🖐🏽 the five
back to a fan fav. 5 picks of what I found interesting this past week.
📚Text is king - As an avid reader (and writer) who deeply believes in the value of the written word, I’ve been worried about the studies that point to a significant decline in reading for pleasure. But Adam Mastroianni takes a deeper look at the data and finds a different conclusion - that pushed to the peak of addictive, attention smashing options, we humans are opting to return to this act of “dragging our eyes across text”.
”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 makes many other points worth reading yourself - that in the longrun books are the most durable medium of ideas and that no matter how many new forms of information transfer we may invent, there is something foundational about text.
💻 For A Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper - I’m really struggling with my kids using their laptops for most of their homework. I just thinking that learning’s degrees of freedom can’t be fully captured in the linear prescriptions of an app’s UI (and I should know). I think flipping around in a physical textbook is fundamentally different than sequentially clicking pages online. I think composing an essay in Google docs just flows differently than doodling and scribbling and ad libbing and annotating your way in a notebook. I think struggling your way to a crappy essay answer and needing to try again is so much more useful than getting the right answer on one. And all of this isn’t to say we don’t use ChatGPT/Claude or an iPad or the latest gizmo. We do. Just not for the messy, hard thing I call learning.
🇨🇦 “ Nostalgia is not a strategy.” This week, Canadian PM Mark Carney delivered a speech for the ages.
I think it’s worth your 16 minutes listen to it fully. Like pop it into your Airpods and go for a walk. It’s like oxygen for so many of us drowning in a sea of despair - fully of principled and practical clarity (beyond the fact that I definitely needed to google what “hedgemon” meant 😬).
His speech included bangers like: “This is not sovereignty. It's the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.” and “Middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu.” It’s really refreshing to remember what a smart and capable and (gasp!) compassionate leader sounds like.
But what I didn’t expect was the parallels to modern parenthood. He says that in world where there are a few powerful players, “the question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls or whether we can do something more ambitious.”
He says that principled cooperation can be far more effective than individual silos and acting on our own, for our own.
I feel the resonance when considering parenthood today. The more each of us pursues our own family’s wellbeing - our own activities, our own schedules, our own conveniences, the more we’re building up walls that feel like protecting our own interests but are really just building up a really precarious house of cards. And it’s tenable for the most privileged and wealthy amongst us, but it’s an illusion propped up with outsourced consumerism for the rest. There is a different path - but it goes through a messier and more uncomfortable route. That of mutual benefit and cooperation. But there’s something stronger and more durable on the other side.
Anyway - watch it for the political message for the world or watch it for the inspiration for your community. But worth watching.
🕹️ Busy simulator - I love the weirdness of human beings because like, who would think of building a website like this, except a human who woke up one morning and said, let me build a page where you can toggle on and off all of the really crazy sounds we’ve invented to feed our monkey brains a sense of importance.
🏎️ Lego Bugati Chiron - all I can think when I see this is: look at all the cool things people can do with technology when we put our minds to it…. this is so insane. Zero glue. Totally functional. 🤯
Historic Vids@historyinmemesLEGO engineers spent 13,000 hours and over one million pieces constructing a fully drivable Bugatti Chiron.4:11 AM · Jan 21, 2026 · 1.1M Views309 Replies · 1.77K Reposts · 21.8K Likes
I am shocked that reading for pleasure is down, as I feel like Booktok and Bookstagram are bigger than ever!