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In an era of split attention, there is more than one type of ADHD
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Literary Looters 💰🤑 Book Bingo Discussions | October 2025 BTRC
In an era of split attention, there is more than one type of ADHD
For nine nights The Goddess fought.
Each night she defeated one demon
On the first night she quelled Kama, the demon of Lust
On the second she extinguished Krodha, the demon of Anger
Then on the third she dispelled the demon of Attraction, Moha
Then she shattered Lobha, the demon of Greed
In the fifth night She came face to face with the demon Mada, and vanquished Hubris.
On the sixth night she confronted the swirling demon of Jealousy, Matsara and defeated it
Then still smiling with the energy of Beauty,she went forward and smote the Ugliness of Swartha, the demon of Selfishness
On the eight night she killed Anyaya, injustice
On the ninth night using only her kindness she banished Amanavata, the dreadful demon of Cruelty
Then on the morning after the ninth night, She was about to rest when She realised that her most difficult foe was upon Her.
She sat in the Lotus position laid down all her weapons and with a gentle sigh and a quiet smile, She dissolved the final demon. Ahankara, Her ego.
Navratri has started
May all your demons be conquered
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The next global disaster may be triggered by a catastrophic eruption. How can we prepare for the fire beneath our feet?
What Happens If No One Reads
With AI able to quickly summarize everything from self-help books to great novels, we need to remind ourselves why we read in the first place.
By Spencer Klavan
No one reads anymore. This is something that teachers of literature like me are always saying. “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect,” wrote the scholar of literacy Martha Maxwell in 1979. But more and more, educators are finding that the last few years have been meaningfully different. Students are showing up at even high-end schools having never read a novel cover to cover. Columbia literature professor Nicholas Dames told The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch that his students “struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.” Last month, as students returned to school, a new study made headlines because it found that the number of Americans who read for pleasure has dropped an astonishing 40 percent since the start of the century.
As a college teacher, I’ve noticed this trend too. My students are perfectly earnest, interested in the world, and even willing to take it on faith when I tell them it’s important to do the assigned reading. They’ve heard throughout their lives that reading is an important component of their future success. But many of them have never gotten much personal enjoyment out of it or seen for themselves what a book can give them that a Wikipedia entry can’t deliver more quickly. Covid school closures probably accelerated the problem. AI chatbots threw it into hyperdrive by offering on-demand, made-to-order, correct-enough summaries of (and essays about) any book you can google. But all ChatGPT really did was intensify our growing need to ask the question: Why read? What is it about sitting with a book, a quintessential experience of civilized life until very recently, that can’t be automated or replaced?
The strange thing is that, once upon a time, professors worried that reading would dull the mind, in the same way we now worry that screens will. In the fourth century BCE—shortly after it became trendy for the chic philosophers of Athens to sell and distribute written copies of their lectures to the elite young strivers of their day—Plato wrote a dialogue, Phaedrus, in which Socrates grouses that gadgets like papyrus are making students lazy. He talks about written texts as if they were a kind of external hard drive for the mind, retaining information so that you don’t have to. He even dreams up a myth in which one of the gods frets that humans will rely on writing to augment their powers of recollection, and that “this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not exercise their own memory.”
You can almost picture the Library of Alexandria as the ancient version of a cloud server bank somewhere out by Palo Alto, housing the sum total of recorded knowledge so that humanity doesn’t have to trouble itself with remembering.
The obvious irony is that Plato made this complaint in writing. The literary form he pioneered—the philosophical dialogue—is a way of using text for a different purpose than simple information storage. Dialogues were Plato’s way of recreating, in written form, the experience of conversation and intellectual exchange. You get into a relationship with the book and its characters. The experience—of reading it, of puzzling over it, of returning to it after a day or a year or a lifetime of reflection—becomes the point.
What Grok could never have done is prompt the recollection that arose in me from having spent a lifetime with books like Middlemarch—my inkling that this thought I was having was one I shared with a brilliant woman, long dead.
When Plato was a young man, the comic playwright Aristophanes produced his Frogs, in which the god Dionysus mentions offhand that he once passed the time when he was supposed to be on naval duty reading the text of another play, Euripides’s Andromeda. This is probably one of our earliest depictions in Western literature of someone reading alone for pleasure, imagining the characters striving and suffering and speaking in the mind’s eye. It’s a different thing entirely from using books as data dumps.
This other kind of reading—as a means of human connection rather than an information delivery system—has always struck some people as frivolous. Even in the 19th-century heyday of the European novel, fiction was often dismissed as a mere pastime, more reminiscent of Dionysus slacking off on his ship than of budding rhetoricians training in the art of statecraft. There’s a scene in George Eliot’s Middlemarch where Fred Vincy, dreamy brother of the rather shallow Rosamond, sits reading while his mother chatters about his “studies.” “Fred’s studies are not very deep,” interjects Rosamond, “he is only reading a novel.”
Of course, by dropping that line into her own novel, Eliot is giving her readers the exact same sort of wink Plato gave us in the Phaedrus. In some ways, the novel was the modern inheritor of the philosophical dialogue: the kind of writing whose whole point was getting to spend time with the characters, the kind that insisted on being lived and imagined rather than mined for facts or life advice. People who read truly great literature for its own sake, wrote C.S. Lewis, find that “their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before.”
And this may be the only kind of reading whose worth is not currently being replaced by machines. The self-help life hacks can be summarized, short-circuited, and then dispensed with. A novel cannot.
When I set out to write the paragraphs above, I woke up with that nagging sense of recollection that every lifelong reader knows. Somewhere—was it Middlemarch? David Copperfield?—there was a scene where a character says something like “she’s (or he’s) only reading a novel.” But I couldn’t quite place it. So I asked Grok. A perfect use case: It confirmed my hunch and led me back to Middlemarch, where I found the quote. That’s the kind of value AI can provide. It can outdo almost any other current tool for streamlining whatever fact-gathering task you would once have had to accomplish with a card catalog, or an encyclopedia, or a search engine.
What Grok could never have done, though, is prompt the recollection that arose in me from having spent a lifetime with books like Middlemarch—my inkling that this thought I was having was one I shared with a brilliant woman, long dead. Above all, Grok could never have given me what Eliot does in the moment right after Fred’s sister carps at him about his reading habits: “Fred drew his mother’s hand down to his lips, but said nothing.” That utterly real gesture of silent acceptance, his irritation conquered by the domestic mercies of ordinary love—that’s the kind of thing novels offer that summaries can’t.
This is what I tell my students when I try to explain to them why they can’t outsource their memories or their homework to a souped-up predictive text program. They will be constantly nudged and tempted to do so—OpenAI already offers students various discounts and free promos for its premium service, clearly hoping to encourage the habit of relying on ChatGPT for all manner of things. It will be up to the new generation to decide which tasks they want to delegate to the machines. But if they choose reading, they will have cheated themselves terribly. The art of really taking in literature is one of the great liberal arts—it’s an act of pure freedom, something you do for no other reason than to do it.
It may be a dying art. There is now a whole genre of social media posts about how to extract the value from books without reading them. “Reading books is now a waste of time,” wrote Davie Fogarty, whose bio on X credits him with “$850m in Shopify ecommerce sales.” Books are obsolete, thinks Fogarty, because “AI reasoning models can distill key insights and tell you exactly how to implement them based on everything they know about you.” And he’s perfectly right about that first kind of reading—the kind that self-help writing and business strategy manuals require, the kind that treats books merely as convenient packaging for “action items” which could just as well be slides on a PowerPoint deck. There has always been a cottage industry of digests and summaries, SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, to abridge that kind of reading. Now there are apps like Blinkist, which do the same thing using AI.
It will be up to the new generation to decide which tasks they want to delegate to the machines. But if they choose reading, they will have cheated themselves terribly.
But the other kind of reading, the kind that consists in watching George bring his mother’s hand silently to his lips, can’t be summarized. What would be the point? If ChatGPT could tell you what a meal tastes like, would you not feel the need to eat it?
It’s easy (and fun) to imagine what sorts of “key insights” a chatbot might extract from the classics for the benefit of a Shopify mogul. “The Iliad: Leverage your assets at work.” “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Underpromise, overdeliver.” I asked Grok about The Brothers Karamazov and it told me, “We’re all a mess of contradictions.” And so we are. Why didn’t Dostoyevsky just say that?
Here is why. Relatively early in the novel, the protagonist Alyosha hears a story in which a nasty old hag dies and wakes up in hell. Her guardian angel pleads before God on her behalf, and recounts the one good deed she ever did in her life: She gave an onion to a hungry beggar. The angel takes that onion and holds it out to the wretched sinner, telling her to grab on to it so that she can be pulled up to heaven. And just like that, every soul in the lake of fire clutches at her heels and starts getting carried up along with her. “But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. ‘I’m to be pulled out, not you. It’s my onion, not yours.’ As soon as she said that, the onion broke.”
Probably whoever cares to feed this story into ChatGPT can find a pat little moral in it: Don’t be selfish, think of others, feed the poor. But in the next chapter Alyosha dreams of his mentor, the saintly Father Zosima, whom he misses desperately, rejoicing at the wedding feast in heaven and saying: “I gave an onion to a beggar, so I, too, am here. And many here have given only an onion each—only one little onion . . . What are all our deeds?” And how can I summarize the meaning of that passage except to say that when first I read it I laid the novel aside and wept, feeling suddenly that I, too, might be saved?
As I tell my students, no one can force you to do that kind of reading. If we are transitioning away from the Gutenberg age of mass literacy, out of the world of Dostoyevsky and Eliot into one where books once again become the preoccupation of a select few, I can’t stop that from happening. But we will be the poorer for it, our lives a little more flattened and emptied. After all, what in the end will all this efficiency and optimization have been for? If we cease to see the point of reading, what are we going to do with all that time freed up by our devices?
It would be one thing if books were being replaced because we’d found a yet deeper way of encountering other minds and other times, or if we were going back to the days of long walks in the agora and debates on the nature of being. But one poster on X explained how he uses AI to “extract . . . the information” from a book that would otherwise take an hour to read—“and then I drink coffee for 58 minutes.” If you want a picture of our bookless future, imagine a row of influencers staring out their high-rise windows, their inner lives zeroed out to a total blank, sipping coffee forever.
“What are you trying / to be free of?” asks the poet Joseph Fasano in a poem addressed to a “Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper.” Is it “the living? The miraculous / task of it?” But “love is for the ones who love the work.” The kind of reading that retains its worth in the age of AI is the kind that has no measurable ROI, no scalable metrics, no immediate market value of any kind. It is like life in that the point of it is the story itself, and the only way to “get” it is to dwell in it and let it change you.
It has nothing to offer, in other words, besides the communion of soul with soul. But if we can’t value that, what is anything else worth?
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Hard pass. Cold brew. Dad bod. Merriam-Webster adds over 5,000 words to ‘Collegiate’ dictionary
Word nerd alert: Merriam-Webster announced Thursday it has taken the rare step of fully revising and reimagining one of its most popular dictionaries with a fresh edition that adds over 5,000 new words, including “petrichor,” “teraflop,” “dumbphone” and “ghost kitchen.”
The 12th edition of “Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary” comes 22 years after the book’s last hard-copy update and amid declining U.S. sales for analog dictionaries overall, according to Circana BookScan. It will be released Nov. 18, with preorders now available.
Petrichor, by the way, is a pleasant odor after a rainfall following a warm, dry period. Teraflop is a unit of measure for calculating the speed of a computer. Dumbphones are just that, mobile devices we used before the smartphone revolution. And ghost kitchens, which came into their own during the pandemic, are commercial spaces for hire.
Other additions: “cold brew,” “farm-to-table,” “rizz,” “dad bod,” “hard pass,” “adulting” and “cancel culture.” There’s also “beast mode,” “dashcam,” “doomscroll,”“WFH” and “side-eye.”
The new “Collegiate” also includes enhanced entries for some top lookups, and more than 20,000 new usage examples. All of the added words were already available on Merriam-Webster.com.
How did they make room for all that?
The company removed two sections of the “Collegiate’s” 11th edition that had sparse biographical and geographical entries to make room for the new content. Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster’s president, exclusively told The Associated Press ahead of the announcement that people no longer use dictionaries to learn such things as the location of Kalamazoo or who Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was. For that, they reach for the internet.
(It’s a city in southwest Michigan, for the eternally curious, and he’s a Russian composer who died in 1908.)
Merriam-Webster also eliminated some obscure and antiquated words, including “enwheel,” meaning encircle.
“We wanted to make the ‘Collegiate’ more useful, a better design, more interesting,” Barlow said. “We wanted it to be more rewarding to browse, more fun to look through, and to really be practical for research, but also a beautiful book.”
What’s happening with dictionary sales in general?
The chunky, linen-cover “Collegiate” update weighs in at nearly 5 pounds. It comes as adult reference book sales, including dictionaries and atlases, have shown annual declines since 2022, according to Circana BookScan, which captures 85% of the print market. In the 12-month period ending Sept., 6, dictionary sales fell 9% compared with the same period prior.
Merriam-Webster, the country’s leading dictionary company, sells about 1.5 million of them a year. Most are regularly revised but not fully overhauled like the “Collegiate,” Barlow said. The company’s retail sales overall have generally held steady in the last few years, he said. Print sales account for a small fraction of the company’s revenue.
“While the print dictionary is not at all important to the growth and profitability of this wonderful language company, it’s still our heart,” Barlow said. “There are people out there who just love books, and we love books.”
For dictionary sales overall, there’s a bit of sunshine at Barnes & Noble. The chain’s dictionary sales have gone up so far this year over the same period in 2024, said Kat Sarfas, marketing manager for nonfiction. She noted similar increases for such reference materials as the U.S. Constitution as well.
“I do think there is that nostalgia that people have to be able to pull a dictionary off the shelf and look up a word,” Sarfas said. “There’s a certain desire to have these kinds of reference materials at home. It may be something that people feel like, as educated people, we should own.”
Dictionaries may be down but they aren’t dead yet
While Merriam-Webster’s “Collegiate,” originally focused on the needs of college students, is among top sellers in dictionaries for Barnes & Noble, its general-interest “The Merriam-Webster Dictionary” is more popular. It was last tweaked in 2022. A pocket version is also a strong seller, Sarfas said.
Death knells for print dictionaries have been ringing since the rise of the internet, said Grant Barrett, a lexicographer, former dictionary editor for Oxford University Press and others, and co-host of public radio’s “A Way with Words.”
“Now we’re in this weird limbo where people want the dictionary but they don’t want to pay for it, because they’re used to getting things for free on the internet,” he said.
Merriam-Webster’s website receives about a billion visits a year, making the company a word digital leader as well, Barlow said. Over the last 10 years, revenue overall has grown by nearly 500% on the strength of its online dictionary, thesaurus, mobile apps and word games.
The new “Collegiate” introduces curated word lists, such as words from the 1990s and “10 Words for Things that Often Go Unnamed.” And it has more word histories. Did you know “calculate” comes from the Latin for “pebble,” because ancient Romans used little stones to do addition and subtraction?
And, for incredibly granular dictionary fans, the new “Collegiate” preserves lettered thumb notches — those little finger-size dents along the edges of reference book pages — to make browsing easier. The only printer doing the notches in the U.S. has closed since Merriam-Webster was last in need, so it had to go to India, Barlow said.
Why do print dictionaries still matter?
Print versions still matter in preserving cultures, as gifts, as a household utility, and for students under cellphone bans at school, among other reasons, said Sarfas, Barrett and other book pros.
“There are lots of communities that speak languages that have never been documented, and they may not have been documented because those languages might have been actively suppressed. I’m thinking about Indigenous communities across North America,” said Lindsay Rose Russell, executive director of the Dictionary Society of North America.
“Having a print dictionary has all along sort of indicated the legitimacy of a language,” said Russell, also an author who teaches English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Barrett said his show and its companion podcast receive a lot of letters from readers that lend insight into how they use dictionaries.
“Some people use the dictionary almost as a meditative resource where they just open it up and see what they find and kind of let their minds wander a little bit,” he said.
Got a band in need of a name? Commodores’ trumpet player William King used a dictionary to find his, running his finger down a page, Russell noted.
“We lucked out,” King told People magazine in 1978. “We almost became ‘The Commodes.’ ”
LEANNE ITALIE work spans the lifestyles and entertainment space, from fashion and family to film, music and theater. She is based in New York and has worked across the United States for The Associated Press.
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