Case study in the power of print: TikTok creator @jackbenedwards reaches millions with his videos, but always dreamed of seeing his work in physical form. He's now a books columnist for @EsquireUK and made a video about the thrill of tracking down a copy of the magazine.

Japanese college students read manga on tablets or in print, then were tested. The tablet readers showed heightened activity in brain regions tied to spatial processing, meaning they had to work harder to reconstruct the comic panels’ visual layout in their minds.

We evolved from an oral to written tradition because writing allows for a level of intellectual and emotional complexity that speaking does not. We shouldn’t act like the death of literacy is no big deal. People will become dumber. They already are.

Some good news: 36 percent of kids in the UK enjoy reading, a four percent increase since 2025. One in five children are now reading daily. This year is a National Year of Reading, & there’s a massive campaign afoot to get kids reading. And it’s working. We need it here, now.

Nobody is complaining loudly enough that Wikipedia is sometimes no longer even on the first page of google results. Like what the hell are we doing

My story on the "educational" games your kid is almost certainly playing in school, which often turn out to just be ripoffs of popular time-wasting iPhone games with a few multiple-choice questions bolted on: theatlantic.com/technology/2…

Worth noting that Pope Leo’s background is Augustinian. St. Augustine is the patron saint of printers.

This story is one of Lovett’s best. It’s rare that anything on Wikipedia gets a true conclusion, much less a relatively happy one where the parties agree they both made honest mistakes. Sometimes “assume good faith” works. edithistory.substack.com/p/w…

This post is an excellent example of the role of background knowledge to comprehension. You only understand it if you know the song and the singer. If you do, it’s hilarious. Consider how this reads for someone who doesn’t know the song. It’s nonsense.

The irony is that this post, which raises genuine concerns, was clearly written with ChatGPT

One year into cell phone bans, Dallas schools see 24% increase in library book checkouts. 👏👏👏 "Public school districts in Texas are almost one school year into the first statewide cellphone ban, and a North Texas school district is seeing positive impacts. Dallas ISD officials said that, district-wide, they have seen a significant increase in library book checkouts, which they largely attribute to students no longer having cellphones with them during the school day. "I started hearing, 'Oh, I'm so bored. I can't get on my phone after I do my work or during lunchtime,'" Hillcrest High School librarian Nina Canales said. "Once they lock into these stories, they don't seem to care about their phones at all." From the first day of school to March 31, 2026, the district reported an increase of more than 200,000 additional books checked out compared to the previous year. A look at the library checkouts for the previous year: 2025-2026 Total Circulation (1st day of school to March 31, 2026) – 1,084,837 2024-2025 Total circulation (1st day of school to March 31, 2025) – 872,430 Total library book checkout increase: 24.35% At Dallas ISD's Hillcrest High, students are following this trend. Canales said there were roughly 500 books checked out in the first nine weeks of the 2024-2025 school year. This school year, that number spiked to about 1,800 books. "That floored me," Canales said. "I had to re-do the report again because I was like, 'What, are you kidding me?'" Students felt the impact too. "Now that I'm busy with a bunch of work and college, I don't find myself missing my phone that much, even at home," said Yamilet Jimenez, 9th grader." By @laceybeasnews. @JonHaidt @safe_screens

We've got the myth of Narcissus all wrong. It's not a story about falling in love with yourself, it's about the dangers of being seduced by things that look human but aren't, wrongly ascribing to them human will & intelligence. Which makes it a perfect metaphor for AI.

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. —Marshall McLuhan, 1964

From the Gutenberg press to now: People still love seeing their writing in print.

i accidentally discovered one of the coolest features on the internet the Wikipedia app has a "nearby" feature that shows wikipedia articles around your location! i opened it and instantly fell into a rabbit hole of random places, local history and weird things around me try it and tell me what shows up near you

Haunted by something I read this morning in a book on the Vikings: “A society without books is ... a society without a history.” We have no idea what we’re throwing away when we abandon literacy as a culture. The rejection of reading is the birth of a new dark age.

Una generación que no lee bien tendrá más dificultades para entender política, contratos o información básica. New York Times: la caída de la lectura es un problema democrático y laboral, no solo educativo. Los propios estudiantes piden soluciones claras: más lectura real en clase, menos vídeos y atajos, estándares académicos más exigentes y límites al uso del móvil y la IA nytimes.com/2025/11/06/learn…

This is as good as everyone says it is, and to me it’s not really about losing the money, which most gamblers do; it’s about how gambling changed Coppins, and changed his relationship with the people around him. A perfectly executed piece.

For Slate, I wrote about what it's like to get a terminal cancer diagnosis when you're 42.

I can't stress enough how important it is that you buy physical books.