.

I think we under-estimate how many people are miserable because they have no enthusiasms, no hobbies, because they gave up reading and quit learning when school ended. It's shocking how much studying a beloved subject elevates your mood. It will transform your life.

Jane Austen's 250th birthday is coming up in December and I hope you'll celebrate by taking a turn about the room, acquiring a passion for dead leaves & closet shelves, and taking a fancy to the last person you could ever be prevailed upon to marry.

It sounds crazy but I promise you: if you just put your phone aside and read for half an hour each night before bed, it will change your life.

If you want to push back against tech's encroachment into every corner of our lives, you have to read books. They're eager to create a future in which most people are illiterate and hooked on slop, a world without imagination or knowledge. Reading is resistance.

If you want to push back against tech's encroachment into every corner of our lives, you have to read books. They're eager to create a future in which most people are illiterate and hooked on slop, a world without imagination or knowledge. Reading is resistance.

People love to criticize reading in public as performative but I can't stress enough how much it would improve our collective mental health if we all carried books wherever we went.

Men assume Pride & Prejudice is a Hallmark romance when the plot is driven by the Bennet sisters’ fear of starvation because they will be homeless when their father dies. It’s a book about money, about people, and those who dismiss it as saccharine fluff are cheating themselves.

In early modern England there was a tradition that witches sailed the sea in eggshells. Children were advised to smash holes in the shells so that they became useless for any witches hoping to cause storms at sea.

Reading for pleasure has fallen by 40 percent since 2000. This is not progress. You should read because it's good for your brain, your soul. You should read because our freedoms will not long endure in a post-literate world. Most of all, you should read because it's fun.

I find it bleak that ChatGPT now has more users than Wikipedia. Many people would rather be spoon-fed information by a machine than read and research for themselves. Tech isn't just making us dumber. Worse than that: it's killing curiosity itself and the desire to learn.

I find it bleak that ChatGPT now has more users than Wikipedia. Many people would rather be spoon-fed information by a machine than read and research for themselves. Tech isn't just making us dumber. Worse than that: it's killing curiosity itself and the desire to learn.

Chatbots and AI slop are going to ruin countless brains. Yours doesn't have to be one of them. Study history. Read poetry. Get acquainted with Bach, Shakespeare, George Eliot. In a time when people are rapidly getting dumber, we need communities devoted to the life of the mind.

Saw someone say, “Stop hoarding books, we don’t need paper books anyway” and I can’t express how misguided this is. Online libraries disappear, digital books can be altered, and with Big Tech seeking to destroy history and literacy, print media has never been more essential.

Saw someone say, “Stop hoarding books, we don’t need paper books anyway” and I can’t express how misguided this is. Online libraries disappear, digital books can be altered, and with Big Tech seeking to destroy history and literacy, print media has never been more essential.

The part of Orwell's 1984 that everyone forgets is how human music has been replaced by soulless, machine-generated pop songs. The AI attempt to take over the film and music industries is an attack on the human spirit. Boycott AI actors. Boycott AI bands. Support human artists.

Learning in school is not enough. You must continue to teach yourself throughout your life. Study history, read myths, memorize poems, get acquainted with the greatest philosophers & writers. In an age when tech is cooking many brains, we need an army of autodidacts.

Insane haul today at the library book sale - seven books for seven dollars ... the librarian told us they had been donated and the donor worried that the books were too niche to sell ... I've been searching for some of these for AGES 🤓

It’s adorable when guys dismiss Jane Austen as saccharine romantic fluff because I suspect none of her critics will write novels of such sharp comedy and keen understanding of human nature that they’re still being read by millions of people 250 years in the future.

If you’ve never read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, do yourself a favor and read it during the holidays. It’s one of the greatest books ever written, it takes less than two hours to read and once you finish, you can say you’ve read one book by Charles Dickens.

Social media amplifies our worst tendencies: bloodlust, baseless speculation, the hunger for vengeance. We were not made to see people repeatedly murdered on camera. We were not meant to read every person's unfiltered opinions. It is corrosive to the soul.

There’s a tradition in some European countries called “telling the bees,” in which bees are informed of notable events in the human world. In Oxford, when a hive’s owner dies, a member of the family will tap on the hive with a housekey and say, “Bees, bees, your master is dead.”

This is one of the best single-volume collections of weird folklore ever written, and awakened my love of bogies, feasts, festivals, drowned cities and haunted castles at a young age. An essential book for any lover of legends and old tales.

I know it sounds mad but if you had regular exposure to trees and sunlight and started reading again for pleasure, it would heal you.

The most alarming thing about the internet is how it kills our capacity for delight. People spend hours scrolling glass-eyed through content that brings only crumbs of amusement. Real joy is found in the real world: in reading, in starlight, in birdsong, in service to others.

If you’re someone who still reads for pleasure, you are a marvel. If you’re able to unplug from all the chaos of our entertainment culture and disappear into the warmth and solace of a book, that is a rare gift and I’m very glad to know you.

If you’re someone who still reads for pleasure, you are a marvel. If you’re able to unplug from all the chaos of our entertainment culture and disappear into the warmth and solace of a book, that is a rare gift and I’m very glad to know you.

Ray Bradbury; a world where no one reads books is no different from a world without books

Students don’t need chromebooks and AI tutors, they need Shakespeare and Jane Austen and the Greek myths, they need the Arthurian Legends and the Arabian Nights, they need constant exposure to nature, fairytales, folklore, poetry and beauty.

People are reading AI-generated synopses of books and then claiming they read 100 books in a week. This is how the abolition of books began in Fahrenheit 451: classics were condensed into five-minute summaries for those too busy to do the reading. Later came the burnings.

People are reading AI-generated synopses of books and then claiming they read 100 books in a week. This is how the abolition of books began in Fahrenheit 451: classics were condensed into five-minute summaries for those too busy to do the reading. Later came the burnings.

I read 186 books in the first six months of this year. In today's essay (link below) I explain how I did it, and how you can rekindle your love of reading and become a voracious reader in an age of distraction.

"Books are portals linking us with all that has come before and all that has ever been thought. To read a book at the drugstore is to transform the drugstore—and ourselves—into “something rich and strange.” Latest from Boze on Biblioll College: bibliollcollege.substack.com/p/how-to-rek...

I read 186 books in the first six months of this year. In today's essay (link below) I explain how I did it, and how you can rekindle your love of reading and become a voracious reader in an age of distraction.

People say, “if you’re not using AI to write, you’ll be left behind!” meanwhile study after study has shown severe and immediate cognitive decline in those who use it regularly. I’m still capable of reading and have a functioning brain, so who’s really being left behind here?

If you're using AI to write essays, eulogies, a text to your wife, I do think less of you as a person. Ceding your mental and creative abilities to a machine is an embarrassing thing and people should be ashamed to admit doing it in public.

If you're using AI to write essays, eulogies, a text to your wife, I do think less of you as a person. Ceding your mental and creative abilities to a machine is an embarrassing thing and people should be ashamed to admit doing it in public.

Frankly I don't like living in an era where no one can read, Big Tech is trying to abolish the educational system as we know it and PBS is gutted because those in power don't see the value in offering children educational programming to counter the ceaseless tide of slop.

A key point in Fahrenheit 451 is that books were banned because they made people depressed and uncomfortable. The novel's protagonist, Montag, is taken into custody after he reads a poem that makes a woman cry because she realizes the emptiness of her life.

A key point in Fahrenheit 451 is that books were banned because they made people depressed and uncomfortable. The novel's protagonist, Montag, is taken into custody after he reads a poem that makes a woman cry because she realizes the emptiness of her life.

Not enough people understand that a world where no one reads books is just as bad as a world without any books. Those who seek to make you illiterate don't need to burn books. They just need to take away any interest in reading them.

I've just spent three days on holiday at the sea-coast and I'm sorry to say I completely get why Victorian doctors prescribed trips to the sea for the nerves.

No. Ignore this. You are capable of reading books again. The brain is highly malleable and you only need a few screen-free weeks to recover your focus. You will be amazed how quickly the hunger for reading returns. You will be inhaling words

Feeling more and more thankful I grew up before the internet was omnipresent, when we spent most of our time watching old movies on cable or browsing encyclopedias and accidentally acquiring a level of literacy that will cause future generations to think us wizards.

I'm begging everyone who hasn't yet to read this book. The premise, about a man living in an infinite house, is terrifically inventive, and it goes in a direction you don't expect. No other living author writes with such a keen sense of horror & beauty. The book of the decade.

I wrote an essay reviewing and ranking my eighty-five FAVORITE books from thirty years of reading - the plays, poems, mysteries, fantasies, diaries that have shaped me. Please tell me in the comments which books I missed. (link below)

“I asked Grok.” “I asked Chat.” I didn’t ask anyone because I grew up without screens and reading encyclopedias was our sole source of entertainment. Now I’m a living compendium of useless knowledge and for the next twenty minutes we are going on an adventure of learning, Brian.

Very unpopular opinion but I think in a healthier world our schools would teach the so-called “useless things”: Latin, old poetry, classic cinema, how to read and enjoy challenging novels. Studying these things won’t make you a better person. But they will give you a better life.