One reason contemporary literary fiction feels so lifeless is its aversion to free indirect discourse. I was reading a contemporary novel and came across the following metaphor: He has what is called a depressed consciousness. A tumor is sitting squat on his meninges. And now his brain stem has turned inward, become a stubborn child with its arms crossed refusing to liaison properly between the spinal cord and cerebrum. Later in the novel, this character’s smile is described as “not actually a smile, only an involuntary twitch of the zygomaticus minor.” The language is sterile, detached, empty. Why do so many contemporary novels sound like this? Part of the reason might be that we’ve abandoned free indirect discourse—a literary technique that puts us directly in our characters’ heads. Take this example from Pride and Prejudice: She knew not how to support herself, and, from actual weakness, sat down and cried for half an hour. Her astonishment, as she reflected on what had passed, was increased by every review of it. That she should receive an offer of marriage from Mr. Darcy! that he should have been in love with her for so many months! so much in love as to wish to marry her in spite of all the objections which had made him prevent his friend's marrying her sister, and which must appear at least with equal force in his own case, was almost incredible! Slipping directly into Lizzy's consciousness, the third-person narrator effectively communicates Lizzy's own astonishment, making Austen's writing distinctly human. distinctly human. Contemporary fiction, on the other hand, gives us elaborate descriptions of human consciousness without ever allowing us to inhabit it.

"bookselling was in a panic about the Kindle...Today, the e-reader market has plateaued at some 10% of traditional publishers’ revenue, while about 75% comes from paper books, a technology essentially unchanged since the nineteenth century" newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

Many beloved study techniques are FAKE: - Re-reading the textbook - Highlighting your notes - Re-copying your notes They don’t build retention. Here’s what actually works: If you want to retain information, then you must train your brain to generate the information itself. You have to reproduce it. Not just re-consume it. Sure, everybody knows: Use it or lose it. Train it to retain it. Retrieve it to keep it. Except, few people actually study that way. You have to solve problems. And you have to solve them without looking at your notes or following an example. If you don’t retrieve it, you don’t keep it.

IF YOU WANT TO GET MORE OUT OF BOOKS, EXPLORE: 1) Literary analysis 2) Narrative perspective 3) Character psychology 4) Symbolism 5) Historical context 6) Philosophy 7) Unreliable narrators 8) The difference between a character's beliefs and an author's beliefs You'll read stories very differently.

very simple explanation as to why this will continue to happen & why this will obviously proliferate to movies too. capitalism esp when paired w/ very sophisticated tech like feeds + ai optimizes for elimination of friction at all costs. tiktok/reels have almost entirely eliminated three primary forms of friction: 1) discovery friction, you literally don't have to decide what to watch 2) time friction where gratification arrives in seconds 3) relevance friction. this is the most critical. since the pool of content is much larger & the algorithm on top is much more sophisticated it is continuously more adapted to your current emotional state, prefs, & behavior like nothing else. netflix cannot remotely pull any of this off even if they have a really great recommendation system. & more specifically the creators on these platforms have gotten much better (the production values of creator content is through the roof & it often feels very professional, just look at some of the pods on here for example). also there is a huge clipping phenomenon that is leveraged by creators for both commentary & showcasing what's actually worth watching in both streams (clavicular) & regular tv shows too. e.g. i watch almost all sports highlights through this creator on tiktok (his name is gavin something). he is awesome. most ppl used to reach for netflix when they door dashed, now it's much much easier to just open tiktok/reels.

When my first AI book was published in 2024, the best AI could do 4 minutes of human work with a 50% chance of success When I turned in the draft of Co-Existence earlier this year, it was 17 hours When it was published two days ago, AI could do 17 weeks open.substack.com/pub/oneuse…

By every measure, Opus 4.8 beats human experts as peer reviewers in a study of 124 Harvard social science papers covering a range from statistical analyses to formal models to qualitative work. As academics, we need to figure out how to adapt the practice of science to AI, fast.

How bad is administrative bloat in higher ed? At MIT, the “student body has grown by 8% and its faculty by 9% since the mid-1980s. By comparison, the tally of administrators jumped by 189%.”

New Substack post with @soumitrashukla9. Work has never been just about the income earned sans effort costs, as typical in economic models. Key aspects of people’s identity, their meaning, and sense of agency are all wrapped up with what they do for a living. There has been a lot of conversation lately about how technological change, particularly AI, may disrupt this relationship, from Ezra Klein's column on his own mathematician father’s grapplings with losing meaning in mathematics, to Francis Fukuyama's post on AI, agency, and recognition. In this piece we take a historical perspective on how technological transformation has disrupted identity and meaning by affecting jobs, and how workers and society responded to these changes. Much of the debate around AI and jobs has centered on wages and material consequences, but losing one's work is also intertwined with how people view their place in society. Most people know about the Luddites—skilled weavers and knitters—who protested the devaluation of their mastery. What’s less known is that the Luddites were actually experts in using the machines as well, and that their protests prompted prominent economists like David Ricardo to rethink the role of automation in society, and later inspired the Arts and Crafts movement. A century later, when recorded sound displaced 20,000 cinema musicians, their campaign against "canned music" and two-year recording ban pressured labels into funding live performance. Soumitra and I have been working on versions of this essay for months. He led the piece, and we’re both really excited to get it out there. Link to the post here: aleximas.substack.com/p/tech…