In 1985, Neil Postman observed an America imprisoned by its own need for amusement. He was, it turns out, extremely prescient.
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by sociologist and mass media scholar Neil Postman. It has been translated into 16 languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide. In 2005, Postman's son Andrew reissued the book in a 20th anniversary edition.
In Favor of Enjoying Things on Purpose
The human being is an enjoyment-seeking creature. There’s a reason people are always trying to restrain themselves from excessive eating, drinking, scrolling, and shoppin...
Amusing Ourselves to Death comics reflections - Stuart McMillen blog
Why was the Amusing Ourselves to Death comic by Neil Postman removed from the internet by cartoonist Stuart McMillen? Reflective essay on this comic.
#760: Gambling the future into existence
Plus: Cosmo for conservatives, AI;DR and being "agentic"
The Art of Taking Smart Risks
Good risk can bring joy to life, but Americans are up against forces that profit from the reckless kind.
Why Being Bored Is Good | The Walrus
Technology keeps us constantly stimulated. What do we lose when we no longer have nothing to do?
The Deaths of Effective Altruism
Sam Bankman-Fried is finally facing punishment. Let’s also put his ruinous philosophy on trial.
Brainrot: Deskilling and Addiction are Overlooked AI Risks | Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
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For the Love of Boredom
Boredom is prone to myth-making — much like the story of Phineas Gage. This matters. If we believe certain myths about boredom, it could lead us astray in how we respond.
The rise of Whatever
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.
The obsolescence of man, vol I , part 2: The world as phantom and as matrix: philosophical considerations on radio and television - Günther Anders
The first complete English translation of a remarkable 1956 essay about television from Vol. I of The Obsolescence of Man by Günther Anders, who—using phenomenological analyses, excerpts from his diaries and reflections on daily life—depicts a capitalist world that manufactures a warped “mass-man” by imposing nonparticipation, consumption of images, artificial “needs” (“drug addiction is the model for today’s needs”), separation, “conditioning”, an eternal present, commodified leisure and the dissolution of the individual in vapid mass produced roles, in a text that in many ways anticipates the theory of the “spectacle” of Guy Debord and the situationists.
#773: Regressing to the mean
Plus: slop wildlife, the post-American internet and AI for emotional labor
A case for AI taboos – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
We probably all know the person, and maybe it is ourselves, who has inundated themselves in AI use, and say they are fully aware of all the dangers, but are so, so careful as to not fall into such traps themselves.
The hidden ‘rules of the game’ that dictate how we navigate the world | Psyche Videos
How free are we really, if human behaviour embodies the complex, intertwined webs of society and history?
Chris Hayes on the attention economy
A conversation about how attention was commodified, why it's so easy to steal, where industry is looking for new supplies, and whether democracy can survive this.
