The Lack of Book Reading

I once had a dream about writing a book, but I was realistic about the slim odds that it would be read by more than a handful of people.

From a 2021 article by Elle Griffin.

Almost a third of Americans don’t read books at all. And, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the ones that do spend only 16 minutes per day reading. Compare that to the average Netflix watcher who spends close to three hours per day consuming video content. At that pace, a watcher might get through 681 movies in a year while a reader gets through only 16 books—and that’s presuming those 15 minutes are spent reading books.

In reality, books compete for our reading time alongside newspapers, magazines, and other online publications. Even this year, when leisure time increased as a result of the pandemic, novels saw only a subtle increase in sales over last year—by 2.8 percent. News consumption, however, saw an increase of 215 percent with most of that time taking place on Facebook (23 minutes per day), Google (14 minutes per day), and MSN (five minutes per day).

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17 Life-Learnings to Celebrate the 17th Birthday of Maria Popova’s “The Marginalian”

This morning I received 17 wonderful gifts. Maria Popova’s website has been one of my places of respite for many years. In her most recent article, she celebrates her 17 years of online writing at “The Marginalian” by crystallizing 17 lessons she has learned along the way. Here is Maria’s introduction to her 17 lessons:

The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels to me now almost like a different species of consciousness. (It can only be so — if we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals, and beliefs, we ossify and perish.)

What follows are merely the titles to Popova's 17 lessons. She discusses each of these more fully at her website. Everything she writes is, somehow, both analytically precise and poetic. I've printed this list and it has gone up on my wall so that I have daily reminders:

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone

3. Be generous.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life.

5. You are the only custodian of your own integrity.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.”

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively.

11. Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality.

12 There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again.

14. Choose joy.

15. Outgrow yourself.

16. Unself.

17.Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for.

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Freddie DeBoer’s Smallish List of “Good White Men”

Over the past couple of years, I have learned a lot about writing by reading Freddie DeBoer. He's got some incredible chops! His most recent article is a masterclass, especially his psychoanalysis of the ACLU's Chris Strange. Here's an excerpt from his article, "The Good White Man Roster: a database of progressive white men who are thirsty for credit."

These are the guys who have carefully crafted personas as ALLIES, as the good ones, as the right kind of white guy. These are the dudes whose every engagement on social media functions to let you know how very sorry they are, but always seem to come out on top in doing so. These are the guys who always stand behind women, ready to catch them when they fall, which they will inevitably do because of fucking patriarchy, man, and if people would just read their bell hooks maybe we’d be getting somewhere!, please like share and subscribe. These are the guys who think all complaints about identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture are just the dying gasp of reactionary old men, which is why they lie awake at night praying to god that they never get canceled. These are the guys who put their pronouns in their bios in hopes that doing so might get them a little pussy. These are the guys who will harangue you about how white dudes do this and white dudes do that, speaking to you from their blameless white dude mouths in their righteous white dude faces. These are the guys who look at the discourse about white supremacy and patriarchy and see market opportunity.

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How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 13: My New Quest as an Author

Chapter 13: My New Quest as an Author

One of the main reasons I am engaging in this 100-Day Creative Project is to find a new voice as a writer of essays.Since 2006, I have written more than 7,000 articles here at Dangerous Intersection. Since becoming an attorney in 2006, I have drafted thousands of court filings, including hundreds of lengthy appellate briefs. Doing so much of this work doesn’t mean that I’m good at it, but I do think I’ve learned a lot of things along the way and I do seem to be competent at that writing style.

But I want to learn how to be a better writer by exploring new styles. Most of my writing to this point has been technical and precision advocacy of a point of view. I am using this Project to explore a new style of writing. Still persuasive, but also more fluid, more free, more creative and with a dash of humor here and there. The only way I'll know to get better at a new style is to have a lot of reps. Over and over for 100 days would be a good start. I’ve addressed (in my former writings) many of the ideas I am discussing in my lessons for “the newborn baby,” but I’m now working to present them in newer ways that might be more effective for a different audience. I hope t break down some old writing habits so that I can draw from heretofore rather quiescent parts of my brain. I hope those parts have been merely sleeping and that they haven’t completely died off.

I was inspired to create new styles of articles as my 100 Day Project after enjoying about a dozen essays by Freddie DeBoer, who describes himself as a “Marxist of an old-school variety.” https://dangerousintersection.org/2022/02/15/the-type-of-real-life-government-freddie-deboer-can-believe-in/ With his writing, Freddie successfully does a lot of the things that I want to do better. This Project will thus be a 100-step experiment and it’s clearly off to an uneven start, although I am clearly writing in a more unvarnished and less edited style (as you can see from the typos). I am forcing myself to write a lot and to do it more spontaneously. I am keeping in mind Mario Andretti's admonition: "If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough." I'm not striving for any length of these essays, but I am noticing that by the time I've emptied out my quiver, I've spilled out more than 1,000 words, which is a fairly grueling pace for me in the context of the other demands (including self-demands) I face in my life.

I am consciously trying to modify many deeply ingrained and ossified writing habits. I hope that by the end of this project I will have noticeably moved the needle regarding my style. It would be fun to see a difference by the hundredth essay, but more importantly, that the difference is for the better, which is not a given when one screws with some that has worked reasonably well. For more insight into a few of the things I'm aiming to accomplish, here's an excerpt from my new writing guru Freddie DeBoer’s recent article: “If you Absolutely Must: a brief guide to writing and selling short-form argumentative nonfiction from a somewhat reluctant professional writer.”

Your politics are your affair. But fear all political fads, resist all political peer pressure, and be ruthless in asking yourself whether you actually hold a position or if you are just afraid of the consequences of appearing to not hold it. Then express yourself. Whatever you do, be weird. As a consumer of writing, please, for me, be weird. Whatever this profession needs, it does not need more hall monitors or commissars and it does not need more writers who seem to have nothing to offer beyond looking down their glasses at the world in shrill derision. That territory is covered. That corner has been taken. The whole point of writing, the only reason to have an alphabet, is to say what no one else is saying. To be singular. What is the value of replicating words that have already appeared in the same order? You can’t choose to be good and you can’t choose to be successful. But you can choose to be your own.

Be brave and tell the truth. Absolutely everyone and everything in the life you are choosing will try to force you to conform. They will hate you if you break ranks, but they’ll hate you if you say something inoffensive but easily misrepresented too. All they want is to root out heretics; it’s the only thing that makes them feel alive. So you may as well not live in fear. If you let them in there will be little of you left when they’re done, so don’t let them in. If you can hold on to some piece of yourself that does not care what they say, you can have the one pure thing left in an industry now made up only of snitches and nuns, that last virtue for a writer, the courage to be human.

. . .

But do write a lot. Writing is like playing an instrument: it’s all about reps. I know that this is as banal as advice gets. But I think we live in an age of distraction where there are so many other things fighting for your time; I think it’s easy to tell yourself that composing social media posts improves your longform writing when it does not; and I think there remains some unfortunate impression, perhaps left over from the Beats, that great writers produce writing the way a bird produces song.

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One of My Favorite Sesquipedalian Journal Article Titles

In 2006, Daniel Oppenheimer wrote an article titled: "Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems with using long words needlessly."

Here's the abstract from Oppenheimer's article, which concludes that the cheap signaling strategy of using abstruse language fails:

Most texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words. However, a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence. This paper explores the extent to which this strategy is effective. Experiments 1-3 manipulate complexity of texts and find a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence. This relationship held regardless of the quality of the original essay, and irrespective of the participants' prior expectations of essay quality. The negative impact of complexity was mediated by processing fluency. Experiment 4 directly manipulated fluency and found that texts in hard to read fonts are judged to come from less intelligent authors. Experiment 5 investigated discounting of fluency. When obvious causes for low fluency exist that are not relevant to the judgement at hand, people reduce their reliance on fluency as a cue; in fact, in an effort not to be influenced by the irrelevant source of fluency, they over-compensate and are biased in the opposite direction.

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