Hello and happy Tuesday! Today I’m excited to feature our household’s favorite books of July — it was a good month for everyone. And with the interviews and essays I’ve published, it’s been a while since I’ve featured some sharable, clickable, binge-able links. So today I’m sharing a bunch of ‘em that’ve been stacking up in my Notes app.
That Ian Bogost piece in The Atlantic is mind-boggling. Here is a man who has so little imagination that he cannot *conceive* of what people did with their idle time before smart phones. It's telling that his limited examples include "pace, sulk, or stew" and never, for example, *talking* to the people around him, or reading a newspaper on the subway, or just letting yourself be bored for ten g-d- minutes. He says "I cannot overemphasize how little there was to do before we all had smartphones." And this is supposed to be a bad thing?
I've been reading the extensive research Jonathan Haidt has been offering on his Substack, and it is sobering: smart phones have played a disastrous role in affecting our mental health, attention spans, social cohesion, political comity and more. These are the effects of things smart phones enable us to "do" all the time, in lieu of boredom. That Bogost would subject us to all of that simply so that *he* doesn't have to ever be bored... what a horrible, tragically circumscribed worldview. To paraphrase Dr. Zoidberg, "His opinion is bad and he should feel bad."
Great bunch of books. I was lucky to get an ARC of The Covenant of Water and was able to read it well before release. I loved it and it also helped that I happen to live in Kerala, the land the story is set in. The descriptions, the history and the geography is authentic and not made up at all.
Another book that I read from the collection is Dorian Grey. Wonderful allegorical tale that has implications for ages.
That Ian Bogost piece in The Atlantic is mind-boggling. Here is a man who has so little imagination that he cannot *conceive* of what people did with their idle time before smart phones. It's telling that his limited examples include "pace, sulk, or stew" and never, for example, *talking* to the people around him, or reading a newspaper on the subway, or just letting yourself be bored for ten g-d- minutes. He says "I cannot overemphasize how little there was to do before we all had smartphones." And this is supposed to be a bad thing?
I've been reading the extensive research Jonathan Haidt has been offering on his Substack, and it is sobering: smart phones have played a disastrous role in affecting our mental health, attention spans, social cohesion, political comity and more. These are the effects of things smart phones enable us to "do" all the time, in lieu of boredom. That Bogost would subject us to all of that simply so that *he* doesn't have to ever be bored... what a horrible, tragically circumscribed worldview. To paraphrase Dr. Zoidberg, "His opinion is bad and he should feel bad."
Scythe sounds dope as hell.
Great bunch of books. I was lucky to get an ARC of The Covenant of Water and was able to read it well before release. I loved it and it also helped that I happen to live in Kerala, the land the story is set in. The descriptions, the history and the geography is authentic and not made up at all.
Another book that I read from the collection is Dorian Grey. Wonderful allegorical tale that has implications for ages.
Cheers...
Thanks for the plug, Jeremy!