Blake Neff(@BlakeSNeff):This is hugely unfortunate and a real sign of intellectual decline. Even today, there is still no substitute for a detailed book (ideally, several books) for gaining a rich understanding of a topic, and actively reading challenging books is the best mechanism for becoming a rigorous thinker. Podcasts (or worse, AI summaries) are a pale substitute.

2026.05.18 23:06

This is hugely unfortunate and a real sign of intellectual decline. Even today, there is still no substitute for a detailed book (ideally, several books) for gaining a rich understanding of a topic, and actively reading challenging books is the best mechanism for becoming a rigorous thinker. Podcasts (or worse, AI summaries) are a pale substitute.

Derek Thompson@DKThomp

2026.05.18 15:28

"Dad books" — which this article, and some publishing insiders, use to describe "serious nonfiction" books across biography, current affairs and business and economics — are reportedly in a free fall, with sales declining every year for the last few years “The trend couldn’t be clearer,” said Jonathan Karp, the former chief executive of Simon & Schuster and publisher of the new Simon Six imprint. “When we have internal meetings to talk about this problem, it always comes around to podcasts,” said Jonathan Burnham, president and publisher of the Harper Group at HarperCollins Publishers.