five quotes (4.3.26)
have a blessed good friday, holy saturday, and resurrection sunday, my friends
Too much time on the internet, perhaps especially social media, is making us all profoundly dumber. Digital slop is destroying our attention spans. We are becoming addicted to the frenetic pace of the internet, to the scroll and swipe, like lab rats pushing a cocaine lever until they exhaust themselves and die.
Historically, the decline of societies is preceded by a decline in reading. It happened with the fall of Rome, which led to the Dark Ages. It happened with Nazism, too. This is precisely why authoritarian regimes banish and burn books. When people stop reading, they stop thinking critically. And when people stop thinking critically, bad things happen. A population that cannot think for itself, focus, or remember is a population that is easy to manipulate. One of the most important counter-culture things you can do right now is read a book.
—Brad Stulberg, “In Defense of Deep Reading” (The Growth Equation)
The genesis for this article was Stulberg’s ungodly amount of time spent online promoting his new book, The Way of Excellence. A lot of what he says here is recycled and can cross into cliche, but sometimes you need to spend some time in the belly of the beast to gain a new appreciation for the inhumanity of the digital world. I mentioned last week that I ban smartphones for students on my trips. I use mine only for navigation and communication with our travel program back home. Coming back from that and entering into a deluge of emails—academic scheduling for next year, operating plans, dubious time-off requests, etc.—is always jarring. For a short time, I get to pretend the world is basically what it was 20 years ago. And then I open Gmail. In short, read books. Slow down. Engage your brain.
There’s a reason that post-COVID (a period during which society’s collective moorings became increasingly untethered), we’ve seen a rise in many of the above. The NFL, NBA, MLS, and WNBA have all seen record attendance. Broadway saw its highest grosses in history during the 2024-2025 season. And though religious affiliation has been trending downward for the past few decades, church attendance is seeing a resurgence driven largely by Gen Z and millennials. Running clubs tripled in 2024, with club participation increasing by 59% according to Strava. A 2023 survey found that 92% of Americans would rather receive an experience over a physical gift.
Our actions are telling us we long for collective experience, and for good reason. Modern science has largely confirmed Durkheim’s hypothesis. When we do real things together in the real world, it not only makes us feel better, but it also connects us on a deeper level.
—Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg, “Go Touch Grass: A Real World Survival Guide” (The Growth Equation)
Two quotes from the same newsletter today, but, hey, I missed it for two weeks. And this is really good. People want real experiences. We want to engage with other people. I am writing this from a pub while my oldest son practices rugby, and all around me people are engaging in real human interaction: conversation, listening to a live band, even playing cards and board games. I had a 15-minute conversation with a guy who saw me reading a book he just finished. It’s great. Durkheim’s term, which the authors give earlier in the article, is “collective effervescence.” This is, almost literally, the goal of human interaction. We want to come together and move in sync, whether that’s through rhythmic dance and singing or even something as small as leaning into our conversation partner. Touch grass. Do what’s real.
My word on my own life should be sufficient—there it is. This, to put it bluntly, is not how medical diagnoses work, or I would have had a brain tumor 15 times so far. But it is the Millennial mantra—I am the captain of my ship, the author of my life, the protagonist of reality. Incidentally, this is the same logic that uncritically affirms young children’s assertions that they are the opposite sex. That position is also part of the progressive package endorsed by West, despite her writing this about GLP-1 prescriptions for adolescents: “Wegovy has been approved for children as young as twelve, when we don’t even know the long-term physical effects, let alone the mental ones.” Wow, sounds like we should be very careful about powerful, life-altering drugs and probably not accuse anyone who has questions about them of secretly wanting chubby kids to die.
—Helen Lewis, “The Death of Millennial Feminism” (The Atlantic)
Lewis’s article is a great example of the reflection many are having with the toxic, feminist-inspired online world of the 2010s. The jumping off point for the article is the publication of Lindy West’s new memoir, Adult Braces. West was the golden girl of millennial feminism, proudly fat, loud, and acerbic. Today, she still maintains the old schtick, but it has worn noticeably thin. No one buys it anymore. There are a lot of great moments in the article, but this was my favorite. My generation grew up under the operative logic of complete autonomy. We believed we could will such a belief into existence. Our experience of adulthood has been notably frustrated because of the immsense expectations we placed upon life. While the millennial culture is worthy of mockery, it is also sad because so many of my peers were swallowed up by it. We believed we could have it all, that we would never die, and that the world would be commodious of our wishes.
Part of what makes me frustrated by this particular piece of advice is that, in most cases, it clearly descends from best practices in artforms that are very different than written ficiton. The axiom, in its modern form, largely migrated into literary instruction from drama and screenwriting. In those mediums, the prohibition makes literal sense; a playwright can have a character turn to the audience and announce that her husband is cold and dismissive, or s/he can write a scene in which he is cold and dismissive. A screenwriter is generally well advised not to bombard the audience with emotional exposition but should instead let the camera do the work. (Often, usually, mostly - never always.) The instruction, in other words, is bound to the constraints of the formats of plays and movies. When it crosses over into prose fiction, something important gets lost: in fiction, there is no “showing.” There’s literally only telling. Every word on the page is narrated! A description of a gray sky is telling. A line of dialogue is telling. The most cinematically vivid action sequence is telling. The writer is always the intermediary, always the voice between reader and event. The medium is fundamentally, irreducibly narrative; the etymology of the word “narrate” stems from the Latin narrare - to tell, relate, recount, or explain.
—Freddie DeBoer, “Great Writers ‘Tell’ All the Time” (Newsletter)
I had heard this rote advice—show, don’t tell—all through graduate school. I wasn’t really sure how it applied to academic writing. (In point of fact, it does not.) It was a cudgel, a way of dismissing a work you didn’t like without thinking. The first time I taught The Great Gatsby, widely considered the greatest American novel of all time (or at least on the Mt. Rushmore of such novels), I was amazed to see that Fitzgerald spends almost the entire book telling us about the characters and their debaucheries.
The easy interpretation is ironic nostalgia. For some buyers, it probably is. But I think something deeper is going on. A growing number of people are tired of passive consumption. Streaming made listening effortless, but it also made it weightless. The algorithm chose what you heard. There was no friction, no commitment, and, in the end, nothing to show for it. A CD or record requires a choice. You spend money, bring something home, and put it on a shelf. It becomes part of your life in a visible way. CheapAudioMan makes this point directly: Gen Z buyers are not mainly purchasing CDs as nostalgia. They are purchasing them as identity. What is on their shelf says something about who they are.
And it is not just CDs. Retro video games, consoles, and cartridges from the nineties and early 2000s have become mainstream, expensive, and more popular than ever, despite modern games being technically superior by almost every measure.
—Michael Foster, “You Will Own Things, and Actually Care” (Newsletter)
In Europe last week, I watched with joy as my student descended upon a music store and stocked their checked baggage with vinyl albums. Now, a cynical interpretation of the return of tangible music is that music consumption is returning to a more consciously performative element, a la the CD towers or record displays of previous generations. I mean, a once-yearly Spotify Wrapped social media post just doesn’t have the power of a shelf stuffed with well-chosen vinyls. However, screw that. I think it’s awesome that people are trading the easy digital options for the tactile experience of records. Anything that returns us to the realm of the real over the digital is a win for me.