Off the Books

Read This To The End

I’m going to keep this short. If I don’t, you won’t read it. That’s at least what one can glean from reading (or at least skimming or asking ChatGPT to summarize) the latest book stats from the National Endowment for the Arts. If you’ve been procrastinating when it comes to getting around to finally writing that novel, you might want to skip it altogether. “Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet. The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.” (At least this explains my book sales.) Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The End of Reading Is Here. “And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.” (America is getting close to be postAmerican, too.)

+ It’s not just that people are reading fewer books. The way certain books become hits has also changed. And that change has circled back to how books get written and which books get published. It’s out with the librarian and in with TikTok. “Whether a given book is well written, structurally ambitious, or intellectually dense does not seem to matter much on BookTok. In fact, a book being poorly written is not at all an impediment to a recommendation as long as it otherwise fulfills the requisite tropes and themes set out by its genre expectations, which are precisely what engineer those strong emotional reactions. Even when a book is considered ‘cringe,’ ‘flat and formulaic,’ or ‘written like an 11 year old,’ BookTok users may ‘still love it with all [their] heart’ because it manages to achieve the chief objectives of its genre conceit.” The New Yorker: The Rise of the ‘As Seen on TikTok’ Sticker.

2

Dropping a Deuce on the Truce

“I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore ... They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people ... If they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” And with that, Trump announces that the ceasefire with Iran is basically over. (Trump also confused Iran with Japan and Zelensky with Putin during the discussion. So maybe everyone should keep their defenses on alert.) Trump also lashed out at Spain, saying he’s going to cut off all trade with them. In a whiplash-inducing shift, Trump praised Zelensky and said he will let Ukraine build Patriot missiles. (This definitely gives one the sense that US intel is advising Trump that Ukraine has the upper hand in the war. Or maybe there’s a bribe involved.) Here’s the latest from The Guardian.

+ “Mark Carney swept to power on a backlash to President Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st state, which many Americans took for mere shtick. But for the new prime minister, reading intelligence reports detailing the gravity of the crisis, it was a breaking point. In private phone conversations with Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, Trump had threatened to scrap the 1908 agreement delineating their shared border. ‘I tear that up and your whole country unravels,’ Trump told Trudeau in one call.” WSJ (Gift Article): The Canadian Who Steered Europe Away From the U.S.

+ Europe may be moving away from the US government, but it’s not moving away from US software. NATO quietly puts trust in Palantir to move troops and identify targets. “If Russia moves its elite soldiers from the 76th Guards Air Assault Division closer to the border with Estonia, Palantir’s system will flag it. Military officers will be alerted to vulnerabilities in the alliance’s force structure across Europe, and which troops to move from where to fend off a Russian attack. At any one time the system knows how many troops NATO has, where and when, so it can advise what to do next.” (The next world war will be software vs software, with humans caught in the crossfire.)

3

Bacterial Inflection

“Scientists refer to this vast, unexplored terrain as biology’s dark matter. Our bodies are home to more bacteria — on our skin, up our noses, in our guts and mouths and around our genitals — than there are stars in the Milky Way. These microbes have evolved not only with us but inside us, and scientists who study them closely say that hardly a biological process or system exists in which they do not play a role. They helped create our digestive systems and our immune systems. They influence the size and shape of our bodies. At least some research suggests that they also affect our brains, moods, personalities and behaviors. And yet, most of them have still not been identified, let alone studied.” NYT Magazine (Gift Article): Our Bacteria Are Talking. We’ve Just Begun to Understand What They’re Saying. (You can be pretty sure they’re talking shit.)

+ The NYT discovered regularity. Should I Be Taking Psyllium Husk? (For Jewish sons, chugging a first glass of Metamucil with their fathers is a right of passage—it’s like a Talmudic version of playing catch in the backyard.)

4

Berried Treasure

“In just the last decade, berries have completed the journey from fragile, local, seasonal treat to worldwide refrigerator staple and marketing juggernaut ... Most of that growth has been driven by Driscoll’s, a $7 billion California company that began as a multifamily farm in 1904, patented its first strain of strawberries in 1958 and is still controlled by family members. In 1989, its board made what the company calls the Meadowood Declaration, a resolution that seemed preposterous at the time: to make all four berries available, in every season, in every part of the world. Today the company is the undisputed global market leader, shipping four billion containers of highly perishable fruit across 60 countries each year. (The company developed its signature hinged, ventilated plastic clamshell in the 1990s.) According to Circana, a market research firm, Driscoll’s is now the second-highest-earning brand in American supermarkets, behind only Coca-Cola.” Why Are Berries Everywhere, in Every Season? Driscoll’s.

5

Extra, Extra

Chain Yanked: “The global economy is set to slow sharply in 2026 after the war with Iran disrupted energy supply chains and triggered a fresh bout of inflation.” (And the IMF issued this warning before today’s announcement that the truce is potentially off.)

+ K Stop: “’Oh no,’ she recalled the director saying upon hearing the child’s name. The parents, the director said, had declined the vitamin K injection newborns routinely receive to help blood clot. Without it, infants are vulnerable to spontaneous bleeding.” As Parents Reject Vitamin K Shots, Some Babies Develop Devastating Bleeding.

+ Passing Fancy: 30 million people watched USMNT-Belgium, making it the most-watched soccer match in U.S. history. (For comparison, the NBA Finals deciding game drew about 24.5 million viewers.)

+ British Invasion: “I remember thinking to myself: My goodness, how are journalists ever going to come down off this high … the adrenaline roller-coaster ride of such big news almost every day? How are they ever going to return to engaging with dreary minutiae of NHS reform, when we’re giving them such big stories all the time? And I remember genuinely thinking this feels consequential. And dreadful.” How smartphones (and Brexit) broke British politics.

+ In a Rutte: A Danish reporter asked a question to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that should probably be asked of a few hundred American politicians as well. “Mark, you sit next to Donald Trump in moments where he talks about conquering Greenland, talked about lashing out at allies like Spain, starting trade wars—things that [don’t] seem like the old Mark Rutte would approve of. Does this have any effect on your self-respect when you sit next to him like that and say nothing?” (Spoiler alert: Nah.)

+ No Pitt Stop: The Pitt, Hacks, Widow’s Bay, Pluribus, Beef, and DTF St. Louis are among the leaders in this year’s Emmy noms. Here are some snubs and surprises.

+ Cream Sinks to the Bottom: “The Covid-19 pandemic had supercharged America’s snacking habit: Some 70% of consumers were eating at least two per day, Smucker said. Buying the owner of Ding Dongs and Donettes gave the jam-and-jelly maker entry into a $65 billion market for snacks. Smucker had beat out other suitors for Hostess, most notably General Mills. Three years later, the deal isn’t tasting quite so sweet.” There are a lot of interesting reasons Why Smucker’s $5 Billion Bet on the Twinkie Flopped.

6

Bottom of the News

“Everyone has a strategy so particular to their concerns that following someone else’s might not always work for you. In the end, the challenge and the reward of the buffet are exactly the same: In a limited time, with endless distractions, you must figure out what you really want.” NYT: The Disappearing Las Vegas Buffets Hold a Mirror to the American Soul. (Better than a mirror to the body after I go to one of those things.)

+ Two teens learn the hard way not to do toy gun drive-bys from a Waymo. (Cut to the scene where the other guys in the prison yard ask, “So, what are you in for?”)