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Hello discoverers!
Reading is dead. Attention spans are toast. We are, collectively, heading toward a post-literate wasteland of reels and soundbites – our once-curious brains reduced to dopamine-seeking mush. At least, that’s the general vibe online.
I’ll admit I’ve sort of subscribed to this thesis. You probably have too. It feels intuitively right in the way that a lot of decline narratives do. But they are often a little too tidy, a little too satisfying, which should probably be our first clue that something’s off.
In Text is King, Adam Mastroianni (see also DD305) argues that the death-of-reading panic is mostly vibes, not data. Book sales in 2025 were higher than in 2019. Indie bookstores are booming. And actual reading time data shows a dip – but a modest one, concentrated mostly around the arrival of broadband internet in 2009, not the smartphone era we love to blame.
“If the data is right, the best anti-reading intervention is not a 5G-enabled iPhone circa 2023, but a broadband-enabled iMac circa 2009.”
His more interesting argument, though, isn’t really about the numbers. It’s about human nature. The ‘death of reading’ hypothesis assumes that people were only ever reading to fill time – that they never truly wanted it, and that Instagram and TikTok simply revealed their real preferences. But he calls BS:
“Everyone, even people without liberal arts degrees, knows the difference between the cheap pleasures and the deep pleasures. No one pats themselves on the back for spending an hour watching mukbang videos, no one touts their screentime like they’re setting a high score, and no one feels proud that their hand instinctively starts groping for their phone whenever there’s a lull in conversation.”
“Finishing a great nonfiction book feels like heaving a barbell off your chest. Finishing a great novel feels like leaving an entire nation behind. There are no replacements for these feelings. Videos can titillate, podcasts can inform, but there’s only one way to get that feeling of your brain folds stretching and your soul expanding, and it is to drag your eyes across text.”
He also makes a more general point about the influence of books. You don’t have to read a book for it to shape how you think. Ideas that get written down are like an invisible scaffolding of culture, and tuning out doesn’t protect you from them:
“Being ignorant of the forces shaping society does not exempt you from their influence – it places you at their mercy.”
To be fair, the declines in reading, however modest, are real. Not everyone who used to read has simply swapped it for something richer. After eight hours of having dense information beamed into my eyeballs, picking up a book at the end of the day is often the last thing I feel like doing. What that does to a society (and especially younger generations) over time isn’t a trivial question, even if the panic has been overdone.
But Mastroianni’s broader point holds. Text has outlasted radio, TV, dial-up, broadband and most likely TikTok. Yes, soundbites and reels hit the spot – fast food always does. But there’s a reason people keep coming back to the longer, slower, more nourishing stuff.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
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Sponsor
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Tackle UI inconsistency faster
Silk is a free developer-friendly design system that’s been battle-tested in real production environments.
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We made sure the UI kit is lightweight, so designers and devs can collaborate faster. Explore Silk in Figma now.
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Tools
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Social feed link aggregator
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This is for everyone who misses some of the good stuff social media uncovers, but doesn’t miss being on social media: Sill watches your Bluesky and Mastodon feeds and surfaces the links being shared most by the people you follow, so you can see what’s actually resonating in your network without getting sucked into the feeds. I just signed up and will now get a daily digest via email.
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How It Wears is a really well executed reference library that covers 100+ textile fibres (cotton, polyester, linen, merino and many more) explaining how each one ages, behaves and should be cared for. There is a ‘cost pear wear’ analyser that lets you “understand the real value of a garment over time”.
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An iOS productivity app for “doing less, with more focus”. Solarday is built around daily intentions, focused task lists and end-of-day reflections, all wrapped in genuinely beautiful, calming design. (Also nice: no subscriptions)
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Earn rewards for scrolling less
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NOMO flips the usual screen-time app logic on its head: rather than just blocking or shaming you, it rewards you for spending less time on social media. I’m not sure about the perks (event tickets, merchandise, cash-back), but I like the carrot approach. A cute feature is the ‘fist bump’, where you tap phones IRL with someone to lock social media for an hour. Whether gamifying screen time actually changes habits long-term is questionable.
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Wanderings
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Charming discoveries from the internet’s back alleys that you don’t need but might love.
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An ‘audio magazine’ that publishes two issues a year (for free) – each a carefully produced collection of original audio essays, features and poetry from writers and documentarians.
100 different ways of visualising 1 simple dataset, showing how much the choice of a chart shapes the story data tells.
Run by a retired London geography teacher, this site documents Barry’s personal mission to visit tripoints – the spots where three countries meet – alongside border crossings, enclaves and geographical oddities all over the world.
A passion project that digs into the history of London’s cinemas – from grand picture palaces to long-gone neighbourhood fleapits – through a mix of stories, photographs and in-person walking tours.
Aeris renders live air traffic over the world’s busiest airspaces on a dark-mode map. Flights are separated by altitude in true 3D: low altitudes glow cyan, high altitudes shift to gold.
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Books
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Rethinking modern friendship
Romantic love gets the spotligh, but pocaster and author Elizabeth Day turns the lens towards friendship – interrogating her own need to be liked and the quiet ways quantity can crowd out quality. She makes a thoughtful case for treating friendship with the same seriousness as family or romance. An honest, relatable reflection on how we navigate friendships in adulthood.
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Democracy beyond green capitalism
A book that sketches a vision of a green democratic future built not on scarcity and extraction, but on shared ownership, democratic planning and what the authors call Public–Common Partnerships. Through research and lived examples, this books shows how communities can seize control of key assets and begin building a greener future from the ground up rather than waiting for it to be handed down.
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Socials
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One in four animals on the planet earth is a beetle. Think of your three closest friends. If none of them are beetles, statistically speaking you are probably a beetle.
on Mastodon
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Media
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Read
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Adam Mastroianni pushes back on the ‘death of reading’ panic with actual data and a love letter to text. He argues that books and essays still shape our culture far more than video ever will, and that serious thinking only really happens with words on a page.
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“You know how you can find a leak in a tire by squirting dish soap on it and then looking for where the bubbles form? Writing is like squirting dish soap on an idea: it makes the holes obvious.”
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Read
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Biophilia is a theory suggesting that humans possess an innate tendency to seek connections with nature and other forms of life (see also DD239). This piece by Oliver Milman goes into depth about many old and recent studies that support this, and it’s wild: exposure to nature (even just some greenery) isn’t just good for our blood pressure, it might help mend our social fabric – from lower crime and loneliness to better learning and health. Fascinating read.
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“‘We are now in an attention economy; there’s a battle for attention and nature is the element that doesn’t have an advertising budget’, he added. ‘We’ve been schooled out of the wonder of nature; we’ve been primed to scroll through our phones and look for wonder there instead.’”
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Read
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Not every conclusion Cory Doctorow draws here I would agree with, but his distinguishing of genuinely useful ‘centaur’ tools from abusive ‘reverse centaur’ setups that offload risk onto humans is a useful framing. The sci-fi writer tears apart the AI hype machine by arguing the real threat isn’t robots taking your job, but your boss using AI as an excuse to fire you.
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“AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”
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Watch
One of the first YouTube channels I’ve ever subscribed to was Kirsten Dirksen’s. It’s two million subscribers’ worth of proof that people are endlessly fascinated about how others have chosen to live: tiny homes, off-grid homesteads, cave dwellings, converted vehicles and everything in between. It’s a channel you open for five minutes and resurface from an hour later, rethinking your own living arrangements.
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Inspiration
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Alfred Basha is a Venice-based Albanian illustrator whose self-taught ink drawings blend metamorphic natural landscapes with wild animals. His work tries to capture a sense of primal energy and inner transformation.
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Istvan Hernek is a Hungarian origami enthusiast who specialises in intricate paper flowers and shares detailed tutorials across YouTube and Instagram.
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Font of the week: Slackers is a handmade vintage sans-serif font family drawing on classic western and custom motorcycle culture. There are extensive alternates and multilingual support so you can mix and match for what you need.
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Classifieds
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“Why isn’t there an app that combines all my different health and activity data to give me actionable insights?” There is. It’s called Exist.
Great UX makes complex problems simple. Lumi designs and builds products that tackle hard challenges → lumi.studio
From brain-computer interfaces to 1950s buses to Calcutta. A weekly newsletter for the curious – AI, tech, and things you didn’t know you wanted to know.
Stanford research meets ADHD brain. Omix generates adaptive focus music that evolves with your session to keep you in flow longer. Deep work without playlist fatigue. Finally.
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Classifieds are paid ads that support DD and are seen by 38,000 subscribers each week. Book yours here.
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Poll
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Numbers
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3
Venture capital investment in US defence-tech startups grew more than tenfold in just five years – from 2019 to 2024 – reaching around $3 billion, reflecting a dramatic mainstream shift in Silicon Valley’s attitude toward military technology.
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54
Africa had its fastest year of solar growth on record in 2025, with new installations jumping 54% year-on-year to 4.5 GW – and the number of countries installing 100 MW or more essentially doubled in a single year.
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Mood
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Structurally unsound sleep.
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