Cinemorphosis

Tag: books

  • Toothpaste, Technology, and the Death of the Luddite Dream

    Toothpaste, Technology, and the Death of the Luddite Dream

    A Luddite, in modern dress, is a self-declared purist who swats at technology like it’s a mosquito threatening their sense of self-agency, quality, and craft. They fear contamination—that somehow the glow of a screen dulls the soul, or that a machine’s hand on the process strips the art from the outcome. It’s a noble impulse, maybe even romantic. But let’s be honest: it’s also doomed.

    Technology isn’t an intruder anymore—it’s the furniture. It’s the toothpaste out of the tube, the guest who showed up uninvited and then installed a smart thermostat. You can’t un-invent it. You can’t unplug the century.

    And I, for one, am a fatalist about it. Not the trembling, dystopian kind. Just… resigned. Technology comes in waves—fire, the wheel, the iPhone, and now OpenAI. Each time, we claim it’s the end of humanity, and each time we wake up, still human, just a bit more confused. You can’t fight the tide with a paper umbrella.

    But here’s where things get tricky: we’re not adapting well. Right now, with AI, we’re in the maladaptive toddler stage—poking it, misusing it, letting it do our thinking while we lie to ourselves about “optimization.” We are staring down a communications tool so powerful it could either elevate our cognitive evolution… or turn us all into well-spoken mannequins.

    We are not guaranteed to adapt well. But we have no choice but to try.

    That struggle—to engage with technology without becoming technology, to harness its speed without losing our depth—is now one of the defining human questions. And the truth is: we haven’t even mapped the battlefield yet.

    There will be factions. Teams. Dogmas. Some will preach integration, others withdrawal. Some will demand toolkits and protocols; others will romanticize silence and slowness. We are on the brink of ideological trench warfare—without even knowing what colors the flags are yet.

    What matters now is not just what we use, but how we use it—and who we become in the process.

    Because whether you’re a fatalist, a Luddite, or a dopamine-chasing cyborg, one thing is clear: this isn’t going away.

    So sharpen your tools—or at least your attitude. You’re already in the arena.

  • Why Reading Is the Last Romantic Act

    Why Reading Is the Last Romantic Act


    If you take my Critical Thinking class, let me set expectations up front: I will not stand at the front of the room and lecture you into becoming an intellectual. That’s not how it works. I can’t command you to read. I can’t install curiosity like a software update.

    What I can tell you is this: the default setting is mediocrity. It’s smooth, seductive, and socially acceptable. The world—especially its algorithmic avatars—is built to exploit that setting. Platforms like OpenAI don’t just offer tools; they offer excuses. They whisper: You don’t have to think. Just prompt.

    You’ll get by on it. You’ll write tolerable essays. You might even land a job—something stable and fluorescent-lit with a breakroom fridge. But if you keep outsourcing your critical thinking to machines and your inner life to streaming platforms, you may slowly congeal into a Non-Player Character: a functionally adequate adult with no self-agency, just dopamine hits from cheap tech and cheaper opinions.

    The world needs thinkers, not task-completers.

    And that’s why I push reading—not as an obligation, but as a doorway to a higher mode of existence. Reading changes the texture of your thoughts. It exposes you to complexity you didn’t ask for and patterns of mind you didn’t inherit. But here’s the inconvenient truth: no one can make you read.

    Reading isn’t a commandment. It’s a love affair—and like any love worth having, it’s irrational, wild, and self-chosen. You don’t read because it’s good for you. You read because at some point a book wrecked you—in the best way possible. It made your brain itch, or your chest tighten, or your worldview crack open like an old floorboard.

    And that’s what I want for you. Not because it makes me feel like a good professor, but because if you don’t fall in love with ideas—on the page, in the margins, in someone else’s wild, flawed sentences—you’ll live a life someone else designed for you.

    And you’ll call it freedom.

  • The Manuscript Awakens: A Dugout Vision from the Collective Unconscious

    The Manuscript Awakens: A Dugout Vision from the Collective Unconscious

    Last night I dreamed I was striding across a wind-blown grassy knoll, the kind of landscape that smells faintly of unresolved ambitions and freshly cut ego. Out of nowhere—because where else do these things happen?—a panel of vaguely official-looking figures appeared, cloaked in bureaucratic smugness, and awarded me the managerial reins of a baseball team unlike any other: it was helmed, inexplicably yet inevitably, by Leonardo DiCaprio.

    Yes, that DiCaprio—Oscar-winner, yacht philosopher, professional man-child. He looked fantastic in cleats.

    Suddenly, the gentle slope of the grassy knoll rippled like a stage set being pulled away, and in its place emerged a full-fledged baseball diamond, etched into the earth as if by divine groundskeepers. The green gave way to precisely mowed outfield grass, bordered by crisp white chalk lines that glowed with supernatural brightness. Dugouts pushed up from the soil like subterranean bunkers, complete with splintered benches and battered Gatorade coolers. Bleachers unfolded in rows, metallic and sun-bleached, teeming with phantom spectators whose shadows twitched in anticipation. The air smelled of dust, pine tar, and something mythic.

    As I issued cryptic signals from a dugout made of dark oak and existential dread, DiCaprio tore around the bases with uncanny precision. But this wasn’t just sport. Oh no. With every base he stole, something stirred beneath the soil. From the Earth, like some hallucinatory literary harvest, lost manuscripts erupted like weeds on speed—scrolls, journals, forgotten novels. Some of them were mine, written decades ago in youthful fits of desperation and pretension. But they were no longer mine. They belonged to the collective unconscious, that vast psychic compost heap where dead dreams go to reincarnate as New York Times bestsellers or cult manifestos.

    As DiCaprio sprinted toward third, the text of the manuscripts began rewriting themselves, transforming into the ideological scripture of a new world order dictated by stolen bases and film star footwork.

    Enter Lanai, a high school friend I hadn’t seen since dial-up internet. She appeared on the dugout steps like a ghost of poor choices past and announced that she had reformed her life through the Quincy Jones Art Club, a kind of gospel-jazz cult devoted to self-mastery, syncopation, and the sacred key of B-flat minor.

    “You should join,” she said, her eyes glowing with the fervor of someone who had clearly renounced sugar, sarcasm, and casual sex.

    “I might,” I lied, “but I’m managing DiCaprio right now and the stakes are cosmically high.”

    Before she could argue, Quincy Jones himself descended like an archangel in a powder-blue zoot suit, easily seven feet tall, smelling faintly of vinyl records, Chanel Bleu, and omniscience. He shook my hand. Electricity pulsed through my forearm. His voice—equal parts gravel, genius, and benevolent threat—delivered a sermon about his artistic path: discipline, vision, excellence.

    I tried to listen. Truly. But my attention was being hijacked by the spectacle on the field: DiCaprio sliding into home as epic sentences unfurled from the ground like flaming banners, edited in real-time by forces unseen. The crowd roared, their faces blurred like a dream I was about to forget.

    And through it all, I wondered: Was I the manager, or just another rewriter of forgotten dreams?

  • No One Gets Out of Here Alive

    No One Gets Out of Here Alive

    Chapter 1 of the Timepiece Whisperer of Redondo Beach

    Late one night, I found myself piloting my car through the hushed streets of Redondo Beach, past manicured lawns and hedges trimmed with neurosis, until I arrived at the blight in paradise: a hulking, lichen-tinged Victorian heap that looked like it had been shipped in from Transylvania on a dare. This was the home of the Watch Master—a reclusive oracle to the chronometrically cursed, a man whispered about in collector circles the way children whisper about the Boogeyman.

    The Master was once a studio guitarist in the ’70s, back when coke was a food group and solos could last nine minutes. He’d since traded fretboards for bezels, amassing a fortune in wrist candy—most of it gifted by rock gods in states of manic gratitude. Yet despite his vault of horological riches, he wore only a battered G-Shock Square with a scratched acrylic face that looked like it had survived a tour in Fallujah. He wore it like a monk wears a hair shirt.

    He answered the door barefoot, his jeans collapsing around his ankles like they’d given up. A Led Zeppelin shirt sagged off his wiry frame, and his hair, silver and stubborn, was pulled back from a gleaming bald crown. His beard was a frizzled thicket, somewhere between Rasputin and an abandoned Brillo pad.

    “What’s your problem?” he asked, voice rough as gravel and just as warm.

    I didn’t flinch. “I own seven watches. That’s my limit. Any more and I spiral. Emotional collapse, obsessive thoughts, buyer’s remorse, the whole circus. But I saw a Seiko Astron—the blue-dial SSJ013J1—and now I need it. Crave it. Is there any way to prepare my psyche for an eighth watch without descending into madness?”

    He stared at me like I’d just asked if I could take up recreational black tar heroin “responsibly.”

    “You’re asking how to rationalize a relapse,” he said. “That’s like asking if there’s a polite way to punch yourself in the throat.”

    And with that, he opened the door wider and let me in.

    The Watch Master squinted at me through the porch light haze, as if sizing up a man who’d brought his own shackles and wanted help tightening them. He scratched his beard, winced like my  question had given him tinnitus, and finally spoke:

    “So let me get this straight. You’ve reached your personal watch ceiling—seven tickers, your magic number, your horological emotional support grid. And now you want to blow a hole in the hull with a satellite-synced Seiko spaceship that tells time in Tokyo, Toledo, and the twelfth ring of Saturn. And you’re asking me how to prepare your psyche for this?”

    He stepped back into the house and waved me in. “Come inside, pilgrim. I need a drink before I answer that.”

    Once in the dark-paneled den, surrounded by velvet paintings of Hendrix and a lava lamp that looked clinically depressed, he continued:

    “You don’t need an eighth watch. You need a spiritual bypass. The Seiko Astron isn’t a timepiece. It’s a cry for help dressed in sapphire crystal. You’re not telling time—you’re telling yourself a story: that the right watch will rescue you from restlessness. You’re like a man trying to fix a leaky roof with a diamond-encrusted hammer. Beautiful tool, wrong job.”

    He leaned in. “So if you must buy it, do this first: Write a eulogy for the peace of mind you once had at seven watches. Light a candle. Say goodbye to balance. Then hit ‘add to cart.’ And remember: when the remorse creeps in—and it will—just whisper to yourself what we all know in this house of horological horrors: No one gets out of here alive.”

    I repeated the Watch Master’s words, “No one gets out of here alive.” Then I said, “I was told you could help me with my problem. All I’m asking is that you help prepare my psyche for an eighth watch. I want you to help me prepare for this Seiko Astron as an Exit Watch. I heard you could do this for me. I had assurances. I gave you five hundred dollars. I was expecting more than a scolding.”

    The Watch Master squinted at me through a cloud of sandalwood incense, scratched his sun-damaged scalp, and said:

    “Five hundred dollars gets you a scolding. A thousand gets you a metaphor. If you want catharsis, enlightenment, and a stable seven-watch rotation, you’re looking at premium pricing. And as for an Exit Watch?” —he let out a low chuckle— “That’s like asking a bourbon addict for one last glass to sober up.”

    He leaned closer, the scratched G-Shock catching a glint of porch light. “You don’t want an Exit Watch. You want absolution. And I don’t do sacraments—I do timekeeping.”

    “So you want more money.”

    “Of course. The five hundred was for the privilege to just see me. If you want an Exit Watch, that will cost you.”

    “The Astron is close to two grand.”

    “Peanuts. If you want to close this deal, pay me five grand, and I’ll make your troubles go away.”

    I was desperate. “Venmo or Paypal,” I said.

    “Now we’re talking.”

  • The Mole Woman Prophecy and the Gospel of Groats

    The Mole Woman Prophecy and the Gospel of Groats

    Last night I dreamed I was a mid-level drone in a sleek, glassy corporate tower, the kind where the espresso is artisanal but the moral rot is industrial grade. My friend John, a man of questionable appetites, had conducted an ill-advised workplace affair with a pale, mole-flecked woman who looked like Tina Louise if she’d been exhumed from a Victorian tomb. The office scorned her, and by association, John had become persona non grata. Worse, the affair had left him with a gastrointestinal affliction—proof, apparently, of both his guilt and poor judgment.

    My boss, a mustached bureaucrat whose entire personality could be summed up as “nonstick,” summoned me to his office. With the casual menace of a man ordering a sandwich, he instructed me to write up John. Not for the affair, mind you—that would be too human—but for the stomach condition. It was, he explained, an external manifestation of moral decay. HR, he added blandly, would now monitor John’s “future movements.” Orwell would’ve blushed.

    Instead of complying, I wandered over to the mole-riddled femme fatale. As we spoke, her moles seemed to multiply like a corrupted Photoshop clone stamp tool—deepening, darkening, replicating. I felt a twinge of pity, but mostly revulsion, and an impending fear that I’d soon be ordered to file a medical report on her as the first step in her “quiet dismissal.”

    I excused myself and found John, whose flat affect suggested either Zen detachment or full-blown delusion. He shrugged off the HR inquisition and announced, with the conviction of a man four bourbons deep, that the boss would soon be fired and that he would lead the company into a new era. He was the messiah of office reform, apparently, and his gastrointestinal bug was just a minor martyrdom.

    Then I woke up. I padded to the kitchen, made my usual overnight buckwheat groats, and watched in disgust as the microwave turned into a groats splatter crime scene. I was done. No more splatter. It was time for a change. A prophet had spoken—probably me—and I obeyed by ordering a $145 Staub cast iron cocotte. Sure, it’s wildly expensive for boiling breakfast grains, but I now had divine justification: a dream packed with plague, prophecy, and intestinal punishment.

    Sometimes, self-delusion makes the best retail therapy.

  • Lot’s Wife Was Human—And So Are You

    Lot’s Wife Was Human—And So Are You

    The story of Lot’s wife is usually trotted out as a biblical “gotcha”—a cautionary tale about disobedience, attachment, and the fatal cost of looking back. But really, it’s much darker, much richer. It’s about the soul-crushing gravity of nostalgia, the seductive pull of the past, and how the refusal to fully commit to forward motion—spiritually, morally, existentially—can leave us frozen, calcified, halfway between escape and surrender.

    Lot’s wife is never named in the Genesis account. She’s just “Lot’s wife,” a narrative afterthought, a supporting character reduced to a cautionary statue. And yet her fate is more memorable than her husband’s, etched into the landscape as a monument to hesitation.

    Fortunately, Midrashic literature gives her a name—Ado, or more memorably to my ear, Edith. Maybe it’s the residue of All in the Family, but Edith conjures a kind of moral warmth: a woman who feels deeply, who wants to do right, but is also tragically susceptible to emotion and memory. I prefer Edith to “Lot’s wife” not for historical accuracy, but for dignity. Edith feels human, conflicted, real.

    I don’t think Edith turned around because she was vain or shallow. I think she turned because she was haunted. She turned because the past was more than rubble—it was love, memories, people. Her heart was a complex web of longing, and it snagged her. The salt wasn’t a punishment. It was a crystallization of what happens when our nostalgia outweighs our conviction.

    And let’s be honest: Who among us doesn’t have some briny lump of regret weighing us down? Some internal salt pillar we’ve built in the shape of a younger self we can’t stop worshiping?

    Our culture is Edith’s playground. Social media, advertising, and even the algorithms know exactly how to pander to the Edith within. I can’t scroll without being invited into some “Golden Age of Bodybuilding” time warp: vintage photos of Arnold, Zane, Platz, Mentzer; protein powder reboots; playlists that reek of adolescent testosterone and gym chalk. Jefferson Starship and Sergio Oliva, side by side. It’s like being invited to embalm my past and celebrate its eternal youth. I can join message boards and talk shop with other proud monuments to vanished glory, all of us reenacting the same ritual: remembering what life used to feel like. Not what it is.

    This, I suspect, is what it means to turn to salt. Not just to long for the past, but to despise the present. To dig our heels into a world that no longer fits and spit at progress as if it betrayed us. To canonize a version of ourselves that no longer exists, then try to live in its shadow.

    But maybe Edith’s not just a warning. Maybe she’s a mirror. A deeply flawed, deeply human figure who reminds us that the instinct to look back isn’t evil—it’s inevitable. And maybe we don’t conquer that instinct so much as we recognize it, name it, and learn when to say: Enough. That life was real, and it was mine. But I’m walking forward now.

    Or at least trying to.

  • The Loneliness Loop: Meghan Daum and the Limits of Solitude

    The Loneliness Loop: Meghan Daum and the Limits of Solitude

    I’m working my way through The Catastrophe Hour, Meghan Daum’s latest collection of personal essays. Now in her mid-fifties, Daum is unapologetically single and childless by design, having long ago decided that marriage and parenting weren’t roles she could convincingly—or willingly—perform. Much of her work is a dispatch from the front lines of solitude. And she’s damn good at it.

    What Daum does better than most is forge an instant intimacy with her reader. Her essays feel like front porch conversations at dusk—no performance, no agenda, just two adults quietly deconstructing the wreckage of modern life. Her voice evokes the same soulful, offhand brilliance I admire in Sigrid Nunez’s novels: smart without pretense, vulnerable without begging.

    But by the halfway mark, the essays begin to blur. There’s a tonal and thematic sameness that settles in—like the ambient hum of a refrigerator you only notice when it stops. The introspective loop tightens. The sharp lens that once turned mundane moments into epiphanies starts to feel like someone narrating their week out loud after too many days alone.

    There’s the grief over dead dogs. The endless parsing of domestic minutiae. The architectural dream house that never quite materializes. And those fragmented, overstimulated city-life encounters that feel less like essays and more like repurposed Substack entries. It’s not that these topics lack merit—it’s that, in aggregate, they start to feel like what happens when no one interrupts you for too long.

    Now, I say this as a card-carrying member of the Navel-Gazers Guild. I recognize the signs. I know the thrill of dissecting one’s inner weather systems for an imaginary audience. So I don’t say this to judge Daum, but to observe that the limitations of a fully interior life—however self-aware—do begin to show.

    Still, dismissing Daum’s collection as mere navel-gazing would be both lazy and wrong. Her prose is laced with hard-earned wisdom and an acid wit that’s as refreshing as it is unsparing. When she hits, she hits hard—and truthfully. And that, more than novelty or plot, is why I keep turning the pages.

  • The Gold and Purple Pyramids at the Gates of Heaven

    The Gold and Purple Pyramids at the Gates of Heaven

    Last night, I dreamed I lived in heaven—and like most people blessed beyond comprehension, I had absolutely no idea.

    The dream began in a hectic classroom, as these things often do. I was teaching at a strange college campus. The students were more postgrad in their maturity and engagement than freshman—mature, sharp, and fully caffeinated on the joy of learning.

    We were deep in discussion, when I glanced out the window and saw rain falling in soft sheets. I drifted, just for a second, and in that brief lapse, the class was commandeered—gracefully—by one of my more opinionated students, Tim Miller, moonlighting as a podcaster and self-appointed co-professor.

    Tim, without missing a beat, told everyone to take out the assigned blue textbook. The expensive one. The one I myself had never read. I looked at the book with the guilt of a host who’s never tasted his own hors d’oeuvres. Trying to recover, I asked what they thought. They said it was “okay”—the academic kiss of death. I nodded solemnly and was mercifully saved by the end of class.

    I looked at the exit and saw a nearsighted colleague half my age pushing a fleet of book carts. I offered to help. He kindly accepted my offer—but by the time I reached the carts, he had finished everything himself. He waved goodbye, like a benevolent young professor who didn’t need me after all.

    As I walked through the corridor, I spotted something. A green coffee mug I’d abandoned earlier on a table, shimmering like a forgotten relic. I scooped it up and raced across campus in the rain, placing it delicately on the windowsill of the library. Two librarians emerged, eyes wide with wonder, as if I’d returned the Ark of the Covenant. They smiled as if I’d done something sacred.

    Onward. The rain kept falling, warm and tropical, more blessing than burden. I reached for my phone–the same emerald green as the coffee mug–now coated in fine beach sand. I frantically wiped it clean, restoring it to its gleaming perfection.

    I wasn’t driving. I never did. I preferred walking the five miles home, savoring the trek. In the distance, my residence came into view: three mountain-sized pyramids rising into the mist, woven from purple and gold stone, arranged in a mesmerizing zigzag pattern. I’d always loved purple—no surprise there—but for the first time, I saw the gold properly. I normally detest gold. Too garish. But this gold? This gold was alive. Deep, radiant, humming with mystery.

    I realized, with a kind of thudding wonder, that I lived there. Among the pyramids. In the mist. In heaven. And somehow, until that moment, I’d never truly seen it.

    Then I woke up, soaked not in rain but contrition, and wondered: How much of my real life do I miss by failing to see what’s already shimmering around me? What marvels have I demoted to the mundane? What if heaven isn’t a destination but a perception we keep forgetting to use?

  • Solitude Is My Boyfriend (And He Doesn’t Snore)

    Solitude Is My Boyfriend (And He Doesn’t Snore)

    In her essay “Same Life, Higher Rent,” Meghan Daum compares her life in 1997 to her life in 2017 and reaches a deflating, oddly liberating conclusion: nothing has changed. At 47 and freshly divorced, she’s more or less the same person she was at 27. Still single. Still chasing deadlines. Still drinking coffee, poking at takeout sushi, and trying to keep multiple Word docs open on her MacBook while ignoring the siren song of Twitter and low-stakes Amazon purchases.

    There is one glaring difference: her rent has skyrocketed and her cognitive bandwidth has shriveled. She estimates she’s lost 70% of her brainpower to the Digital Distraction Era. So yes—same life, dumber brain, higher rent. It’s a Nabokovian joke with a Billy Collins twist: Picnic, Lightning, but with Seamless orders and browser tabs.

    Like her earlier essay “The Broken-In World,” Daum doesn’t frame divorce as failure but as an act of radical return. Not regression—recognition. The performance is over. She’s stopped cosplaying as someone else’s version of a wife. The single life isn’t a punishment or a holding pattern—it’s her set point. The gravitational center she was orbiting all along.

    Coordinating a calendar with another adult, she admits, feels like a hostage negotiation. She loves living alone. She loves eating whatever she wants, whenever she wants, without anyone asking if they should defrost chicken. She can travel at the drop of a hat without shoving someone else’s life off balance. She’s not anti-love. She just refuses to bulldoze her rhythms for the sake of joint Costco runs.

    Post-divorce, she’s dated—kind, smart, well-meaning men—but none of them stood a chance against the one lover she can’t quit: solitude. She rarely goes on second dates. She doesn’t need romantic sabotage. She’s got peace and a dog. Who needs more?

    And let’s be clear: this position wasn’t won in a raffle. She fought for it. Marriage, divorce, reinvention. She earned this life through blood, paperwork, and self-inventory. She’s not about to crawl back into the foxhole of emotional compromise.

    Reading Daum, I’m reminded of a perfectly-cut line from Rodney Dangerfield: “You’re born a certain way and that’s it. You don’t change.” I think about that more than I should. At 63, I’m not all that different than I was at six. Moody, brooding one day. Goofy and loud the next. There’s a streak of isolato in me too. My family tolerates it. They let me take naps and skip amusement park trips that sound like air-conditioned nightmares.

    I’m probably not a perfect husband. But we make it work—me and this life. Me and my Daum-ian disposition. The marriage lasts, not because I’ve changed, but because we’ve all made our peace with who I am. And who I’ve always been.

  • Hot Pockets, CliffNotes, and the Death of Deep Reading

    Hot Pockets, CliffNotes, and the Death of Deep Reading

    Before the Internet turned my brain into a beige slush of browser tabs and dopamine spikes, I used to read like a man possessed. In the early ’90s, I’d lounge by the pool of my Southern California apartment, sun-blasted and half-glossed with SPF 8, reading books with a kind of sacred monastic intensity. A. Alvarez’s The Savage God. Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther. James Twitchell’s Carnival Culture. James Hillman and Michael Ventura’s rant against the therapy-industrial complex–We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse. Sometimes I’d interrupt the intellectual ecstasy to spritz my freshly tanned abs with water—because I was still vain, just literate.

    Reading back then was as natural as breathing. As Joshua Rothman points out in his New Yorker essay, “What’s Happening to Reading?”, there was a time when the written word was not merely consumed—it was inhaled. Books were companions. Anchors. Entire weekends were structured around chapters. But now? Reading is another tab, sandwiched between the news, a TikTok video of a dog on a skateboard, and an unopened Instacart order.

    Rothman nails the diagnosis. Reading used to be linear, immersive, and embodied—your hands on a book, your mind in a world. Now we shuttle between eBooks, PDFs, Reddit threads, and Kindle highlights like neurotic bees skimming data nectar. A “reading session” might include swiping through 200-word essays while eating a Hot Pocket and half-watching a documentary about narco penguins on Netflix. Our attention is fractured, our engagement ritualized but hollow. And yes, the statistics back it up: the percentage of Americans who read at least one book a year dropped from 55% to 48%. Not a cliff, but a slow, sad slide.

    Some argue it’s not worth panicking over—a mere 7% drop. I disagree. As a college instructor, I’ve seen the change up close. Students don’t read long-form books anymore. Assign Frederick Douglass and half the class will disappear into thin air—or worse, generate AI versions of Douglass quotes that never existed. Assign a “safe” book and they might skim the Wikipedia entry. We’ve entered an age where the bar for literacy is whether someone has read more than one captioned infographic per week.

    Rothman tries to be diplomatic. He argues that we’re not consuming less—we’re just consuming differently. Podcasts, YouTube explainers, TikTok essayists—this is the new literacy. And fine. I live in that world, too. I mainline political podcasts like they’re anti-anxiety meds. Most books, especially in the nonfiction space, do feel like padded TED Talks that should have stayed 4,000 words long. The first chapter dazzles; the next nine are a remix of the thesis until you feel gaslit into thinking you’re the problem.

    But now the reading apocalypse has a new beast in the basement: AI.

    We’ve entered the uncanny phase where the reader might be an algorithm, the author might be synthetic, and the glowing recommendation comes not from your friend but from a language model tuned to your neuroses. AI is now both the reader and the reviewer, compressing thousand-page tomes into bullet points so we can decide whether to fake-read them for a book club we no longer attend.

    Picture this: you’re a podcaster interviewing the author of a 600-page brick of a book. You’ve read the first 20 pages, tops. You ask your AI: “Give me a 5-page summary and 10 questions that make me sound like a tortured genius.” Boom—you’re suddenly a better interviewer than if you’d actually read the book. AI becomes your memory, your ghostwriter, your stand-in intelligence. And with every assist, your own reading muscles atrophy. You become fit only for blurbs and bar graphs.

    Or take this scenario: you’re a novelist. You’ve published 12 books. Eleven flopped. One became a cult hit. Your publisher, desperate for cash, wants six sequels. AI can generate them faster, better, and without your creative hand-wringing. You’re offered $5 million. Do you let the machine ghostwrite your legacy, or do you die on the sword of authenticity? Before you answer, consider how often we already outsource our thinking to tools. Consider how often you’ve read about a book rather than the book itself.

    Even the notion of a “writer” is dissolving. When I was in writing classes, names like Updike, Oates, Carver, and Roth loomed large—literary athletes who brawled on live television and feuded in magazines. Writers were gladiators of thought. Now they’re functionally obsolete in the eyes of the market, replaced by a system that values speed, virality, and AI-optimized titles.

    Soon, we won’t pick books. AI will pick them for us. It will scan our history, cross-reference our moods, and deliver pre-chewed summaries tailored to our emotional allergies. It will tell us what to read, what to think about it, and which hot takes to regurgitate over brunch. We’ll become readers in name only—participants in a kind of literary cosplay, where the act of reading is performed but never truly inhabited.

    Rothman’s essay is elegant, insightful, and wrong in one key respect: it shouldn’t be titled What’s Happening to Reading? It should be called What’s Happening to Reading, Writing, and the Human Mind? Because the page is still there—but the reader might not be.