91–100 of 349 posts
“A Clockwork Orange” as “Old English” is an amusing anecdote, but it might be worth noting that the novel is written in deliberately nonstandard English mixing in Russian words, so it might be nontrivial to read for people lacking interpolation skills. In the first paragraph, e.g., there is: > There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Koro…
I read more than ever, but Substack is taking a sizable share of the pie whereas lit and non-fiction is now my late evening. I don't do the audiobook thing, though I understand that has become increasingly popular yet not really given much credence. Desire might be theoretically limitless, but time and attention is not. Time I spend reading is time I'm not consuming endless short-form videos. People have gotten hooke…
We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read. Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. Mor…
Programming probably is more intellectually stimulating than reading fiction novels.
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It's true; I also started reading the comments before clicking the article. Show of hands?
>Of course, the new republic was not always a haven for sober analysis. The Founding Fathers attacked their enemies in the papers, spreading lies to incite the public against their opponents. One ally of Thomas Jefferson’s called John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
Even as the author points out people are reading more, he continues to conflate books with reading - and not just that but reading specifically physical books (referring to his stats around book ownership). The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t. The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form…
> The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t. > The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction. You're in good company. Sam Bankman-Freid: I would never read a book. I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever wo…
Don’t have to read a book on every US president to understand what happened during the Reagan administration. And if I’m primarily interested in the Cold War, I can focus on that subject and skip out on when Reagan was governor of California, or how he met his wife.
More than that I can get information from a variety of sources, including ones that disagree with each other and have different perspectives. That has absolutely enormous value when trying to comprehend something new…and isn’t often available in a single book.
You still can’t be lazy. Laziness is antithetical to truly acquiring knowledge. But it definitely can’t only come from a book.
I refuse to believe that the decline of our education system is some inevitable, intractable problem.
Decline since when? A few hundred years ago most people were illiterate farmers.
Even today, most talking about literacy rates are using a very high level read skills to make things look bad, when most people can read just fine for the normal level things are written in. I'm near illiterate if you only test me on medical papers.
We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read. Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. Mor…
Can you recommend me a book to read?
https://devoneriksen.com/products/theft-of-fire-orbital-spac...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cinema is dying? Hollywood is on track to have its best year since 2019. Where do people come up with this stuff?
Inflation adjusted outcomes and overall ticket sales down 30-40% Overall ticket sales Globally are down 46% since 2000. Please learn to tell financial engineering headlines from reality.
>Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most of the news are not worth reading. I listen to news when eating, and I am very glad I don't have to waste my reading span on this crap.