People make certain assumptions about you when you’re the CEO of a children’s book company. Some assume I must have spent my childhood summers in a hammock reading Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, or winters taking turns reading Little Women by the fire with my sisters. The reality is far more complicated, quite a bit less wholesome, and probably more familiar to most parents reading this.

The truth is I spent a good chunk of my childhood rotating between three game consoles—a Sega Genesis, a Gameboy, and a multitude of PC games, some featuring nudity and/or violence. During the school year, I had the entire TGIF television lineup memorized (and still do). My idea of a middle grade novel was Carrie, which I conveniently “borrowed” from my brother’s vast Stephen King collection.

That isn’t to say I didn’t grow up with books and even age-appropriate ones—just that I don’t recall my parents being particularly concerned about screen time. There was no cultural panic about technology rotting my brain. We weren’t unusual in this regard. Screens were alive and well in my childhood, just as they are today.

The real challenge isn’t technology itself, but how technology has evolved to actively compete with the very cognitive processes that reading requires.

The difference wasn’t the presence of technology in our lives; it was the nature of our relationship with it.

When I fired up Kings Quest VI, I committed. I guided Alexander through the Land of Green Isles, memorized the magic map, and worked my ass off to solve the puzzles at the Cliffs of Logic. The game didn’t ping me with notifications every few minutes. It didn’t track my behavior to sell me anything. It didn’t fragment my attention into bite-sized dopamine hits designed by teams of psychologists to maximize engagement. It was, in its own way, long-form content that demanded sustained focus—not so different from the mental muscles required for reading.

This distinction matters more than we might think, especially for those of us trying to raise readers in 2025. It’s easy to blame screens wholesale for declining literacy rates, but I find that both reductive and unhelpful. The real challenge isn’t technology itself, but how technology has evolved to actively compete with the very cognitive processes that reading requires.

The Unnatural Act of Reading
Here’s something that might surprise you: reading isn’t natural. Unlike speaking, which humans develop organically, reading is an acquired skill that literally rewires the brain. Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, whose research has fundamentally shaped my understanding of how children develop as readers, describes reading as “an unnatural act” that requires us to connect disparate neural pathways in ways evolution never intended.

Wolf’s work reveals something remarkable about the reading brain. When we read, we’re essentially performing a complex neural symphony. Our brains must coordinate visual processing, language comprehension, memory systems, and abstract thinking—all in milliseconds. This isn’t something that happens automatically. It’s built through practice, repetition, and what Wolf calls “deep reading circuits.”

Children who become strong readers develop these circuits through thousands of hours of focused attention on text. Their brains learn to process written language with increasing fluency until the act becomes as natural as breathing. But here’s the crucial part: these circuits are fragile, especially in the early years. They require sustained, focused attention to develop properly.

This is where our modern digital landscape becomes genuinely problematic. Not because screens are inherently evil, but because many of today’s digital experiences are specifically designed to prevent such sustained attention.

When Screens Turned Predatory
The screens of my childhood were fundamentally different than what our children encounter today. When I played Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, the game wanted me to stay engaged, certainly, but it didn’t have access to sophisticated behavioral data about what kept me playing. It couldn’t A/B test different reward schedules or generate feedback loops from my friends with every action I took. Carmen didn’t appear suddenly with a sponsored post that preyed on my insecurities and tried to sell me teeth whitening gel.

Today’s digital experiences are built on what tech insiders call “persuasive design”—interfaces deliberately crafted to maximize time on screen through intermittent variable rewards, social validation loops, and carefully calibrated frustration. These aren’t accidents. They’re the result of millions of dollars in research into human psychology and memory, designed specifically to capture (and fragment) attention.

The average child now receives their first smartphone around age 10 and spends over seven hours a day on screens. But far more troubling than the raw hours is how this time is spent: in short bursts, rapidly switching between apps, constantly responding to notifications and alerts.

This creates what researchers call “continuous partial attention”—a state where we’re always monitoring multiple streams of information but never fully focused on any single task. It’s the cognitive equivalent of trying to build muscles by switching between machines every few seconds before we can get in a single quality set.

And yet, here’s what gives me hope in the data: not all children are struggling. While average reading scores have indeed declined, the top-performing readers are actually doing better than ever before. This suggests that the challenge isn’t insurmountable—some families and schools are successfully navigating this landscape. The question is: what are they doing differently?

Building Participation
Running a children’s book company has given me a front-row seat to what actually works in developing young readers. Over the past decade, we’ve been exposed to a multitude of stories on what is working—and what isn’t—that informs our own product design.

The children who thrive as readers share two key characteristics: they’re actively engaged with their reading from the earliest ages, and reading has been ritualized as a cherished family habit.

Active engagement is crucial. This doesn’t mean turning every book into an interactive multimedia experience. Rather, it means ensuring that children are mentally participating in the reading process rather than passively consuming. With toddlers, this might mean encouraging them to point to pictures, make sound effects, or predict what comes next. With older children, it involves asking questions that go beyond basic comprehension: “What do you think motivates this character?” “How would the story change if it were set in our neighborhood?”

We’ve discovered that children who regularly engage in these kinds of active reading practices develop stronger neural pathways for deep comprehension. Their brains learn to treat reading as an interactive, creative process rather than a passive reception of information.

The ritualization piece is equally important. The families raising strong readers don’t just find time for books—they create sacred space around reading. This might mean a bedtime routine that’s never rushed, weekend morning reading sessions with special snacks, or car trips where audiobooks replace music. The key is consistency and intentionality.

One mother told me that she and her seven-year-old have “reading dates” every Saturday morning at their local coffee shop. They each bring a book, order hot chocolate, and read silently together for an hour. Her daughter now looks forward to these sessions more than screen time. This isn’t magic—it’s the power of positive association and ritual.

But perhaps our most important discovery is this: the parents raising successful readers aren’t necessarily limiting screen time more than other families. Instead, they’re being strategic about what kind of screen experiences they’re choosing.

Science as Our Antidote to Technology
Wolf’s research points us toward a solution that’s both practical and hopeful. If reading circuits are built through focused attention and practice, then our job as parents isn’t to eliminate technology—it’s to create intentional spaces where deep attention can flourish.

This means being ruthlessly selective about digital experiences. Not all screen time is created equal. A child watching a thoughtfully crafted film[?] or playing a strategy game that requires sustained focus is having a fundamentally different cognitive experience than one rapidly scrolling through short-form videos.

The neuroscience suggests several practical strategies. First, protect the early morning and pre-bedtime hours as screen-free zones. These are when our brains are most receptive to the kind of focused processing that reading requires. Second, create physical spaces in your home that are associated exclusively with reading—no devices allowed.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, model the behavior you want to see. Children are remarkably adept at detecting when adults are partially present, their attention split between conversation and the notification pings in their pockets. If we want our children to develop the capacity for sustained attention, we must demonstrate it ourselves.

Our job as parents isn’t to eliminate technology—it’s to create intentional spaces where deep attention can flourish.

I think about my own childhood, rotating between those game consoles and books, often within the same afternoon. The difference wasn’t that my parents were anti-technology. It’s that the technology of that era didn’t actively compete with my ability to concentrate. Today’s parents face a more challenging landscape, but they also have something we didn’t: a growing understanding of how attention works and how to protect it.

The Path Forward
The children who are thriving as readers in 2025 aren’t growing up in some idealized, screen-free bubble. They’re learning to navigate a complex media landscape with intention and purpose. Their parents understand that the goal isn’t to return to some imagined golden age of childhood, but to apply what we now know about brain development to create a new (and equally beautiful) childhood where deep reading can flourish alongside thoughtful technology use.

This requires us to move beyond the false choice between books and screens toward a more nuanced understanding of attention, engagement, and cognitive development. It means teaching our children—and ourselves—that not all digital experiences are equivalent, and that the most important skill we can develop in an age of distraction might be the ability to choose what deserves our focused attention.

The stakes feel particularly high because we’re not just raising readers—we’re raising citizens who will need to think critically, process complex information, and maintain focus in an increasingly chaotic world. The neural pathways that Wolf describes, those deep reading circuits built through sustained attention to text, are the same ones that enable complex reasoning, empathy, and the kind of patient thinking that democracy requires.

But here’s what I find most encouraging: the human brain remains remarkably plastic, especially in childhood. Every day presents new opportunities to build these crucial circuits. Every bedtime story, every conversation about a book, every moment of focused attention is rewiring our children’s minds for the better.

The hammock and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm were never really the point. The point was always the quality of attention we bring to whatever we’re reading, and our willingness to create space for the kind of deep thinking that transforms both individuals and societies. That’s as possible today as it ever was—we just need to be more intentional about how we get there.

Ripe apples drop about my head . . . The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach.

—Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”

When you bite into an apple, a pear, or a peach, you bite into the result of thousands of years of interactions between these fruits and primates. When you let a fig squish in your mouth, you are savoring an even more ancient story. These moments of pleasure are reenactments of a kind of jungle theater that has played out again and again for tens of millions of years. But it didn’t start this way.

Before the fruit, in a beginning, all of the seeds that dangled from trees fell from those trees. These were gravity’s seeds. They might be pushed this way or that by the wind or fall into the river and drift along shores, but that was all for their travels. Most fell below their mother tree. In her shade, they died. Mother plants sometimes smother. This was long the fate of plant progeny. Some trees evolved seeds with wings, that they might be carried a little farther, but only when the winds willed.

Then, some plants evolved fruits. Fruits were a radical evolutionary innovation; they surrounded seeds and attracted animals in order that those animals might consume them and ingest their seeds. They called out, “Eat me.” This was their proclamation made in the form of bold colors, scents, and even flavors. Some of the seeds were ground up by the teeth of those animals. Others died in their guts. A few survived. Each bit of feces deposited by a fruit‑eating bird or mammal was pregnant with the potential of a forest.

A forest can walk across a landscape in the gut of a primate, traveling one defecation at a time.

Then came our kind, not the first humans, not yet, but instead the first of our extended family, the first primates. They evolved in the tropics, around 60 million years ago, in the shadow of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Those first primates have been hypothesized to have consumed the fruits of trees as well as flowers, and then, also, insects attracted to fruits and flowers. Over the succeeding tens of millions of years, some of the descendants of those first primates became more dependent on fruits. Meanwhile, many trees grew increasingly dependent on those fruit‑eating primates for dispersal of their seeds; this was a relationship of mutual benefit and dependency. The primates lived in the trees the way that the protist Mixotricha paradoxa lives inside a termite, or the way that cilia-like spirochetes live on the protist. Conversely, like the spirochetes living on the protist, the primates helped the trees to move. Metaphorically, a forest can walk across a landscape inside the gut of a primate, traveling one defecation at a time.

It is likely that our shared ancestor with all other apes, a kind of ur-ape, ate leaves, bark, and insects, but especially fruit. So, too, for our much more recent ancestor, the most recent common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans. Paleoanthropologists refer to this species, which lived 5.5 to 7.5 million years ago, as the Chimpanzee‑Human Last Common Ancestor, or CHLCA; for ease, let’s call them chilcas.

In broad strokes, the diets of chilcas were likely similar to those of chimpanzees. The primatologist Christophe Boesch began studying chimpanzees in the Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire in the 1970s. He studied those Taï chimpanzees in detail, but then also went on, with a large team, to study chimpanzees across Africa. Through this larger project, called “The Cultured Chimpanzee,” Boesch and his colleagues, collaborators, and mentees have demonstrated that chimpanzee cultures, and hence diets, vary from one community to the next.

Many but not all chimpanzee communities use sticks to eat ants. Others use sticks to eat termites. Many use sticks to access honey. Some use sticks to kill and eat bush babies. Bush babies are small, big-eyed, nocturnal primates with adorable little hands that look, yes, like furry babies living up and among the trees. Some chimpanzees love to eat them. Other chimpanzee populations use sticks to gather and eat algae.

Others hunt colobus monkeys. Chimpanzee diets are varied. Yet The Cultured Chimpanzee collective found that, despite this variation, chimpanzee populations share a dependence on fruit. More than anything theirs is a diet of fruit, and especially figs. Red figs. Green figs. Plump purple figs. Small figs and enormous figs. Chimpanzees include figs in 80 percent of their daily meals during the long fig season. An average daily chimpanzee diet often includes hundreds of individual figs.

Chilcas and other ancient fruit‑eating primates gardened their own worlds.

Figs were also a key fruit of the ancient garden planted by chilcas. And it was a garden. Ancient chilcas ate figs and deposited their seeds. Those seeds grew, eventually, into trees. The more figs the chilcas ate, the more fig trees they planted, until the forests they lived in abounded (as they still do today) with figs. The fig trees also supported the insects and colobus monkeys that, if they were like chimpanzees, the chilcas might have also eaten.

By gardening fig trees and other tree species with delicious fruits, chilcas and other ancient fruit‑eating primates gardened their own worlds. Scholars, depending on their field, sometimes call this “world-making,” “niche construction,” or “ecosystem engineering,” analogies drawn from literature, art, and engineering, respectively. This “making” is passive on behalf of the primates. They don’t actively choose to make forests. But as I’ll discuss, many of the other steps humans took in partnering with other species weren’t necessarily active either.

In general, where primates are more abundant, so, too, are the fruit trees whose fruits they like to eat. Primates grow their own forests by “planting” the seeds of their preferred fruits; they can even create new forests when they move into the open habitats at the edge of the tree line. When primates become rare, so, often, do the fruit trees that depend upon them. When giant lemurs went extinct in Madagascar, the large‑fruited species that depended upon them became rarer. You can’t have arboreal primates without their trees, and, in some cases, you can’t have the trees without the primates.

Both primates and trees also have other mutualistic partners. Primates depend not only on fruits, but also, just like termites, on their gut microbes. It is these gut microbes that convert the fiber in figs into energy. Chilcas, we can infer, depended upon their gut microbes to help them digest their food. They depended on their microbes to help defend them against pathogens. Such microbes helped to keep them alive, and so one might say that they also help to keep the figs around. When one species (one of the chilcas’ gut microbes) affects another species (say, a fig species) via its effect on an intermediate species (the chilcas), ecologists describe these effects as “indirect.” The living world is full of Rube Goldberg-like indirect effects that, though sublime, are hard to study, and harder to describe.

As for the figs, they often depend on other seed dispersers such as bats and birds. They depend on fungi that connect to their roots and give them access to the nutrients in deeper, smaller interstices in soil and rock (in exchange for sugar or fat). And they depend on wasps that pollinate their flowers. It is these wasps, called agaonids, or fig wasps, that know the subtlest arts of fig making. Nearly all species of figs are pollinated by these tiny wasps. Fig wasps and fig trees appeared to have evolved simultaneously some 85 million years ago. They evolved in relation to each other. As fig trees have diverged, so too their wasps.

They also evolved to be dependent on one another. This dependence is very particular and relates to the details of fig flowers. Fig flowers dwell inside a spherical structure called a syconium (plural, syconia), from the Greek, sykē (συκῆ), for “fig.” The word is thought to derive from a connection to Sykeus, one of the few Titans to survive the war against the Olympian gods. After the war, Zeus continued to pursue Sykeus. Sykeus fled to the bosom of his mother, the Earth goddess, Gaia. For his own protection, Gaia turned Sykeus into a fig tree draped with Earth-shaped syconia, now named in his honor.

Nature can be, at once, red in tooth and claw and collaborative.

The details of fig pollination vary depending upon the fig and wasp species. Some fig species have separate male and female syconia; in others, the syconia are all hermaphrodites. Some fig wasps accidentally disperse pollen; others do so with an active care. In all cases, each syconium contains tens to hundreds of flowers that have the potential to collectively bear seed.

The syconium and its flower-world are entered by way of a small hole, termed the ostiole, exactly the width of a tiny pregnant female wasp—or, rather, a wasp minus its wings, which the wasp may shed upon entering, never to fly again. Once in the syconium, the female wasp pollinates some flowers. She lays her eggs in others of the flowers. She then dies, inside the fig. Her eggs become larvae, then adults, all while still inside their flowers, which by then have become a kind of botanical crèche that the plant makes in response to the wasps’ presence. The wingless adult males emerge first and mate with the winged females while they are still in their swaddling. As the now‑pregnant female wasps emerge, they become coated in pollen from new male flowers within the syconium. They then crawl out of the syconium through holes that the males dig, holes wide enough to accommodate the female wasps and their wings; this is the males’ last useful act. The exiting females then carry the fig pollen with them as they go on to look for their own forever homes.

When a chimpanzee bites into a fig, it bites into this complex biology. The same is true when you bite into a wild fig. Parenthetically, I have had the chance to work with Hjalmar Kühl and Mimi Arandjelovic, now leading The Cultured Chimpanzee project, to use samples of chimpanzee feces to decode new mysteries of chimpanzee lives. We have found that we can see the biology of figs, fig wasps, and chimpanzees excrementally. Chimpanzee feces contain the DNA of figs, fig wasps, and the parasites that attack fig wasps. This DNA is evidence that the chimpanzees eat not only the remains of baby wasps but also the bodies of the male wasps and the mother wasps, both of which die in the fig. The bodies of the wasps are protein rich, though, and so fig fruits are quick to metabolize them and turn their nitrogen and phosphorus into added resources in the fig. The figs, as a result, are more nutritious than they would be without their wasps.

As for fig wasps that don’t pollinate enough flowers, they suffer. Fig trees retaliate against such freeloaders. They drop their unpollinated syconia with the mother and baby wasps inside; the fallen fruits rot. The wasps die. Charles Darwin and Lynn Margulis were both right: Nature can be, at once, red in tooth and claw and collaborative.

At some point, maybe in the time of chilcas, or maybe a little later, our ancestors left the trees to live more on the ground. Some 4.5 million years ago, in what is now Ethiopia, fossils indicate the presence of a human relative named Ardipithecus ramidus, shortened to “Ardi.” Ardi had hands that were not as adapted to climbing as those of chimpanzees. Ardi’s legs and feet, meanwhile, were slightly better adapted to walking than those of chimpanzees. Ardi might have been one of our ancestors, or simply a relative alive alongside our ancestors. Regardless, once our ancestors did begin to spend more time on the ground, they would have faced the same tradeoffs Ardi faced. They almost certainly still ate fruits, but, like Tantalus, they would have struggled more to reach them. The figs on the highest branches would have become a sweetness just beyond reach.

Excerpted from the book The Call of the Honeyguide by Rob Dunn. Copyright © 2025 Available from Basic Books, a division of Hachette Book Group Inc., New York, NY, USA. All rights reserved.

Lead image: Erich Karnberger / Shutterstock

In the past couple of months, I published a number of articles on recreational math. I did my best to keep them accessible and fun, but my goal was usually to shed light at deeper mathematical truths. For example, the discussion of 0.999… = 1 served as a springboard to highlight some of the subtler properties of real numbers and the different meanings of infinity.

Today, I have no agenda. This article exists because I discovered a somewhat obscure paper that says something unexpected and cool. It feels profound, it probably isn’t… and if you keep reading, it’s going to live rent-free in your head too.

The road to a friend's house is never long

Topologists are an odd bunch: they study the continuity of geometric shapes with no regard for appearances. To them, continuous transformations — such as stretching and squeezing — are of no consequence. A donut and a drinking straw are the same because you can knead one into another without making or mending any holes.

A topologist doesn’t care about the distance between two points in space: all that matters is a more narrow concept of local continuity. Because of this, they often choose to lean on stripped-down geometrical spaces where the notion of distance — also known as a metric — is simply not defined.

That said, if you’re not a topologist, you probably enjoy being able to measure stuff. In standard Euclidean geometry with two dimensions, if we have two points that are separated by x horizontally and y vertically, the resulting straight-line distance can be calculated as:

One of the most common ways to construct non-Euclidean spaces is to alter the space’s metric in some way. An example that should be familiar to many software engineers is the taxicab metric, also known as the Manhattan distance. It’s named so by analogy to a cab navigating a rectangular grid of streets, charging you per mile traveled:

In the taxicab universe, the distance between two points is a simple sum of the absolute distances in each axis: d_taxicab = |x| + |y|. If we take another look at the earlier case — d = √(x² + y²) — it’s tempting to express the new equation in an analogous way:

If we look at these two formulas — Euclidean and taxicab — it’s clear that we can generalize this to a whole family of related metric spaces:

Again, the case of n = 1 is the taxicab universe; n = 2 nets us the standard Euclidean space. There are some unnamed geometries in between, but if n approaches infinity, we get what’s called the Chebyshev distance. In this case, because even the tiniest difference between x and y makes one of the exponentiated values vastly smaller than the other one, so the distance is just:

A circle by any other name

In each of these spaces — from d₁ to d_∞ — there is a well-defined notion of a “circle”: it’s a set of points that are equidistant under the chosen metric from some center point.

To understand how these circles might look like, we can note that if y is zero, the earlier distance formula always simplifies to just d_n = |x|:

Similarly, if x is zero, the formula is just d_n = |y|. This means that in any of our spaces, if we’re trying to draw an n-circle with a radius r = 1, the points at (1, 0), (0, -1), (-1, 0), and (0, 1) will be a part of the shape:

For the taxicab metric (d₁), the distance from (0, 0) is a simple sum of x and y coordinates, so a circle of radius r is just a collection of points that satisfy the criteria |x| + |y| = r. This includes (0.9, 0.1), (0.8, 0.2), (0.7, 0.3), and so on. In effect, each of the four quadrants of the circle is just a ±45° diagonal:

For higher-order n-circles, the constraint for (x, y) points that make up the “circle” is:

The following illustration shows examples calculated for n = 1.5, 2, 3, and 5:

Earlier on, we also mentioned that as n approaches infinity, we get what’s known as the Chebyshev distance, d_∞ = max(|x|, |y|). This ∞-circle is a collection of all points where one coordinate is equal to ±r, while the other one stays within [-r, r]:

So… you mentioned π?

Right. This brings us to an interesting question: does the value of π — that is, the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle — change for “circles” drawn in these non-standard spaces?

Let’s have another look at the taxicab scenario:

What’s the circumference of that shape? It’s tempting to say that each quadrant is just the diagonal of a 1×1 square (= √2), so the circumference is 4·√2. The diameter of the circle is 2·r = 2. Hence, the value of the taxicab π (π₁) must be 4·√2/2 ≈ 2.828.

Except… that’s a bit of a category error. We’re attempting to measure the circumference of a circle drawn in a non-Euclidean space by using the Euclidean definition of length. In the taxicab space, the diagonal of a 1×1 square is not √2; it’s a simple sum of the edges of the square. So, if we’re to be consistent, the correct answer is that π₁ = 4·2/2 = 4.

Curiously, the ∞-circle case nets the same result: the each quadrant consists of two straight segments of length 1, so the total is 8·1/2 = 4.

For other n-circles, exact answers require some non-trivial calculus, but we can approximate the value numerically. To do this, we solve the circle equation at some constant angular intervals and then connect the dots, yielding a shape constructed out of straight segments.

For example, for the familiar case of n = 2, we get:

We can calculate the length of these segments using the appropriate metric, then divide it by the diameter (always 2). With the crude 20-segment approximation shown above, we get π₂ ≈ 3.129. A more precise model with a thousand segments nets us π₂ ≈ 3.14159.

Several other computed values are shown below:

And here’s a plot of π_n showing even more data points:

So, that’s the somewhat unexpected revelation: of all the metric spaces constructed through simple extrapolation from Euclidean geometry, our π is the “minimal” π. We live in some sort of a π-dip.

👉 Credit: in their 2000 paper, mathematicians Charles Adler and James Tanton provide a formal proof of this property, and this is where the idea for this blog post comes from.

Hol’ up… what about n < 1?

We can do that too! Positive exponents less than 1 produce concave “circles”:

The measurements corresponding to the image are π_0.8 ≈ 4.7, π_0.5 ≈ 7.2, π_0.3 ≈ 11.9, so the trend continues. And at n = 0, our earlier notion of distance breaks down.

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According to my records, between 2008 and 2013 I assigned ’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (first published in The Atlantic August 15, 2008) to 14 different sections of college writing students.

In the essay Carr wrestles with what he perceives as a change to his own ability to pay sustained attention to reading and thinking because of the way he’s found himself working with and on the Internet. He sums things up this way, “My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

He extends from his experiences to the experiences of others, reporting on what he’s heard from friends and colleagues, or what he’s read by other contemporaries. He goes deeper on the connection by technology and cognition and argues that we are now digital Taylorists (after Fredrick Winslow Taylor who studied automation and efficiency in industrial settings), where the system dictates the human’s behavior, rather than the other way around.

He shares a quote from Google co-founder Sergey Brin that hits particularly hard in today’s era of generative AI, seventeen years on from Carr’s writing, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

In 2008, Carr writes that this “easy assumption that we’d all ‘be better off’ if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling.” I was generally sympathetic to Carr’s argument from the first time I read it, but at the time of teaching the essay, I was much less unsettled than him, and speaking as someone today who finds himself significantly more unsettled now, I’m wondering why.

Some of it is age and time. It was seventeen years ago. I was younger and had seen and experienced less. My lens did not have the same length and breadth as Nicolas Carr’s. I also had not experienced the same kind of disruption to my reading abilities that Carr describes. The Jet Ski versus scuba metaphor made sense to me, but at the time (and indeed, to this very day), I felt very comfortable toggling between scubaing and jetskiing. I think a lot of this is due to the sweet spot of my age where I’d established those root skills of deep reading (c.f. Maryanne Wolf), and was also very quickly comfortable with the affordances of the internet, while always being able to distinguish between the two modes.

The Internet had also been a huge boon to my career, giving me access to outlets for my work that never would’ve been on offer in the earlier eras that Carr had come up through. I was good at delivering quick, timely bits. At the time I was editing the McSweeney’s website and the way the submission inbox filled with good (and not good) stuff from all over the world suggested to me that all this connectivity and speed was on balance a good thing, not necessarily an advancement, but not a retreat. I was aware of the risks, but I was much more hopeful about the upside.

Do you know who else was less hopeful about the upside of the access and connectivity afforded by the Internet?

My students.

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Every semester one of the first things I had to discern was my students’ abilities to properly identify another writer’s argument and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was a perfect vehicle for that assessment.

• It’s written at a sophisticated level, but targets a general reader requiring no knowledge of specialized jargon or academic concepts.

• It explores an experience familiar to students, accessing and reading information online and being expected to work with that information in academic contexts like writing and research.

• It’s personal, but also reaches out to draw in outside sources and ideas, connecting Carr’s sense of a changing world with the ideas and experiences of others. In fact, I said that our end of semester goal was for everyone to be able to write something very much like “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” only about a subject of their own interest and told from their unique perspective.

• The opening gave me an immediate opportunity to check how actively students were reading.

In class I would read that opening paragraph aloud, then pause, and ask students how many of them truly knew what he was referring to. In a class of 25, no more than two or three students had seen the movie, and many had never even heard of it. I asked how many were confused (definitely some). I asked how many used the miracle of Google to better inform themselves about the film and context (zero). I asked them why not and they shrugged. It hadn’t occurred to them. I’d then show the clip, easily found on YouTube.

I asked what the choice of reference might tell us about who Carr is targeting as his audience, and pretty quickly they’d figure out that it was directly intended more for people my age (or even a bit older) than their generation, which was more native to life online.

I asked them to give me a reference that would better connect to people of their generation, and the near universal answer was a movie called Smart House, which apparently aired on the Disney Channel on a weekly basis through most of the 2000s that I still have never seen.

Above all, I wanted them to understand that reading in the way that I expected was not passive, and they would know they’re doing it “right” if their mind was conjuring questions and connections as they moved through the text.

This level of attention was largely unfamiliar to my very bright, well-prepared students because the nature of what they’d previously been asked to do with texts had little relationship with what I was trying to model. They been able to get by with a general passing familiarity with what they’d read because very rarely, if ever, had they been asked to make something from someone else’s text.

In fact, many struggled significantly with the basic purpose of the writing portion of the exercise, to accurately summarize Carr’s argument.

The overwhelming majority of my students would summarize the piece’s content, e.g. “Nicolas Carr writes about how the Internet is changing our brains,” rather than zeroing in on specifically what Carr believed about how the Internet was changing our brains.

Discussion revealed that my students were, in fact, worried about their brains, increasingly so as the years advanced, particularly with the advent of Instagram in 2010, a platform that many of them felt a kind of compulsion toward. This was a step beyond Carr’s notion that we were becoming overused to skimming text. This was endless, mindless scrolling through images.

At the same time, one of the byproducts of reading and discussing/writing about “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was students acknowledging that they had at least some measure of agency over the technology and how they used it. Building this agency became a kind of sub rosa purpose of the course as the temptations of being online interfered with their ability to complete their assignments in our writing course. This was the period of time where I was actively developing what would become my framework of “the writer’s practice” and it was a student who first posited that one of the chief skills of a writer is “concentration.”

“How many of you have a hard time concentrating?” I’d ask. Every hand was raised.

I’d taken my ability to concentrate for granted, but my students were telling me that this was something they needed to work on, and so we did, more so with each passing year as I developed some very specific writing experiences and suggestions for drafting that privileged connection and slowing down over speed and efficiency. I wanted students to experience the pleasure of noticing something about yourself in the world and then bringing that noticing to life in a way that connects with others, of making connections in the way Carr does in the essay.

One of the other things I’d ask students to do after we’d discussed the essay’s meaning is to list out all of the sources that Carr apparently draws from in the completion of this relatively short piece of writing. We’d go paragraph by paragraph and the list would be dozens of different sources long. They were amazed. I wanted students to appreciate the density of the piece and suggested that over time, they could and should strive for something similar, while acknowledging that the benefit of time and experience made this easier to achieve.

“If you start paying attention now, you can learn a lot of stuff,” I’d tell them.

I’d tell students this because I’d reached the part of my career where I was starting to see the benefits of my own learning. I was also frank with them by admitting that when I was in college, I failed to take advantage of all the opportunities I’d been given to learn stuff.

One additional reason I was somewhat less alarmed than Carr is that my experiences as an instructor of introductory college writing caused me to believe that the thing we are fighting for is the preservation and implementation of human agency, and that if we worked carefully and collectively this ability could be fostered, and once fostered, it would endure. I’d seen it happen for hundreds of students moving through my classes over the years.

Yes, Google could make us stupid, but it didn’t have to. It wasn’t inevitable. This is what I wanted students to believe, and furthermore I wanted them to believe that reading and writing were great defenses from becoming stupid. This is the same mentality that led me to declare that ChatGPT can’t kill anything worth preserving at the time of its initial appearance.

I still believe this! We do have the power inside ourselves to resist the negative byproducts of working with large language models should we choose to do so. I suppose much of my work now is trying to help other college faculty demonstrate the value of resistance where resistance is warranted.

While I still believe this is possible for individuals, and will keep working to foster the conditions that allow for individuals to choose agency over automation, I am much less confident that sufficient numbers of people will be able to resist the pull of the platforms and effects of this wave of AI technology.

I’m not quite ready to give into the Borg and declare resistance futile, but resistance is very very hard, and the stakes are higher than ever. Nicolas Carr’s most recent book, Superbloom: How Technologies Tear Us Apart, is a helpful look at why these things are indeed so hard.

There is a lot to the book, and its worth grappling with all of its facets in detail, but in essence, it is about how the intersection between these platforms and our human vulnerabilities makes for an bad mix. Carr argues that we have made an online world in which it is near impossible for the human psyche to survive intact.

Even though this is not my experience,1 I can’t deny that this may be true for many if not most. Consider the increasing number of people who are lapsing into literal psychosis when interacting with chatbots. These reports are beyond unsettling. Also consider the apparent terminally online state of the killer of Charlie Kirk, a young man steeped in memes and online culture who decided ending a life the most violent and public fashion imaginable was somehow sensible.

Social media is not de facto bad for you, video games do not make you violent, using generative AI doesn’t inexorably lead to a diminution in one’s ability to think for themselves.

And yet, many people are psychologically harmed by being on social media. Playing video games does not lead to violence, but there is a burgeoning online “gaming” culture that is increasingly linked to public shooters. I wrote about the way laborers are damaging their ability to do their work in the absence of the algorithmic help just a couple weeks ago.

The deep question that I think we have to continue to wrestle with - and I appreciate any reader thoughts on this - is: How do we steel ourselves against how these platforms and technologies are indeed designed in ways that not just could, but will harm us?

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Links

At the Chicago Tribune I covered Nicolas Boggs’s amazing biography of James Baldwin, Baldwin: A Love Story.

I took two different looks at the recent purging of a Texas A&M instructor who was fired despite displaying the highest levels of professionalism when targeted by a student. For the I covered the big-picture implications for academic freedom. At Inside Higher Ed I identified the student’s actions as an act of madness and wonder how it’s possible to teach and learn in this kind of atmosphere.

The longlists for the National Book Award were announced.

Please enjoy this reflection on how legendary editor Dan Menaker put him on the path of writing for magazines. Let me also recommend Menaker’s memoir of his time in publishing, My Mistake. I believe this review extract from the Bookshop.org page is from someone you may be familiar with.

Taylor on what it means when he says he’s “revising” is also worth your time.

I would like to know who else can identify with “I Am a Dog. I Am About to Puke. Where Is the Good Rug” by Karen Scholl, via my good friends .

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Recommendations

1. Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane
2. James by Percival Everett
3. So Far Gone by Jess Walters
4. Groundskeeping by Lee Cole
5. A Brave Man Seven Stories Tall by Will Chancelor

Chris C. - Denver, CO

I have read every single one of these books! This is my occasion to recommend one of my desert island choices, The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury.

Custom reading recommendations here!

This is my last chance to plug my appearance at the Mark Twain House in Hartford on Sept. 19th at 7pm. I’ll be in conversation with Erin Bartram and the event will be both accessible in person at MTH and virtually online.

To reserve tickets for the in-person event you can go here.

To register for the live stream you can go here.

Registering ahead of time helps us know how many people to expect and for those joining virtually, you’ll get a handy calendar reminder. It’s going to be extremely entertaining and you don’t want to miss it.

Alrighty folks, the next few weeks get busy for ol’ John boy here with trips to speak and family obligations and other things, but I will do my best to put something up every weekend, but if you don’t hear from me, please forgive the absence.

In the meantime, stay connected to yourself and to others.

JW
The Biblioracle

I’m a trained historian. At least I consider myself one, with a Master’s in History and in International Relations, I think I qualify. But, today I must confess to a dilettantish interest in the history of mathematics. Now, please understand that I am no mathematician. I struggled through college algebra. I will, however, add that when I completed college algebra my analytical faculties grew so profoundly—at least to me in hindsight—that I made the Dean’s List every semester thereafter. So, I believe there is something quite important to be said about learning how to solve for ’n’ that we should impart to our children. In the beginning the abstract nature of algebra confounded me, but once I was able to conceptualize it, I began mastering the equations and, as aforementioned, my intellectually faculties grew rapidly and intensely. Soon, my intolerance for fucktose in an history text—or any text for that matter— become keen, acute and annoying as hell to many of my fellow junior and senior history seminar classmates. But I digress. This is about math. Let me add before the next paragraph begins that I also never took calculus. But we’ll get to calculus soon.

First, my fascination began with Euclid and how he systematized and synthesized Egyptian and Babylonian ideas into a coherent structure of elements that led to modern plane geometry. The dude took the wisdom of the pyramid builders and the ziggurat builders and discovered a way of looking at the world to build in new ways. That takes a hell of a mind, one I can appreciate, even at his far of a distance in time. As I studied Euclid I learned that Babylonia used a base-sixty numerical system. While the Egyptians used a base-ten system. The Egyptians were the first to utilize fractions around 1000 BC. Then, in the 5th century BC the Indians in an attempt to square the circle calculated the square root of two correctly to five decimal places. Then around 300 BC the Indians used Brahmi numerals to further refine the true ancestor to our base-ten system. At the same time the Babylonians invented the abacus.

The poor Romans didn’t do diddly for mathematics. Imagine complex calculations with Roman numerals? Screw that. But they sure used them to build roads and survey, among other things. So, kudos to them for applied mathematics. At lot of stuff happened between the Romans and the next development. Stuff which I am skipping because I’m trying to get to a simple point without using two thousand words to do so.

Something truly remarkable happened in India in 628 AD. Brahmagupta wrote a book that clearly explains and delineates the role of zero in a proton-hind Arabic script. This was positively revolutionary. He is the clear discoverer of the modern place value system of numbers, as well. Well, natural numbers, that is.

And now stuff really begins to accelerate.

In 810 the House of Wisdom is built in Baghdad for express purpose of translating Greek and Sanskrit mathematical and philosophical texts. Ten years later, in 820 a Persian from Khwarazm—the delta of the Oxus River into the former Aral Sea discovered a way to solve linear and quadratic equations. His name was al-Khwarizmi and his book was called Al Jabr—which was Europeanized into algebra. His book, once it reached Europe three and a half centuries later introduces the Hindu-Arabic numeral system that is adopted wholesale by the nascent scientific community emerging in the earliest European universities. Universities also have a Muslim Golden Age pedigree, coming from the great Persian vizier to the Seljuk Sultan of Central Asia Malik Shah, Nizam al-Mulk. His Nizamiyyas, now known as madrassas, were built all over the Seljuk realm and were the earliest versions of universities, where men came from all over to learn many different topics. Sadly, the madrassas fell into stagnation when al-Ghazali closed the gates of ijtihad (open questioning) in 1091 with his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers. The Muslim Golden Age ended that year.

Now, between the foundation of the earliest European universities and Isaac Newton, a lot of essential groundwork was laid for Ike’s work. I seek not to diminish any of that. But Newton begat not one, not two, not three but four revolutions in science: optics, mathematics, mechanics and gravity. His discovery of infinitesimal calculus is literally the base for modern rocket science as he used it to calculate and predict with stunning accuracy movements of heavenly bodies, hitherto impossible. Newton is simply the single greatest mind in the history of human science. He stands on the shoulders of some mighty men, but his accomplishments are of the ages.

Now, I come to the point. In this essay I have used a very specific word with each mathematical advance I have discussed. That word is “discovered.” I have purposefully eschewed the use of “invented.” And I have done so for a damn good reason. I am what you call a ‘mathematical Platonist.’ Said theory is defined by Wikipedia as “the form of realism that suggests mathematical entities are abstract, have no spatiotemporal or causal properties, and are eternal and unchanging.” Thus, as the Brits would say, ‘maths’ are discovered. However, the opposite of said theory is mathematical nominalism, which has its merits and is defined as, “the philosophical view that abstract mathematical objects like numbers, sets, and functions do not exist in reality, or at least do not exist as abstract entities independent of concrete things or the mind.” Thus as we Yanks say, they be invented.

So why did I write this essay? Because this discussion on the merits of the two theories is utterly fascinating to me. And if you have ten minutes and a solid high school foundation in mathematics you will most certainly understand and appreciate it. The interview engrossed me from the first question.

One final note: Ms. Jonas, the philosopher of math being interviewed says that she is 87% certain mathematical Platonism is correct, I’ll add my confidence level as about 59%. Why? Because there is some set theory ideas I simply cannot wrap my danged head around–I reckon my grey matter isn’t as big or maybe as sophisticated as Ian’s. I licked logic in college with an A+ but this set theory stuff. Good grief. The paradoxes drive me wonko! (If you get the reference add ten bonus points to your final grade.)

If you’ve read this far, and you’ve read some of my articles and most if not all of Ian’s, then you might wish to Subscribe or donate. Ian has written over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, need the money to keep the shop running. So please, consider it.

I may not be “the face that launch’d a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium,"1 but I am the face that launched a thousand tech bros to beat the shit out of each other with inflatables, and I think that’s just as powerful.

It all started because I was craving violence, so I sort of A/B tested fighting ring ideas by making posters and putting them on the street. Idea A: a “men’s fight to the death” to fix the gender ratio in SF. Idea B: a “couple’s fighting ring” to help spice up your relationship.

A friend posted Idea A on Twitter and it immediately blew up, so I felt obliged to make it real.

For Non-San-Franciscans, "The Ratio" is a common term used by tech bros to lament that there’s more men than women in their circles, and that's the sole reason why they're struggling to get any. Used in sentence: "Damn bro The Ratio at this AI-biohacking climbing party sucks" and "I can't deal with The Ratio, I need to move to New York where I will still get rejected, but at least by many more women."

However, while many men complain about The Ratio, none are creating B2B SaaS (Boy to Boy, Slaying as a Solution) ways to fix it. So I stepped up.

I contacted the SF Transbay Joint Powers Authority Bay to see if I could actually host the fight in Salesforce Park, but they respectfully declined. (Said it would cost $6,000.)

I thought it’d be funny to have the men fight shirtless, and the natural next thought was to make them oil up before they fight. You see, as a feminist, I am sick and tired of the objectification of women, and the best solution is to objectify men just as much. That way, the baseline of “objectification” is raised and relatively no one is objectified.

I’ve already made people strip (for CHARITY, it’s altruistic) so making them fight just seemed like the natural next step. Interestingly, there was a lot of overlap between the strip show and the fighting ring: the pole kittens became the ring girl/boy, there was a strong element of performance, each contender had an alias. The fighters were actually much more sexualized because they were shirtless and oiled up, whereas the strip show was surprisingly wholesome.

Serendipitously, my friend Samuel Sliman (or as you may know him, “Thomas The Spank Engine” from Strippers for Charity) had experience running a meme fighting ring. (He challenged the frontrunner of his college’s presidential race to a boxing match, and although some claim he “lost” the fight, he won the people’s hearts and earned the presidency.) Sam suggested using inflatable boxing gloves to minimize liability.

Because I am highly dedicated to my craft, we did a trial run of the duel. After getting sloshed on $1 margs at my weekly “office hours,” we went to one of those fancy gentrified parks and beat the shit out of each other.

^Me and Greta fighting, never say I don’t practice what I preach. (Violence.)

I made a playlist of appropriate music, including Kung Fu Fighting, Eye of The Tiger, the Wii Sports Theme, and songs from Pokemon, Mario, Super Smash Bros, and Naruto. I had my friends vote on the best oil for the men, and baby oil won. I later realized this may’ve been due to the Diddy meme, but by then it was too late to change.

Sffuncheap shared the event and called me a cultural renegade (I’m blushing). I found it really funny that they added so much context to the event. Like, what’s confusing you babyboy?

Day of, as we were staking out the location for the fight, we saw a huge children’s party, so we stayed far away (responsibly). We did end up near a baby shower, but that was for adults. Their gender reveal showed it was a boy, so a bunch of oiled up boys fighting nearby was a fitting peek into their future.

Patrick brought his folding table on a bike. Everybody say thank you Patrick.

People kept coming up to me and asking what the inspiration for the fight was. And I was like, “well I thought it would be funny.” I don’t understand what’s so confusing about this. It was funny - I was literally right.

Sam refereed the match, we actually showed up wearing the exact same shirt. Sam did an incredible job, everyone say thank you Sam. He strip dances, he referees, what can’t this guy do?

Our fighters’ names included:

• Daddy Bone

• The Accountant

• The Daltic Beast

• Shareholder Value

• Nico

• B2B Ass

• Nate

• Michael

• Tisslord

• Number 1

• Big Friendly

• Slamuel L. Jackson

• Amber Sucks

• Fist of Justin

• A Challenger Approaches

• Plot Twist

To be clear, these were mostly aliases made up for the fight. I do not know what their real names were, and I guess I never will.

The fighters got oiled up, and apparently this was actually useful, as it helped punches skim off the skin. Everything got really oily though, which was not a sensation I enjoyed.

The first two rounds were with inflatable gloves.

Then we had a five-way fight with pool noodles to make it to the semi-finals.

The semi-finals were with giant inflatable hammers, which unfortunately could not withstand the sheer power of the revved-up tech bros and ripped.

To give the finalists a breather, there was a “resurrection round” where the audience picked eliminated favorites to duel.

Then the final round brought back the gloves. The winner was awarded a bedazzled belt: “Ratio Champ.”

After the fight, Nick gifted the leftover baby oil to the baby shower happening nearby. It was only right. Then we let the crowd release any frustration (whether Ratio-related or not) in a free-for all. Finally, my friends and I celebrated another successful event by getting boba and burritos.

Upon reflection, I realized moving from a three-bedroom where I’d throw unhinged parties with my roommates, to a one-bedroom where I didn’t have space for parties, and therefore had to host them in public, has truly had cosmic effects on the San Francisco Bay Area.

I’m pretty tired out, so no more parties for a while. And by “a while” I mean until I think of something else that’s kinda funny, which is probably gonna be tomorrow.

Acknowledgements:

A huge thank you to all the incredible people who helped with this event. Sam referee. Patrick table-bringer. The two Ryan photographers. Ryan and Angela, the ring boy and girl. (I do not know why we had three Ryans.) Quincy, Mary, Isla, Graydon, Peter for operational support. Kristine and Ashwin the oilers. Mackenzie for moral support. And of course, the stars of the show, all 18 aforementioned men who had the courage to step up and square up. You guys are the best, thank you for your deep commitment to the bit.

Also so grateful for my friends for coming to support my stupid shit all the time, and the hundreds of strangers who took a chance on an event they saw off a flyer. I couldn’t do it without you. Or I could, but it’d just be me alone in a park, which would be way less fun and kinda weird.