Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Nicolas Delon's avatar

Great post. I just wish you'd mentioned SBF.

Expand full comment
Becoming Human's avatar

Having just read "After Virtue," this post comes at a good time. MacIntyre's very excellent treatise has to be read to the end to make sense. If you want to get what he is laying down, you have to put in the hours.

I no longer read popular nonfiction, like Malcolm Gladwell or Yuval Hariri, as they have (intelligently) written for the modern reader, which is to say they write a blog post and expand it into a book to fill a shelf without requiring the full reading to get the to the content. If you don't get a Gladwell argument in the first chapter, then you will never get it, and Malcolm will gladly summarize the whole thing in a TED talk with no loss of nuance or breadth.

I would contrast these with "The Dawn of Everything," which is majestic and long. I suspect virtually nobody reads the whole thing, but I did, and it was spectacular to the last page. It had reinforcement, but never repetition, and the argument kept unfolding to the bitter end.

People don't read real books all the way through because it is very hard. It takes time and moreover a great deal of energy, energy that is not returned from the social sphere. It is cheaper to read a tweet of listen to a podcast and say a few sentences to a friend about it to cement a social bond.

But a tweet won't ever make you change the way you understand the world. Finishing a book can.

Expand full comment
34 more comments...

No posts