Month: July 2026

In 2005, when the studies began, the average number of words that each participant spoke in a day was 16,632; in 2019, when the research concluded, the average was 11,900. Each year, the participants spoke about 338 fewer words a day than they did in the previous year, amounting to a decline of about 28 percent over the entire time period.

— Read on www.theatlantic.com/family/2026/07/talking-less-reasons/688074/

How magnificent
the funeral song our children or contemporaries
will write for us, a song they will make by
taking our obituary and Facebook posts,
plus random quotes from our algorithm,
and feeding them into Chat
or Gemini
or Claude.
The tears that will fall in the face of such
sanitary sweetness!

Be sure to use AI

— Read on shawnsmucker.substack.com/p/please-use-ai

“We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information,” Mr. Page said.

Google fulfilled that responsibility by acting as a gateway to the internet. It answered people’s search queries with lists of hyperlinks, pushing users out to what is known as the “open web” — the millions of websites run by merchants, publishers, universities and others — for more information. In the ensuing decades, Google became one of the planet’s richest and most powerful companies by directing people to the vastness of the open web.

Now in the age of artificial intelligence, Google appears to be shrinking back from the open web — and may be imperiling it.

— Read on www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/technology/google-ai-open-web.html

The idea that more choice is better is baked into Western culture, but research shows that having more options can make people anxious, indecisive and, paradoxically, less happy with what they pick, said Barry Schwartz, an emeritus psychology professor at Swarthmore University and author of “The Paradox of Choice.”

“There have been hundreds of studies showing that there can be too much of a good thing,” Schwartz said.

To minimize the mental noise, he said, limit the number of choices you make, and your brain will thank you for it.

— Read on apnews.com/article/too-many-choices-making-decisions-8ae0bfaac1d51cc5fc7b2e59336ff0dd

Long-tenured workers like Barzar are Costco’s secret weapon. They are reliable and experienced, able to speed shoppers through a checkout line and serve as mentors to newer workers, passing down the company’s unique culture, Costco executives say. Barzar’s pay and benefits reflect his value to the company. He earns $32.90 an hour, and the holdings in his 401(k) have boosted his retirement savings to over $1 million, he said. His Costco-sponsored healthcare has a regular visit co-pay of $15, and a specialty visit co-pay of $25, well below the national average. In 2009, Barzar’s family bought a three-bedroom, two-bath house with a pool, and they have been able to travel to Europe twice over the past decade. 

He Earns $33 an Hour as a Costco Cashier. Now He’s a Millionaire. – WSJ

For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue.

Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.
— Read on www.adweek.com/media/publishers-opt-out-google-search/

This is what I call the “experimental mindset”. It makes use of your brain’s natural ability to generate predictions about what will happen next, and to learn when those predictions turn out to be wrong. Most of us experience this as failure and try to avoid that feeling – so we stick to the plan, we double down.

The experimental mindset does the opposite. Instead of asking, “Am I there yet?”, you ask, “What can I learn?” This helps you to try new approaches, pay attention to what actually happens, and change direction when the evidence points somewhere new. The life you end up building is yours, not a copy-paste of someone else’s blueprint for success.

So what does this look like when you’re weighing up whether to leave a job, if a relationship has a future, or how to rebuild your social life after a big move? It all starts with designing a tiny experiment.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jun/21/improve-career-health-relationships-experimental-mindset

And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.

…

Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text. Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

The End of Reading Is Here – The Atlantic