Worth noting that Pope Leo’s background is Augustinian. St. Augustine is the patron saint of printers. www.ncregister.com/cna/pope-leo...

This story is one of Lovett’s best. It’s rare that anything on Wikipedia gets a true conclusion, much less a relatively happy one where the parties agree they both made honest mistakes. Sometimes “assume good faith” works.

What's going on with Evan Spiegel's Wikipedia photo?

A weird little Wikipedia story from recent days

edithistory.substack.com

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. —Marshall McLuhan, 1964

Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models

Company hired Google's book-scanning chief to cut up and digitize "all the books in the world."

arstechnica.com

new from me (and not an April Fools thing): I spoke in depth with @ilyaslebleu.bsky.social, the Wikipedia editor who first proposed the ban on A.I.-generated text in English articles. we talked about the idea-to-policy process, the disagreements along the way, and what other platforms can learn:

One of the Internet’s Most Iconic Websites Just Took a Bold Stand. The Rest Should Follow.

The fight to keep the internet’s encyclopedia bot-free scored a big win.

slate.com

One lovely part of book research is reading these deep cuts

*sigh* There comes a time in every millennial’s life when you’re officially recast as the old guy. Thanks to @vox.com for making me sound ancient in this otherwise fantastic piece about Wikipedia’s role in the age of AI. www.vox.com/culture/4787...

The Internet Archive stores physical books, preserving them as a back-up to digitization. Whereas AI companies despise the physical world so much they’ve shredded millions of books and tried to hide the evidence.

Pizza Hut is a core memory for me, the spot where we had so many class pizza parties. They were special, yes, but also just a normal part of mid-’90s childhood life. Now it’s a place of pilgrimage for anyone desperate enough to be “swaddled in a warm 20th-century embrace.”

An Old-School Pizza Chain Is Fast Becoming a Cultural Obsession. I Spent a Day at One to Find Out Why.

People travel from all over for the gleeful novelty of pizza ordered from real menus, served by real people, and eaten off checkered tablecloths.

slate.com

This one is for the Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman fans: “The medium is the metaphor” > “The medium is the message”

As a thought experiment, I’ve been updating the references in a few passages from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). What do you think?

Most writing about the Attention Crisis is gloomy, for good reason. But I appreciate this little book by Prof. Alan Jacobs because he highlights the rewards that come from the struggle of deep reading, as in this passage:

the Onion needs to update this for 2026 to mention AI summaries & give us one cause it’s too long

I love this new term “critical ignoring” because it points to yet another benefit of print. Our phones flood us with an endless amount of low-quality info that’s incredibly hard to ignore. By contrast, a physical book is a single-purpose device that excludes the background noise and lets you focus.

Your Key Survival Skill for 2026: Critical Ignoring

In an age of endless low-quality information, it’s time to fight our instinct to seek out and absorb all we can. It takes practice.

wsj.com

Eighty-four percent of Americans say they’ve adopted analogue habits to create boundaries with screens. Writing in notebooks leads the list at 32%, followed by reading printed books at 31% and using paper calendars at 28%.

While a lot of folks are understandably concerned about the loss of mass market paperbacks, there’s perhaps a more positive interpretation of this story. 🧵 1/5

Oh man, extremely interested in this one 👀

Stephen Harrison@stephenharrison.com · 6mo ago

This news means a lot to me. I'm writing my first nonfiction book, THE POWER OF PRINT, about why we think differently with paper versus screens, and why we should all aspire to reclaim our print brains. Coming 2027 from St. Martin's Press. @stmartinspress.bsky.social

Among the many topics missing from this piece is any discussion of the medium. Harry Potter was a print phenomenon, with most readers encountering the books in physical form, and huge in-person launch events. It’s not only that politics have changed. It’s that we’ve become increasingly disembodied.

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 6mo ago

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com Younger generations “have fallen out of love with Harry Potter because they have fallen out of love with the worldview the series represents,” writes Louise Perry. “Which is to say that young people have fallen out of love with liberalism.”

This news means a lot to me. I'm writing my first nonfiction book, THE POWER OF PRINT, about why we think differently with paper versus screens, and why we should all aspire to reclaim our print brains. Coming 2027 from St. Martin's Press. @stmartinspress.bsky.social

How can we expect 13-year-olds to focus on their assignments when a glut of entertaining video content is just a tab away? Digital tools have their place, particularly for student research, but sometimes a paper worksheet or handwritten response are simply better tools for deep learning.

Opinion | The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education

nytimes.com

Anyone marking Wikipedia's 25th anniversary today can believe it’s an incredible success story for commons-based peer production and that there're aspects of the site that sometimes piss them off. Let's hope it lasts a while longer. My latest for WIRED:

WIRED@wired.com · 7mo ago

As the free online encyclopedia turns 25, it’s facing political opposition, AI scraping, dwindling volunteers, and a public that may no longer believe in its ideals. www.wired.com/story/wikipe...

Microblogging is just a catastrophically bad form of human interaction. If you sat down to design a system specifically meant to make people act out and create harassment mobs, you'd be hard pressed to build something more effectively toxic.

Anyone else conflicted by this Atlantic essay? I agree with the author that the “democracy depends on reading” line won’t be effective. Then again, promoting reading as a “vice” seems like a mistake, especially now as so many folks are starved for wisdom/virtue/healthy pleasures.

Reading Is a Vice

Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive.

theatlantic.com

As we start 2026, I’m grateful for the sharp, thoughtful people I’ve met on Bluesky, but I also want to keep in mind what my favorite contemporary philosopher says about posting:

Gotta love the do-it-yourself gumption in Adler’s 1940 guide How to Read a Book. “With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more.”

One of the underrated benefits of print is the variety of forms. Heavy textbooks, faintly musky paperbacks, pocket-sized primers… Whereas digital tools tie the experience to a single, uniform environment. The knowledge sticks less, and we struggle to transfer what we’ve learned to other contexts.

We all know McLuhan’s, “The medium is the message.” He also said, “As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation.” By his logic, AI was always going to flip the framework, producing new appreciation for analogue forms. Let’s hope we make the most of the reversal.

The rise of AI art is spurring a revival of analogue media

It is not just vinyl. Film cameras and print publications are trendy again, too

economist.com

Does anyone else bristle at this framing? WSJ says blue books are “torturing” students with hand cramps, and “nobody likes them.” Listen, students have been outsourcing everything to AI and cheating their way through college. Blue books should be celebrated as a return to authentic human learning.

They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back.

Cheating with ChatGPT has become a huge problem for colleges. The solution is painfully old-school.

wsj.com

We can form intense ties with analog objects over years of use. That’s why Flaubert asked to be buried with his inkwell. But digital tech is mostly disposable. We value its connection to the infosphere, not the thing itself. No one’s dying wish is to be buried with AI glasses.

Looking to talk to people who bought a reMarkable tablet, or similar digital notebook with e-ink, and stopped using it after a few weeks or months.

Víctor Hugo, born 1802 in Eastern France, spent his teenage years filling notebooks with poetry and sketches. Eruptions from his restless mind. He developed a two-handed approach—one hand writing, the other drawing—that he’d later use while writing classics like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (cont.)