The Washington Post is getting rid of its Books section. We’re losing the institutions—journalism, middle-class artistic and intellectual culture—that once made life bearable. Those things were a threat to the super-rich who increasingly govern us. Democracy dies in illiteracy.

Rach and I walked over to the university library yesterday and spent a few hours writing this list of our thirty-five most beloved characters in Dickens. Tremendous fun, and one of my favorite things we've written together. bibliollcollege.substack.com/p/our-thirty...

I find it depressing that so many people seem determined to outsource their basic brain functions. Like WHY ARE YOU EVEN ALIVE IF THAT'S HOW LITTLE YOU THINK ABOUT EXISTENCE

You can write your emails just fine. You always have! Want to improve? Take a writing course (there are cheap and free writing courses for a variety of types of writing to be found online). Using features like this is literally dimming areas of your brain. Keep them lit. Forget this feature exists.

I find Gmail’s new “write this for me” feature deeply sinister. They’re trying to convince you that you are dumb and helpless. Don’t let them steal your ability to formulate thoughts and communicate. You were capable of writing an email in 2022 and you’re capable now.

Our mutual Christmas book haul (Rach’s books on the left and mine on the right). I’ve found that the happiest life is a life filled with love and books.

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.

People say AI is a magic shortcut to creativity & success. I’ll tell you the real secret and it’s voraciously reading, being interested in everything, being diligent in the pursuit of learning, paying attention to the interior lives of others & keeping a heart open to the world.

“Why are folks getting dumber?” Because they don’t read. “Why aren’t men as romantic & poetic as they used to be?” Because they don’t read. “Why are people so vulnerable to propaganda?” “Why is everyone a conspiracy theorist?” Because they don’t read. Because they don’t read.

No offense but I think we underestimate how many of our current problems, both cultural and political, are downstream of the decline in reading, the decline in learning and the loss of interest in the humanities.

In honor of my birthday this week I encourage you to get a library card, read books of folklore, listen to medieval & Tudor Christmas carols, watch an old film by Welles or Bergman. Life is not long and we ought to find some beauty in each day. We ought to hold each other close.

There's an enormous cat who lives a few streets down. She somehow figured out a way to unlatch and open the screen door leading into our bedroom. Every night she breaks into our room, curls up on my chest and falls asleep. I've been adopted by a real-life Miyazaki character.

Sat down at the dining-room table to read a bit of Bleak House. Noticed that my wife, seated next to me, was also reading Bleak House. Realized we have at least FIVE copies of the novel. This is what human flourishing looks like.

I’m looking for a good contemporary novel. I’ve been reading a lot of medieval poems & sagas and realized I’d read hardly any recent fiction this year. I love a book that’s a bit cerebral, a bit strange, and tells a solidly plotted story with a minimum of fuss.

Reading will make you more interesting. Last week I met up with some old friends and we were discussing Cornwall. I told them, “According to legend, the devil avoids Cornwall for fear he will be baked into a pie” and the expression on their faces was priceless.

Been reading a lot of academic texts this year and needed a mental break, so I picked up Dickens and I'm amazed anew at how shamelessly FUN, entertaining & escapist he is. He invented modern storytelling. He was writing prestige TV in the 1850s.

We're witnessing the greatest sustained attack on the human spirit in history. Big Tech seeks to destroy the arts. They're destroying the school system. They want to make us lobotomized people who can't read, write or create. They've turned dystopian fiction into a manual.

I'm glad the villain of the new Toy Story is a child's tablet. I hope the film conveys how screens eat up a child's hobbies, interests, literacy, ability to function socially. I hope it provokes millions of parents to think twice before making the iPad a babysitter.

I need everyone who uses AI to generate art & text to notice what Vince Gilligan says here. You're surrendering your brain, your creativity, the divine spark within you to a machine. Someday you'll wake up and find you're no longer capable of writing or thinking. And for what?

Too many people have resigned themselves to not reading because they fear they no longer have the focus for it. You only need to limit your screen time for a few days to begin feeling the effects on your brain. I promise you, you are capable of reading books again.

Carl Sagan, writing in 1995, warned that soon America would be ruled by illiterate elites wielding “awesome technological powers,” and that most people, their brains broken by screens, would be unable to resist. We are living in the nightmare that Sagan foresaw.

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