Amy Willis 0:03

Hello, today I’m delighted to welcome my dear friend, scholar, and author Brad Berzer of Hillsdale College, and we’re going to talk today about his magnificent new book, *The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty* Welcome, Brad.

Brad Birzer 0:23

So I’m really glad we’re able to do this. You’ve been a you’ve been a great friend, an ally, and it’s just it’s great to be doing this together.

Amy Willis 0:39

Aw, thanks, Brad. And I’m happy to let listeners know that that’s the reason that you are my very first guest for this podcast series1 because you’re such a dear friend, and our conversations over these decades have meant a lot to me as well. So, let’s dive in and talk a little bit about the Declaration [of Independence]. So, first of all, your title says that this is a “radical experiment in liberty,” which I think is perhaps not surprising to listeners. But one of the things that I found surprising about your book is that you called the Declaration both a radical act and a conservative act, and that might seem a bit at odds for some listeners. So could you tell me a little bit about what you mean by that? How can something be both radical and conservative simultaneously?

Brad Birzer 1:28

Yeah, it’s a difficult thing, and I actually, you know, for what it’s worth, Amy, I actually think all of American history can be understood in a in a kind of, you know, I’m not a Hegelian, but there’s a dialectic there in which we as Americans are always deeply conservative and rooted in the past, but we’re also on the edge of tomorrow. You know, whether it’s the moonshot or the iPhone, whatever it may be, and you know, I think, and I’m very much an ‘80s guy. You know, I’m 58. I was in seventh grade when (Ronald) Reagan was elected. I was a senior in college when the (Berlin) wall came down, and I think about the 80s. You’ve got someone there. I mean, think my two heroes from the 80s were President Reagan and Steve Jobs, and they both you know they represented the same thing, and yet in utterly different ways, they represented that they were both quintessentially American.

So I think, and this may be my own bias, but I tend to look at American history that way. And so when I look at something like the Declaration, and I see a statement, an utterly profound, beautiful, brilliant statement, like, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” Well, that’s a radical statement, in that it’s a radical claim. It’s a brilliant claim. I think it’s one of the greatest claims ever made, but it’s a brilliant claim. But it’s also basically just ratifying what Saint Paul said when he said, “There’s neither Greek nor Jew, neither male nor female, and so it’s a radical expression of a very conservative old idea.

And another example I would use is common law. Right? We love common law. We should love common law. Common law is brilliant, but you think about what the founders did-they established common law immediately, and the 28 grievances in the Declaration are all common law grievances. Common law is at least by the time we get to the American founding, it’s at least 2,000 years old, if not older than that, and so it’s not like the French where they’re starting over, and every new day of the week has a new name, and we start over in the year zero. Right? These are a deeply religious people, and they are deeply indebted to everything of the past. So the revolution is an expression that’s radical, but it’s a radical expression of traditional things.

Amy Willis 4:08

Thanks, Brad. I too am an ‘80s geek, like Brad. So I’m going to toss a surprise question in there. Channel your inner John Hughes for a moment. Who plays Jefferson in the movie?

Brad Birzer 4:21

Oh, I have no idea. That’s a very. Are you thinking like Michael Anthony Hall or?

Amy Willis 4:30

Ooh, well, I hadn’t thought of him, but sure, why not?

Brad Birzer 4:33

Well, you said John Hughes, so yeah, I don’t know. That’s a that’s a that’s a great question.

Amy Willis 4:40

I might have gone James Spader. I don’t know, but we can come back to that. We’ll see. Okay, next question. You also talk about the sort of complementarity of chaos and unity during the period leading up to the writing of the Declaration, which I found fascinating. And then, what I found to me particularly unique, and given my background in economics, you won’t be surprised that I picked up on this. You talked a lot about spontaneous or emergent orders. So, how is this process and this history of the creation of the Declaration a good example of a spontaneous order?

Brad Birzer 5:18

Well, again, think about common law. Common law is nothing if not spontaneous order, right? The idea that our law is not imposed from above, our law is a ratification of our experience and our customs and our norms and our habits, right? And so I’m reminded not just of [Friedrich] Hayek, but I think of Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Remember when he says, “What have the French done? They have made terrors of our laws, right? And of course, that that’s not a healthy way for a society to work.

If we follow the law simply because we’ve been told not to do something, that’s horrible, right? We should believe the law should be an expression of who and what we are; it should reveal our inner culture, our inner selves, and so in that way, spontaneous order during the American Revolution is huge because of that emergent common law, and you know I think, and I’m very much a libertarian, Amy, but I think where libertarians often get the founding wrong is they’ll say it’s a tax revolt.

It’s not a tax revolt. It’s a revolt against being taxed without having a say in being taxed. If the American Revolution was a tax revolt, they failed miserably because taxes went way, way, way up after we separated from Britain, I mean exponentially, but what we don’t remember, and I think this is to our shame, is that the founders were not only fighting for representation, they were also fighting for the British not to interfere with our common law courts, and that’s something that we forget, and I think that’s a brilliant part on the part of the founders that they recognize that common law is sacred, and when the king starts imposing naval law or admiralty law on American soil, he has no right to do that.

And you know, again, think about the 28 grievances of the Declaration; almost all of them deal with the king messing with our law courts, not with representation, but with the king messing with our law courts. So again, there’s spontaneous order, but I would say there’s another very important way as well, and this goes back to the Mayflower Compact. You know, you think about all of these pilgrims, what about 150 of them, who show up in November of 1620, they have no government. They’re under no law. They’re literally in a wilderness. There aren’t even Indians around the area where they settle.

It is truly virgin land, and yet, what do they say? We are men. We are Protestants. We believe in the common law. We make our own government. That is spontaneous order. When when the Congress meets for the first time, the Continental Congress, they have no legitimate right to meet. Nobody told them you legally are now the government of America, they spontaneously created the First Continental Congress. When the Declaration is passed in the Second Continental Congress, they have no legal right to do so, but they make it a legal right because it is that spontaneous expression of who and what they are. So the founding, and I’m very Hayekian. I admit that I’m looking at this through Hayekian eyes. But there’s no doubt that that we could never understand emergent government during the American founding without recognizing spontaneous order, common law, but institutions as well.

Amy Willis 8:59

I love that. I mean, Hayek certainly talks about the common law as an example of emergent order himself, but I don’t think we even need to necessarily use Hayekian eyes on that. You reference my man [Adam] Smith a lot throughout the text. I didn’t see Adam Ferguson, who I mean, we take the initial notion at least thus far from Adam Ferguson’s work. So, do you know if he had anything to say about this in the same way that Smith did?

Brad Birzer 9:24

I don’t, Amy. And one of the reasons I focused on Smith is because I at least am familiar with Smith. I’m not that familiar with Ferguson, and I need to be. Sure, I very much need to be. But there was a lot of Scottish influence, mostly coming through Princeton. That’s where and it was through John Witherspoon, and that’s where [James] Madison gets a lot of that. So especially you know Smith, it’s interesting. And again, I can’t answer the Ferguson question. Smith is known in America up to 1776, But he doesn’t become incredibly celebrated, and he will be. He will be a national hero, but not really until the 19th century. He doesn’t have a huge influence on the founding, but he will have a huge influence on the interpretation of the founding after the founding.

Amy Willis 10:19

Yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, particularly so, his Wealth of Nations, of course, comes out in 1776. So it’s not like the founders could have read it in the process of creating the Declaration. But he does have a lot to say about the colonies. So I think you’re right- that sort of backward-looking influence on Smith. But maybe a side quest for us on Ferguson.

At least as far as I know, Smith appears in the libraries and reading lists of many of the founders involved with the Declaration. Not so much Ferguson, so it’d be an interesting sort of an interesting historical dig, as it were. So, but let’s yeah, let’s continue with this notion of natural law and legitimacy for a moment. So you talk a lot about the appeals to natural law that the authors of the Declaration and the Patriots at the time are making. Certainly, they are. You say they are looking for legitimacy beyond just sort of constitutional or written law, right?

Of course, the English Constitution being notoriously not written, but that they’re also appealing to the laws of Englishmen, right, and that they are at least initially coming to the table as Englishmen, saying you’re sort of particularly to the king and at some points to Parliament, you’re not recognizing our rights as Englishmen, right? So tell me a little bit about sort of what the difference is between these natural law appeals, appeals to the law of Englishmen, and any sort of alternative arguments for legitimacy. You mentioned already that you know these initial gatherings of continent of the Continental Congress were in fact illegitimate from a strictly legal perspective. So maybe some thoughts on that.

Brad Birzer 11:57

Yeah, no, it’s great, Amy, and that’s a hard question. Let me let me try and break that into two parts. So one thing we have to remember, and I think historians, because we’re not that religious today, we forget this. And I say this as a Roman Catholic, but we are an utterly Protestant people. In 1775 and 1776, you know, we talk about the Enlightenment, and there are four really important enlightenment figures. There’s Thomas Jefferson, there’s Ben Franklin, there’s Thomas Paine, and there’s Benjamin Rush.

But if you were to walk up to 99 out of 100 white colonists in 1775, they would not be thinking about the Enlightenment. They would be thinking we are really Protestant, and Edmund Burke also said, “You know, these aren’t just Protestants; they’re the most Protestant of Protestants.” And I think, you know, and again, and I say this as a Roman Catholic, but you think about the genius of Protestantism. You know there are really two two brilliant things. There’s more than that. Don’t get me wrong, but two things that stick out when we’re talking about the founding.

Number one, Protestants are almost always literate, right? That and man, is that important. You know when we’re looking at the white colonials, and especially the farther north you go, we’re talking about the most literate population of people anywhere in the world at the time of the American founding. Nobody even comes close to that, and so we’ve got this high level of literacy.

But the other thing Protestants do really well is they have a very healthy distrust of authority, and they create their own authority, and again, it goes back to that spontaneous thing. But when we look at something like the Declaration, and they say that we are under God or nature or nature’s God or the natural law, that comes very easy to them. That is not a hard thing. That is not a hard leap to make, and so turn that around. If God is the Creator and He has created all things, then that means that our culture allows for a spontaneous understanding of what is rooted in God or nature, and so there’s no contradiction from their standpoint that we can have both a deep authority of God, but a spontaneous emergence of culture, because it is just a revelation of God. It’s a different form of a revelation.

So when they talk about the rights of Englishmen, and this is a long way of getting to your question, Amy. But when they talk about the rights of Englishmen, it already has a universal quality to it. The English may be the first to have discovered these things, but they are inherent for all human beings everywhere, and so it’s not a big leap for someone in 1765 to say an Englishman has these rights to saying a human has these rights, and I don’t buy the argument that this is cultural imperialism or anything like that. I think this is deeply rooted in the Western tradition.

You know, if we go back to Heraclitus and to Thales and Anaximander, if we go back to Socrates, look what all of them there are doing. They are all, from the very beginning of Western civilization, they are trying to find out what makes us human-not black, not white, not male, not female-human, and that’s deeply rooted in that cultural project. And I think that’s something that the Protestants in the American colonies do very, very well. They bring that up.

But the other thing I would say about this is this, Amy, and this is where a lot of the understanding of the founders is more mythological than it is real. They are deeply culturally Anglo-Saxon, so not when they say the rights of Englishmen, they’re actually thinking Tacitus, and they’re very classical. That’s another thing we often forget about the founders. These are a classical people, and we can get into that, but they’re a very classical people, and almost every American who’s educated at all has read Tacitus. They love Tacitus, and when Tacitus says, “Who are these German tribes, where they are a people who have an elected monarchy? Their monarchy is controlled by their witan-: what we would call parliament or congress, and when we look at the Germans themselves, these Anglo Saxons, they have a serious morality.

They don’t divorce. They don’t believe in child abuse. They don’t believe they have this this deep traditional morality, and y’all Tacitus he’s not making this stuff up, but he’s clearly trying to show the Germans are superior morally to the Romans, right? He’s mocking the Romans, and so there’s a there’s an element in that that’s not factually true, but it’s mythologically true, and so the founders-they’re not lying. They believe this myth. They believe it completely.

Who are the Anglo Saxons? They’re people who meet under an oak tree and make their laws. That’s who they are. They’re noble. They are small “r” republicans, and so when the English in the English colonies say we have the rights of Englishmen. They don’t literally mean we have the rights that that [Sir Edward] Coke said we have. They meant we are noble Republicans who meet under oak trees and make our laws. That’s what they mean. They are automatically, nobly, natively, naturally Republican, and so that’s what they’re getting at.

And that, you know, Amy, you used to work for Liberty Fund. Nobody has done a better job in this country than Liberty Fund of making us look at Cato and making us look at all of those influences of Trenchard and Gordon, you know these incredible influences on the American founding. Those Whig influences, you know, they’re they’re not factually true, but the founders didn’t know that they believed they were true, and so automatically in the woods there is Parliament, right? That’s how they see it. So again, that Amy, that’s. I’m sorry, I went on too long with that, but that that’s a long way of looking at how are they balancing the rights of Englishmen with natural law.

Amy Willis 18:52

I love that. I also particularly love that you mentioned literacy, as you well know. That’s a passion of mine, right? And expanding the reading of the public, so a couple questions related to that, and that might tie back to this notion of the founders as a very classically oriented people, right? I also love that you talked about this as myth making, right?

So what are some of the myths that we ascribe in today’s world to the founding? You mentioned Tom Paine earlier, right? So this is one of the great pieces that comes out prior to the Declaration. We should probably talk about our favorite farmer as well, and and his work, which you also talk about in the book. But so maybe a bit more on how exactly the founders were classical people, and how some of those classical myths then get translated into what become our myths today.

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Brad Birzer 19:43

Sure. Well, think about America. The whole story of America is the story of the Indian. Think about these people who’ve lost their home. They search for a new one. When they find Rome, it’s already populated by the Latins, and the Trojans have to figure out how to deal with that. That’s our story. We come, we meet the American Indian, and you know. So it’s not it’s not crazy to realize that when James Fenimore Cooper writes The Last of the Mohicans, it’s a retelling of the Aeneid, you know, in every way. And you know, someone like George Washington was known as the American Aeneas, that was one of his titles. He had about four titles. He was the American Achilles, the American Cincinnatus, the the American Cicero, and well, and the American Cato too. So there are actually about five titles that he had, and you know this is Amy.

This is where in 2026, I think this is mind-boggling to us, but if we take a kid, let’s just say it’s 1750, and I’m a seven-year-old farm kid in Massachusetts, and by the time I’m 10, I’m strong enough. All I’m going to do is farm labor, so school’s over for me. But I would go to school ages 7, 8, 9, and 10, so I’d get maybe three or four years of schooling. The only thing, Amy, and I’m not exaggerating, absolutely the only thing I would have learned from ages seven to 10 in grade school was Latin and Greek. That is all that is taught in American schools. You know the idea that you would learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. That’s all stuff you do at home. You don’t do that at public expense. At public expense, you’re taught Greek and Latin, and so I’m always amazed by this.

But you take the take a quintessential battle of the American Revolution. Take take the Battle of Yorktown. It is two thirds French and 1/3 American, right? And this is the great battle in the fall of 1781 that more or less earns our freedom. It’s it’s not, yeah. I mean, I can say that without exaggerating. There’s still some battle after that, but that’s the big one. And when we look at what was going on at Yorktown, you know, the French hardly ever spoke English, and the Americans did not speak French. All of the battle orders at Yorktown were in Latin. Everything was in Latin because it was the only language they had in common, and so we forget this.

You know, we we forget that these people are a deeply classical people, and it’s no accident that the Federalist authors call themselves Publius, or that Capitol Hill is a Roman Republican building, right? We we we often, you know, it’s not Timbuktu, it’s not the Hanging Gardens, it’s not Parliament, it’s not a European cathedral, it is a second century BC Roman building. Or the fact that we call our upper legislative body the Senate, which you know is Latin for wise old men. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Yeah, we can aspire, right? I mean, we are, and we love the Greeks, but we adored the Romans, you know, and we saw ourselves as a new Roman people, and and so we are deeply classical.

And Amy, I would take it even further, you know. It no nobody but men went to college in the 18th century, right? My college, Hillsdale, was the very first college to allow women to get a liberal arts degree, and that’s not till 1844.

Amy Willis

Oh wow! So yeah, it’s a pretty cool fact. I didn’t know that.

Brad Birzer

Yeah. Yeah, Oberlin was the first to accept women, but they could only get a home ec degree. Ah, well, sure. We’re very proud about it, Hillsdale. But you know, you look so. Basically, my argument is, it’s all male. There are only nine colleges in America in the in the 18th century, the eight Ivy Leagues, and then William and Mary, and you go to school as a boy. You go from age 14 to 17. That was college age during the American Revolution, and the entrance requirements to get into college. You had to pass three exams to get into college. You were given three of Cicero’s orations in Latin, and without aid, you had to translate those into English.

You were given the first three chapters of Saint John’s Gospel in Greek, and you had to translate that to Latin. And then you were given the first 1500 lines of the Aeneid, and you would have to translate that from Latin into English. That’s how you got into college at age 14.

So these guys, you know, they knew the classics in every way, and so you know the way I like to think about it, Amy. And again, I don’t have that kind of training. I’m not a Protestant, but you think about the character of the American Founding. These guys are deeply Protestant. They are deeply classical, and they are deeply Anglo-Saxon. And that if we don’t get those three things about them, we’re not going to understand what was going on in the founding and all, so I think those things are just essential to understand the kind of the cultural milieu of the time.

Amy Willis 25:30

Great, I in my head I have this sort of horror movie reel going on right now about high school students today stressing over those three tasks you just laid out in lieu of say the SAT or the ACT, right? I mean, good lord. Oh my gosh.

Brad Birzer 25:50

Yeah.

Amy Willis 25:57

No. Yeah. You can’t sit down on a Saturday morning and get that done. One more question for you, Brad. Sort of relating your excellent book to today. One of the other things that struck me, I’m going to call it an irony. Maybe you’ll tell me that this is not in fact ironic, but the irony of independence again prior to 1776 being first forged locally, right, and that individual colonies and individual patriots were sort of lobbying what would become Congress to take some action toward independence, and Congress doesn’t do a lot of that for quite some time, so that is relatively familiar. But gosh, it seems like such a big socio-political shift between the founding period and today, right? With sort of the action coming from localities and the and the federal, what would become the federal government being pressured to act on behalf of them. What do you think happened there? How did we experience such a shift? I know that’s a really long question, but you know…

Brad Birzer 26:59

yeah, it’s a hard, it’s a good question. It’s a hard question. You know, I’m going to sound a lot like my Straussian colleagues. I really think that the great change comes with the progressive period. You know, and especially when the progressives substitute and that they’re open about this. You know, this is this is not conspiratorial. They say quite specifically, we want to interpret American history according to Darwinian principles rather than Newtonian principles. You know nothing against Darwin; he’s brilliant. But you know it’s one thing to use Darwin to explain how we got here biologically. It’s a very different thing to explain how we got here politically, and if we are Darwinian in our politics, it means that what the American founders were doing on July 4 of 1776 is fine, but it has nothing to do with us today.

And the one thing we can say about progressives that you know is just incontrovertible: they hated anybody who was not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, you know, so that they hated Italians, they hated Catholics, they hated blacks, they hated Jews, they hated American Indians, and so much of the reason that they undermine the Declaration is because they’re truly offended by we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. The progressives reject that completely, and so what do they implement? Will they implement an extremely centralized executive branch? That’s and you know whether we’re talking about a right-wing progressive like Teddy Roosevelt, or we’re talking about a left-wing progressive like Woodrow Wilson. The one thing that they well they agree on two things: they don’t like these non-white Americans, but they also believe that all power should reside in the executive branch.

And you know, Amy, when we look at the history of the executive, from basically Teddy Roosevelt all the way up to the present, you know you can name a few that don’t fall into this category, but they’re the minority. You know Taft doesn’t quite fit in, Harding doesn’t fit in, Coolidge doesn’t fit in, Eisenhower and Reagan kind of on the fence, kind of not, but every other president, Republican or Democrat, they have all bought into the idea that it is the executive that runs the government, and that is utterly a progressive idea.

And so, you know, we get to a point like today, and I’m speaking just as Brad here, Amy. So I’ll reveal my own politics for a moment. You know, if you look at the three branches of government, the president has a billion times more power than he should. Again, left or right, it doesn’t matter if it’s Obama or if it’s Trump. Right? It’s outrageous how much power the presidency has. The Supreme Court seems to be the one branch of government that’s still doing what it was supposed to do from the beginning, but look at Congress-they’re totally impotent. Congress has been impotent since 1946. They’re a waste of a branch, and I-that just drives me crazy. But I think that’s all a result of progressivism, and then metastasized by war, right?

So war has been horrible for governments, just horrible. It’s been horrible for culture. Not not that all wars are unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong. Some wars are very necessary, but when you look at Vietnam, or you look at Korea, or you look what we did in Afghanistan, I mean, clearly these things were failures in every way, right? And Amy, I know I’m a little bit older than you, but you know I remember very well when we deserted when we deserted Vietnam. It was one of my first memories as a kid, watching the news and watching all those helicopters depart Saigon on April 30th of 1975. Right, I was what I was eight, seven at the time, and you know to watch that and literally to watch Vietnamese women throwing their babies into the helicopters as those helicopters are departing, you know that’s my first image of America, is just defeat, and you know that that’s hard as a kid.

That’s hard for me now as an adult to look back on that, and I still get emotional thinking about those kinds of things. So you know, we again, I don’t want to blame only the progressives. I think they’re the beginning of it, but war metastasized that as well.

Amy Willis 31:44

Thanks, Brad. I want to encourage all of our listeners to read your tremendous book. They’ll learn a lot, even if you think you know the history of the Declaration. Brad’s take on it, as I hope we’ve been able to express here, is pretty unique, and I want I highly recommend it.

Brad, I want to ask you one totally unrelated question before we close, and no explanation needed. I just want some titles here, because you know we’re sort of in the business of getting books out, books and ideas out there, and starting conversations. I want listeners to know, Brad, what are some of the books that made you you.

Brad Birzer 32:23

Yeah. Oh, that’s a great question, Amy. And I’ll try not to go on too long about this. By far, the most important person in my life was my mother, and still, she’s going to be 90 in a month, and she still is sharp. I mean, she’s just amazing. But she, from the from my earliest age, she taught me to read. She handed me books, you know, and she gave me books all the time. You know, we were never, there was, it was never a house without books. My mom was a Goldwater girl. She was a huge Goldwater fan, and she gave me books that you know I actually I’m proud of. I mean, she gave me even things like Peyton Place when I turned 16. It’s kind of a scandalous book. She gave me The Summer of 42, a kind of scandalous book. She gave me when I was very young. Atlas Shrugged. I mean, just all of these things, and she just oh, and she gave me great books too. Don’t get me wrong. She didn’t just give me scandalous books, okay…

Amy Willis 33:24

Brad, I love scandalous books!

Brad Birzer 33:26

Well, there was nothing untoward going on. Brad, you’re ready for this book, and she would hand it to me, and I would read it. She gave me Leon Uris, that had a huge influence on me. But you know, it’s funny, Amy. The first book I ever read that I remember reading was a short biography of Lewis and Clark. It was a children’s biography of Lewis and Clark. I can still see the book. It’s a little orange book, orange red. I loved it. I still love Lewis and Clark. My wife and I have traveled the whole Lewis and Clark Journey Trail. I’m still kind of obsessed with them. That all started.

I read a book called Ben and Me about Ben Franklin, who had a little mouse who gave him advice. I love that, but I would say you know for me the probably the two greatest influences on me were J.R. Tolkien. I mean, without question, he has influenced my view of the world more than any other author, but I would actually say Ray Bradbury was number two, and then if I had to add a third, it would be Willa Cather, though those have been the three authors, and I love. Don’t get me wrong.

I love Virgil. I love Homer. I love Dante, but I didn’t actually come to them until later, and I came to them through basically through Liberty Fund, and so Liberty Fund was, I mean, just you know… My next conference will be my 101st conference. Wow. 101st Liberty Fund conference, and I could never thank Liberty Fund enough. For I mean, really, I had a good liberal education, but nothing like what I got at Liberty Fund. And so again, though, I I would say those authors are Tolkien, and Bradbury, and Cather. But then, as an adult, coming to these other great books as well.

So I’ve never been without books. My house is outrageous. I don’t know if you can see, but even here, I’ve got books stacked. I’m trying to hide that view of my house right now. Yeah. Oh yeah. In the living room. It’s just kind of insane. And my wife collects as well, so you know she’s an academic too. Yep, a PhD, and so you know we both have our libraries here, and it’s crazy. Yeah, but I love it. You know, I love it, and I couldn’t imagine anything different. A life without books just sounds horrific to me. You know what? I just read. What is the? Did you see the new Atlantic monthly article?

Amy Willis 36:04

Oh yes.

Brad Birzer 36:05

Reading is dead.

Amy Willis 36:06

We’ll link to it.

Oh no! Please God, please no. So I don’t think it’s true, Brad, and I’m banking. I’m literally banking on it right now. So, I mean, I like you, and we met through Liberty Fund. I can’t thank them enough for my reading life, and you know, it’s hard to pick the favorites that influence you. I would never ask you to pick your favorite child, so you’re safe there. In any case, friends, pick up Brad’s book. Also, perhaps pick up some Tolkien, some Bradbury, or some Cather. Thanks for joining us today, Brad. I appreciate you and loved your book.

Brad Birzer 36:45

Thank you. It was so fun talking.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, I envy you the first read. I hope you won’t be too handicapped by not being a Midwestern girl growing up in the 1980’s, but since it’s sold millions of copies since its publication in 1962, there’s good evidence its charm is not too narrow. The 2018 movie directed by Ava DuVernay has an amazing cast and it is very beautiful to watch, but it misses one of my favorites parts of the book so I can only partially recommend it. A big part of the reason L’Engle’s story moved me then and lingers with me now is that it puts love in the center of everything.

Meg Murry, our clumsy, bespectacled, frizzy-haired hero, loves her family. She loves her father who the neighbors say ran off, but Meg knows it’s not true. Meg loves her strange little brother Charles Wallace, beyond his years in many ways but a baby in others. Meg loves and, oh, so importantly is loved in return, by Mrs. Whatzit, a magical being who shows up to call Meg and Charles to their hero’s journey to save their father. Alexander Murray, an astrophysicist who was experimenting with space travel, is imprisoned on an evil and far away planet, Camazotz. Meg and Charles must go there and save him. Meg’s story reminds us that love requires us to do hard things and love gives us the courage to do them. There is good and evil, and love is one of the most powerful ways to fight evil.

This book also has the power to make a little kid feel smart. Early in the book there’s an explanation about time as a fourth dimension and about folding space to travel quickly through it. This is the “tessering” that gets Mr. Murray in so much trouble. The explanation in the book is not a lot of words and just a few pictures but even a child can understand it’s a big, cool idea about this big, cool world. The book also contains many, many references to great thinkers and doers. Younger readers might have a hard time imagining this, but in the 1980s when you read the name of a person you had never heard of before in a book you could not just “search it up” on the internet like my kids do. You had to find an encyclopedia that was recent enough and comprehensive enough to include this person (good luck!) or you headed to the card catalog the next time you were able to get a ride to the library. Yes, yes, I did.

As someone who loved books and ideas at an early age, every one of those mentions felt like a little gift from L’Engle - here’s something else to read, here’s something else to learn, here’s something else to love (and, remember, that’s another way to fight evil). Jesus and Shakespeare get lots of mentions and I’d definitely heard of them before. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the first time I’d heard the name Marie Curie or Goethe might have been in this book. (The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might have beaten L’Engle to introducing me to Michelangelo and Leonardo but I really can’t be sure.)

But smartness, especially coupled with too much pride or confidence in your smartness, is the very thing that makes Charles Wallace so vulnerable to the same evil being that trapped his father. When Mr. Murray takes Meg and escapes, they leave Charles Wallace behind. Meg is horrified that her father has left him there. Reading this as a child, Meg’s anger and despair is so real. It seems impossible that a father could do that. Reading it as an adult, with two children, it’s hard in a completely different way. Poor Mr. Murray.

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For Meg’s first journey, the one to save her father, Meg is given the gift of her faults. This is not the light of Eärendil ‘s star that Frodo Baggins receives from Galadriel or Susan Pevensie’s bow and arrow from Father Christmas to help defeat the White Witch. It’s not even a thing! Meg is confused about how her faults can help her, and so was I. But they do. And on her second journey, the one to save Charles Wallace, she is given something else. Meg is given an idea:

“The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called, but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. And God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.”

Meg doesn’t have to be wise, or mighty, or noble. She can confound evil by just being herself and doing something that evil cannot do: love another person. This is a wonderful thing to tell a child because children know that they are not wise, or mighty, or noble. The whole world shouts it. But their love is not less than a grown-up’s love.

On page 208 Meg says “I love you” to Charles Wallace ten times. She says it in her mind. She says it out loud and out louder. Her love pushes the evil out of Charles’ mind. He returns to himself and returns to her. She continues to say “I love you” four more times and they are whisked off the planet safe and whole and together. Meg doesn’t save Charles Wallace with gifts from elves or other magical beings. She saves him by loving the whole idea of him even when he is not himself.

I hope you give it a read, a reread, or a listen. And don’t forget to tell your brother, “I love you.”

I had the great pleasure of talking with Carly Jackson on her BookClubPodcast about this book and she made some excellent suggestions to make this short article even better (Thank you, Carly.). You can find links to listen to our episode here.

If you’d like to read more by this author, check out the below:
Crumpets & Comeuppance in Commonplace, A Journal of the Catherine Project (Spring 2025)
The Poor Man’s Son According to Adam Smith and Hilary Mantel at AdamSmithWorks
The Ends of Curiosity at Econtalk

I promised a roundup of vacation reads, and here it is. One thing I love to do is read books about or set in the places I am traveling. On our recent family vacation, we took a cruise through the Norwegian fjords so at ’s excellent suggestion, I brought along Sigrid Undset’s first Kristin Lavransdatter volume, “The Wreath.”

You guys, how did I not know about this???

This first third of Kristin’s story is utterly charming. While I would have thought nothing could make me want to live in medieval Norway, well… Undset is a Nobel laureate, and it’s easy to see why. Her depiction of this time and place is somehow both utterly strange and utterly familiar.

But what most struck me about this book is Kristin’s passionate desire for freedom and the the torment that its accompanying responsibility foists on her. She loves Erlend Nikulaussøn, which sets her against her family and the expectations of the world into which she was born. In this way, the book is very Jane Austen marriage-market like. You must read yourself to find how Kristin navigates her desires.

Me, I’m on to the next volume, “The Wife.”

I also read Michael Koryta’s How It Happened. He’s one of my favorite thriller writers, and he’s from right here in Indiana. (His So Cold the River, set in French Lick, is one of my all time favs). This one, set in rural Maine, centers on an FBI investigator’s return to a decade old double murder. Specializing in confessions, he gets a seemingly solid one from one of the original witnesses. Given this happens in the first quarter of the book, the reader is pretty sure it won’t hold up. No spoiler- it doesn't. As the body count mounts (mostly “"overdoses” from a particularly virulent heroin called Black Cat), the twists will not disappoint. I love a story where it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys, and this one is great in that regard.

Speaking of twists and turns, I also finally read Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? It’s pretty fun! Bernadette, a certified genius, is a mystery unto herself. Who she is to her tech guru husband, her precocious daughter (and narrator) Bee, her fellow car line moms, and the architecture students who have missed her creation are all different. And then she disappears. The fun of the story is both in finding out how she did it and how each party’s perspective both enabled and ultimately helped solve it. If you still need a beach read, this is a good one.

I also returned to another favorite, William Kent Krueger, and I found a novel I didn’t even know about, The Devil’s Bed. This is a standalone crime novel, which surprised me. Krueger’s other standalones are truly lovely, though I would not characterize them as crime fiction. I learned about this book from the introduction of the Cork O’Connor mystery I recently read, in which Krueger mentions The Devil’s Bed as the origin story of one of the characters in Desolation Mountain.

Intrigued, I was. While not my favorite Krueger, it was very enjoyable to see him take on a totally different setting- mostly centered on Washington DC- as the protagonist is a Secret Service agent embroiled in a plot to assassinate the First Lady.

I have loved Howard Fast since I read April Morning in high school (a title currently in the GoodRiches Bookmobile as part of our America 250 Collection). Recently, I came across his Lavette family series in some used bookstores, with the exception of the first volume, The Immigrants. Loaded on my Kindle (thanks, Indy Public Library!) I dove in.

I love a sweeping family saga, and this one fits the bill. I loved the Horatio Alger-esque theme of rags to riches, particularly as it pertains to the main protagonist, Dan Lavette, the son of an immigrant fisherman who becomes a tycoon in early 20th century San Francisco. He is far from perfect (I mean, far) but of course that’s part of the novel’s charm. He weathers the great fire and then the Great Depression as he climbs up Nob Hill, and falls back down. The next book in the series centers on his daughter Barbara, who I anticipate will be an even more interesting character.

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And now that I’m back from vacation, it’s also back to work! This semester, I’ve made a change to my assigned reading, and will be using Thomas Sowell’s classic Basic Economics. It’s a (nerdy!) joy to revisit this text, which I can’t recommend highly enough as a readable (no math! no graphs!) introduction to the economic way of thinking. The revised version (my original copy is more than 20 years old…) also has a great section on global wealth inequality that I anticipate will work really well with students.

Now don’t worry, I’m still teaching graphs (they’re just pictures, people) and Adam Smith…

And last but not least…Since I’ve been traveling, my podcast consumption has been down. (We’re not even going to talk about the bad movies I watched on our flight…) But I did find one! If you haven't yet encountered and Charles Mann’s new podcast, Everyday Abundance, check it out; there are only eight episodes thus far. I was particularly tickled by this one on washing machines. Postrel and Mann do a very fun job of emphasizing how much our standards of living have improved (and how much we take it for granted). Washing machines, for example, may be one of the biggest boons for women’s freedom in the last century. Find out why, and maybe you’ll join me as I attach “appliance of freedom” stickers all around my house.

Now it’s your turn… Tell me what you have been reading!

Did I get that personal pan pizza? Yep. Did I read the books that LeVar Burton told me to read? Sometimes, yes. Did I read enough books to get the AR points? Yep, and I used the smaller books with fewer points to get there.

Still, I did not enjoy about 90% of what I read.

It was not until my mid-twenties when I decided to try to read again. Now to be clear, I read for all my educational purposes. As both a teacher and a graduate student, I did what was needed. But I again tried to read for me. For fun, hopefully. And that try was all it took. Today, I am A READER, no pan pizza necessary.

There are two important things that made this rediscovery of reading possible for me. First, is the genre and type of books I chose. The second is how I read.

Finding Myself on the Page.

When I think about genres, I think about it in two parts. First, I look to see if it’s romantic, action-packed, a thriller, etc. I have my favorite (comedy and romance, what can I say?). However, I also look for books based on their characters. Being a queer man, I typically read books with queer main characters. I want to see characters like me in the stories I read.

More than just my queer identity, I want to find characters that aren’t just tropes- butch guy, gym bro, whatever. I want to find male characters who are sensitive, caring, complex, intellectual, and give a crap about the people in their lives and the world they live in. I have done a recent audit of my book collection, and have found that most are connected through characters within, more than by any particular genre.

I think this goes back to a statement I made earlier. We are humans. We want to see ourselves (whether ideally or realistically) in the books we read. We want to connect to the characters. We live in a time where we have authors with vast identities who bring vast characters to life.

Reading at Full Volume.

The second thing that changed the game to me was how I read. I do not like silence. I am a theatre teacher. Chaos and noise is where I thrive. Truly. If I am alone, I either have music or a podcast playing, or I talk to myself.

Again, in my mid-twenties, I found audiobooks. I know this is not a new concept. As a teacher, I know that these have been around a long time. However, the quality of audiobooks has skyrocketed. I started to have the audiobook playing while I had the physical book opened, so I could follow along. Literal. Game. Changer.

For those with an active mind like mine, this was key to keeping me engaged with a book. My first book I read like this was the first of a seven book series. I was shocked when I read all seven books within three months. There is something about having the text being read to you and seeing the text as you follow along that is so satisfying. I get lost in the story immediately, and then- boom!- the book is finished.

I need a book that to create a visual in my mind; if I can’t see it, I do not enjoy it. Listening to while reading a book creates that picture for me early on.

Spoiler Alert! It All Counts.

I admit, there was a little bit of guilt when I started with this. I asked myself, “Does this count? Why can’t I be like others who can read silently without the audiobook?” Then I discovered Whoopi Goldberg saying that she also uses audiobooks in the same format that I do. If audiobooks help you enjoy books, she counseled, then let them. I have, and I can’t stop, won’t stop.

If you are trying to get back into reading for enjoyment, but seem stuck, it’s okay. First, ask yourself what type of book you want. This can include the overall genre, and the types of characters you want to read. Then go to your bookstore or library, and do the easiest but sometimes most terrifying thing. Ask for help. That bookseller or librarian, they know their stuff. They can help you find what you are looking for. If talking to a person maybe isn’t your thing, ask the internet. There are GoodReads suggestions, Reddit threads, and more that can help you find ideas. It may take a few stabs, but you’ll find what you’re into.

Then find your way to read. Maybe you prefer physical books to ebooks. Maybe you prefer them without the audio; cool. Find what works for you. It all counts. It is all reading.

Finding Your Fellow Book Nerds

Once you are back into it, find the book nerds just like you in your area. They meet up and do cool things all the time! Some stores have their own version of BookIt for adults (GoodRiches Book Maven Amy Willis and I are doing LoudMouth Books’ summer reading program, for example). Join an in-person or online book club like those hosted right here by GoodRiches Books. Check out group reading sessions at parks, bars, or restaurants, like Silent Book Club. You, too, can find your reading community.

Best of Luck. Happy Reading.

Muse, tell me how a story wandered and was lost when it wrecked the holy conversations of the classicists and the Christopher Nolan fanboys.

Where does the story go?

Who will you meet?

What pains the lovers of ancient Greek suffer.

And the storms that rain on Twitter.

And how a story can work to save a life

And bring you back home.

The story may not keep you safe, poor fool.

If you eat the sun god’s cattle, you will not make it home.

Now goddess, child of Zeus,

Tell the old story for our modern times

Find the beginning.

Homer’s epic The Odyssey is one the most recognizable stories in the history of the world. Even those who haven’t read it have absorbed parts of the story through its influences on other authors’ writings, through art, and even through language itself. There is no one way to read this story and no one way to translate it. It is a perfect book to discuss. We hope you join us.

Like all great works of art, The Odyssey often inspires strong feelings in those that encounter it. One theme might resonate more strongly with one listener. Or the translation of the Greek word πολύτροπον (polytropon), the first description of Odysseus as “complicated” (Emily Wilson) or “of twists and turns” (Robert Fagles) or “ingenious” (Samuel Butler) might inspire or turn away a reader.

While we will welcome insights from all translators in this reading group, we ask that the common text is Emily Wilson’s translation. You can purchase a copy to read at Bookshop.org 1in case you’ve not yet encountered the GoodRiches Bookmobile!

Session 1: Thursday, October 1, 1-2:30 pm EDT

Books 1 - 4

Ithaca after Odysseus’ long absence.

Session 2: Thursday, October 8, 1-2:30 pm EDT

Books 5 - 8

In which we meet Odysseus

Session 3: Thursday, October 15, 1-2:30 pm EDT

Books 9 - 12

Odysseus tells his story

Session 4: Thursday, October 22, 1-2:30 pm EDT

Books 13-16

Odysseus returns home

Session 5: Thursday, October 29, 1-2:30 pm

Books 17-20
Odysseus at home but in disguise

Session 6: Thursday, November 5, 1-2:30 pm
Books 21-24

Odysseus revealed

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Have we sparked your curiosity? Then come join the conversation and be part of our community. To register, email our Book Maven at amy@goodriches.net.

We hope you “see” you on October 1!

As I’ve written previously, rather than “defining” our community, we are actively seeking it. We start by (hopefully!) attracting curious people. Going out on a limb here…but I’m working off the assumption that if you’re reading this, you absolutely qualify as curious. As you also know, we have begun making space for conversation- during our bookmobile outings, in our online book clubs (stay tuned for news on The Odyssey here this week!), and the podcast series we’ll launch this fall. As such, I’ve been using a lot of my head space of late to think about what makes for a good conversation. Many of you here have been helping me think through this, both on and offline, and I appreciate these conversations tremendously!

So here are some of the things I’ve been mulling in recent weeks, as well as some thoughts on further reading, and, always, a plea for your suggestions.

Conversation is about more than the exchange of information.

If that were its sole purpose, we really could immerse ourselves in a digital-only world and flourish. If that thought makes you cringe, you’re my people.

Information encompasses facts and evidence, of course, but also opinions, arguments, and assertions. Facts are broadcast, with the goal of absorption as is. Facts may indeed play a part in conversation, perhaps a necessary but not sufficient condition. Conversation at its best, on the other hand, is about listening as much as speaking, joint exploration, and thinking together.

Certainly great conversations happen spontaneously; we can all think of examples of these unexpected pleasures. But here we’re in the business of curating conversations. In these sorts of experiences, you can’t have great conversation absent some substance, which leads me to books.

Books matter because they make better conversations, and better conversations make better communities. I’ve written previously that the most highly valued use of books is not their consumption in isolation- even if that may be a starting point. So how do we get there?

Books make conversations better.

Engaging in a conversation about a book gives its participants shared reference points and a common entry point. While the conversation may very well reach beyond the bounds of a particular book, it remains at least tethered to it. Books can give us shared language with which to explore difficult or controversial ideas. When fictional, this power may even be enhanced by adding a veil of speculation to such ideas.

Absent a common text, conversation may become reactionary versus exploratory.

Curiosity matters more than brilliance.

How one approaches conversation based on books also matters. Like my main man Adam Smith, I am a radical egalitarian. As Smith wrote long ago, there is no inherent difference between the street porter and the philosopher. We are born equal. This does not mean we are the same; different individuals will have different inherent strengths, interests, aptitudes, etc. These innate differences are then compounded by life experience- especially by the division of labor. But we are all endowed with the same nature. (Sounds familiar in the summer of 2026, no?)

Beyond common content, I believe this is the first key to a great conversation. We come to the table-physical or metaphorical- as equals. Some in the group may be experts on the topic at hand; perhaps ideally most are not. But we are each experts in something- especially our own life’s experience. Sharing from our unique perspectives enriches conversation. Others are drawn to consider plot points or themes from others’ perspectives- a privilege not afforded to the reader in isolation.

In a great conversation, no one should be there to “prove a point” or teach people the “correct” idea or way to think. We will all think differently. People leave conversations remembering how interested someone was—not how impressive they were.

Hospitality is an intellectual virtue.

I wrote recently about our vision of intellectual hospitality. Hospitality isn't just setting the table; it's making sure everyone knows there's a place for them at it. Intellectual hospitality means welcoming people into a conversation, inviting them to contribute, and treating disagreement as an opportunity rather than a threat. A good host begins by recognizing the radical equality noted above as well as the common textual starting point we share. Participants need to be actively invited to the conversation and actively invited to participate in it. A great conversation welcomes ideas- even those one may ultimately reject.

Great conversations leave everyone changed.

A great conversation is not one in which you have “won,” but one from which you have learned something new- about the text, about an idea, about yourself. To truly be changed, one must do more than seek out conversations, one ought also work to be the sort of person others wish to engage in conversation with.

Many of the books I’ve been reading and writing on here have helped me to think about that… ’s Lost in Thought is a lovely exploration of how reading can be preparation for a richer human life. ’s Curious helped me to see curiosity as the beginning of wisdom by transforming information into quests for new understanding. Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation reminded me of the tremendous importance of connection and real conversation in our digital world.

So what should I explore next to think more about becoming the sort of person others want to engage with? Here are some of the titles I’m considering. I’d love your thoughts on these, as well as suggestions for titles not listed below.

• How Reading Changed My Life, Anna Quindlen

• The Intellectual Life, A.G. Sertillange

• The Great Conversation, Robert Maynard Hutchins

• How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler

• On Reading Well, Karen Swallow Prior

And now I’m headed off on a family vacation… You can be sure I’ll have several “fun reads” to report on upon my return. In the meantime, help me bulk up this list, and let’s read together.

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It’s been a bit since you’ve heard from me… I’m still lounging on Cloud 9 after the GRAND Opening of our Bookmobile over Independence Day weekend here in Indianapolis. Since then, I’ve been busy reflecting, restocking (shout out to ’s How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, GoodRiches Books’ first sellout!), and reorganizing in anticipation of future events and the eventual opening of our permanent home downtown. (More on that soon…)

One of the great joys of the opening was watching people gravitate toward certain books and conversations. Our inaugural featured collection, America at 250, sparked exactly the kind of curiosity I'd hoped it would, and it has influenced much of my own reading over the past few weeks. You can see the current collection on our Bookshop.org page, where you can also purchase titles with proceeds going to our store.)

Unsurprisingly, a lot of my focus of late has been on the Declaration of Independence, so I’ll start my latest list there.

I’ve mentioned this title before, but now seems an apt time to alert you to our new podcast series, on which will be my first guest! We’ll be discussing his new book, The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty, and I’ll be posting that conversation here.

I also enjoyed this recent podcast discussion among , , and on the Declaration, It’s a great piece to start with; it even includes a three-part recitation of the whole text! Threads that particularly caught my interest were their observations on how the Declaration lives in our consciousness; the religiosity (not religion) of the Declaration and the Founders, and their discussion of what was radical in the Declaration as well as what was unexceptional.

The Pursuit of Liberalism

The Declaration of Independence with Zena Hitz and Hollis Robbins

Welcome to the sixth episode of our new podcast season about liberalism and the arts…

Listen now

2 months ago · 4 likes · The Pursuit of Liberalism and Rebecca Lowe

Next I’ll be taking on Divided Over the Declaration: How an Enduring Debate Sustains the Vision of America, co-authored by Tony Williams and David J. Bobb. Williams will also be joining me for a podcast conversation!

Speaking of Tony, if you can’t wait for my interview with him, here’s a good one he did with , whose take on political life past and present is always worth your while.

We Made This Political Podcast

Ep. 59: Tony Williams on the Debating the Declaration

Lura and Lauren host Tony Williams of the Bill of Rights Institute to discuss his book Divided Over the Declaration and the long history of Americans arguing over the Declaration of Independence. Williams explains that debates over the document’s meaning have shifted across eras, with different generations emphasizing consent, equality, and other princi…

Listen now

a month ago · Lauren Hall

My reading of late hasn't been all about the Declaration, fear not! I’m about a thirds of the way through ’s excellent The Idea Machine, which makes a compelling case for the book as humanity's greatest information technology. I love the way he thinks through the physicality of the book, relating that to its socio-cultural import. I’ll have a lot more to say about this book; you all know how I love books about books, so I’ll again save the rest for a future post.

Of course I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo in preparation for OUR FIRST BOOK CLUB, which starts August 11. Even I was a little intimidated by the sheer size of this one, but I found it reads like any great modern-day thriller. That Danglars dude is really a piece of…work. And Fernand? What a sop. Things don’t bode well for our hero Edmond right from the start…

For those interested in social issues, and particularly immigration, I can’t recommend Lionel Shriver’s A Better Life highly enough. She’s one of my favorites, and a master at portraying multiple perspectives. A Better Life tells the story of Brooklyn’s Bonaventura family, whose matriarch takes advantage of a New York City program that compensates residents for taking in illegal immigrants in an attempt to ease its burgeoning crisis. Enter Martine, who immediately endears herself to Gloria and her daughters, but whose presence is anathema to her twenty-six year old, basement-dwelling slacker son Nico. And then Martine’s “friends” begin to arrive and take up residence with the Bonaventuras’… Things do not go well. Unreliable narrators (mostly Nico) abound, and you’ll be guessing who’s on whose side until the end. Whatever your perspective on immigration, Shriver refuses easy answers. That's what makes this such an engaging—and unsettling—novel.

On the crime front, I returned to one of my favorite protagonists, Cork O’Connor, in William Kent Krueger’s Desolation Mountain. This is the seventeenth (of 21) in a series I never want to end, and this one was one of my favorites. I read each installment petrified that this will be the last I see of Henry Meloux, the centenarian Ojibwe Mide whose influence over Cork, his family, and the community are the heart of the series. Krueger’s depiction of place is as good as his character development, so reading about the northern Minnesota woods during an Indiana heatwave was refreshing.

Equally, er. refreshing? is David Grann’s The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, as it starts off with a treacherous winter-time expedition around the Cape of Good Hope. Speaking of things that don’t go well…This true story reads like a great caper. Turns out that after the good ship Wager went down, more than one group of castaways returned- with wildly different versions of the events which had transpired. If you’re interested in the dangers of the sea, the rigidity of military command, the ingenuity of men on the brink, and the politics of wealth and trade, this one’s for you.

Last but not least (at least for today) is a strange pick (for me) that my friend Orla insisted on- so much so she made me order it while she was watching. Orla is smart. Dungeon Crawler Carl is a crazy story of a collapsed Earth which now features in an alien reality TV show. Carl and his companion Princess Donut (a cat!!!) must navigate this new world as dungeon levels regularly collapse, battling all sorts of creatures to achieve… it’s unclear. I’ve been listening to the Audible version, and I would highly recommend it. The narrator is fantastic- especially his dead-on Judi Dench impersonation for Donut. I'm still not entirely sure what shelf I'd put this on. Science fiction? Dystopian satire? RPG fantasy? Whatever it is, it's wildly entertaining.Have you read it? Help me out, here! All I know is, I’ll be getting the next volume ASAP.

Now it’s your turn… What have YOU been reading/watching/listening to of late? Tell us about it in the comments and help us all create dangerously high TBR piles… Maybe Carl and Donut can help us keep them from collapsing…

As the catalyst who sets the plot in motion, the Count looks beyond himself, while Dumas shows us justice versus revenge, moral clarity, reinvention, and manipulation. For those interested in literary analysis, Dumas uses every page in this lengthy book to further the plot, introduce us to a large cast of characters, and share the adventures of the Count and his friends. The writing is captivating and complex, making it perfect for discussion.

This six-session online reading group will take readers on a wild ride as we follow Edmund Dantes’ journey from betrayed sailor to imprisoned scholar to wealthy avenger, and finally as a figure confronting the moral costs of revenge, all while situating the novel within broader contexts of 19th‑century justice, identity, and narrative. As we read together, we’ll not only unpack plot and structure but foster critical debate about the ethics of retribution, the uses of wealth and disguise, and Dumas’ narrative strategies, culminating in a final discussion on moral reckoning and the novel’s resonance today.

[A Note: You can use any translation or edition you choose, but the chapter and page numbers below correspond to the Penguin edition linked above.]

Session 1: Tuesday, August 11, noon-1pm EDT — Innocence, Betrayal, and Injustice

As we begin, we examine Edmund Dantès’ fall, the social forces and personal jealousies that produce his arrest, Villefort’s moral compromise, the novel’s opening of innocence, and the mechanisms of betrayal.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Chapters 1–21 (p212)

Session 2: Tuesday, August 18, noon-1pm EDT— Imprisonment, Companionship, and Identity

On the Château d’If, Dantes begins his intellectual formation with his imprisonment. With life in the Château d’If, we experience Abbé Faria’s mentorship as he imparts knowledge and purpose, and how confinement can catalyze identity change.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Chapters 22-38 (p212-436)

Session 3: Tuesday, August 25, noon-1pm EDT — Resurrection, Reinvention, and the Acquisition of Means

In this session, we trace resurrection and reinvention. From Dantès’s escape, the discovery of the Monte Cristo treasure, and the beginnings of his multiple identities, we will explore how wealth and new personas enable social mobility and strategic action.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Chapters 39-60 (p 436-677)

Session 4: Tuesday, September 1, noon-1pm EDT —Strategy, Masks, and Social Power

In this session, we’ll study the Count’s theatrical entrance into Parisian society and his use of performance, disguise, and calculated manipulation to probe and destabilize his enemies. Along the way, we’ll analyze strategy, rhetoric, and social power.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Chapters 61-80 (p 678-895)

Session 5: Tuesday, September 8, noon-1pm EDT — Collateral Damage and Justice vs. Vengeance

Chart the unfolding consequences of revenge: the targeted downfalls, collateral harm to families and innocents, and the complex role of secondary characters (e.g., Haydée) in exposing moral cost and complicating vengeance.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Chapters 81-99 (p 896-1078)

Session 6: Tuesday, September 15, noon-1pm EDT — Resolution, Mercy, and Moral Reckoning

For our last session, we’ll conclude with resolution and moral reckoning. Final confrontations and punishments, acts of mercy, and the novel’s closing statements on justice and forgiveness give us a chance to explore the limits of transformation.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Chapters 100–end (p 1079-end)

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Have we sparked your curiosity? Then come join the conversation and be part of our community. To register, email our Book Maven at amy@goodriches.net.

We hope you “see” you on August 11!

Since that day, I’ve been lucky to have had so many memorable conversations over books, so many evenings where discussion lasted longer than expected; but I’ve also learned what a privilege this is. I’ve realized that outside these cloistered, ivory tower conversations, many people are hungry for intellectual community but don’t know where to find it. They aren’t looking for another social media platform. They’re looking for a table, a cup of coffee, and someone willing to consider a good question. I want to be their host— their book maven. I want to become the sort of bookseller who introduces people to ideas they didn't know they were looking for.

GoodRiches Books did not begin as a retail idea.

It began as a vision of intellectual hospitality.

We have more information than any generation in history, yet many of us struggle to find genuine intellectual community. Algorithms have become our curators, replacing serendipity with prediction.

I've had countless "aha!" moments while reading something that seemed unrelated to the question at hand, or during a conversation with friends and colleagues. Now algorithms increasingly determine what we read, watch, and discuss. This serendipity has become surprisingly rare. I want more of those “aha!” moments, and I want others to enjoy them as well.

I also worry that we've forgotten how to have conversations with people who see the world differently. Reading independently is declining. Our public discourse often rewards certainty over curiosity, and certainly over civility. People with different points of view are cast as the enemy. The result is that many people feel intellectually isolated.

My vision for GoodRiches Books began with a desire to foster and create a space for conversation about ideas, to satisfy what I see as a need for places and communities that cultivate curiosity. So I started with four books I thought would help me hone my vision, and through which I arrived at three project pillars.

Below is how I have seen these pillars evolve over the past several months, as well as more about where we are today.

Curiosity

Curiosity is the habit of asking better questions.

We at GoodRiches see books as invitations to inquiry rather than status symbols. We believe that interdisciplinary reading is the best way to learn deeper and to satisfy your curiosity. To practice curiosity is to find the questions that tickle your brain, to find holes in your knowledge you want to fill. We aim to help you find ideas you’re curious about, perhaps questions you didn't yet know you’re curious about. We’re interested in history, biography, economics, philosophy, fiction, food and wine, the arts and culture, and the ideal of living “the examined life.”

Conversation

Conversation is how ideas become shared understanding.

We see conversation as meaning-making, empathy-building, disagreement without hostility, intellectual engagement, and building friendship.

GoodRiches is not simply about reading alone. It is about shared intellectual life. This shared experience includes salons and book clubs and author talks, both virtual and in person. It’s about gathering places and spaces where ideas become communal.

Community

Community is where curiosity and conversation become a way of life.

Fostering community means cultivating the spaces for these conversations, again both in person and online. Because we are particularly sympathetic to building community where we live, this means local events, familiar faces, neighborhood relationships, artisan partnerships, reading groups, podcast conversations, and unreasonable hospitality.1

We are not trying to create anonymous consumer traffic. We are trying to cultivate belonging.

This week, our vision takes its first concrete form.

On Thursday of this week, the GoodRiches Bookmobile hits the streets of Indianapolis. Here’s what you’ll find if you come visit us Thursday through Saturday in midtown, and going forward to our eventual brick and mortar location.

Curated shelves. We’re not trying to be the everything shop. The Bookmobile will carry a small Biography Collection and the Amagi Collection, which is based on the Goodrich Seminar Room’s inscriptions. You’ll find primary texts alongside accessible introductions and adaptations of the classics.

In addition to these permanent collections, GoodRiches Books will offer featured collections, and we have our first collection on board the bus. Curated collections will always feature multiple genres- some classics, some new titles, and hopefully something unexpected. In our first collection, we’re celebrating America's 250th by exploring the ideas, people, and events that gave birth to a nation. Our first collection brings together timeless books on the Declaration of Independence, the Founding, and the enduring promise of liberty.

We’re starting mobile to meet people where they already gather. We hope to introduce every visitor to a book they've not met—or one they didn't yet know they needed. We look forward to lingering over conversation and coffee or tea with old and new friends as they pop in.

So if you're in Midtown Indianapolis this week, stop by. Browse the shelves. Have a drink. Stay for a conversation. Meet the wonderful people helping make this dream possible. We’ll tell you more about what’s to come. This project will eventually become an entire ecosystem of books, conversation, food, wine, podcasts, and community.

But, it starts with the books.

Always the books.

Greetings, friends! I mentioned in my previous post that soon you’d start to see guest posts here. Today is the day! I am so happy to welcome editor, writer, reader, and dear friend Renee Wilmeth to the Stack, today in praise of The Big Summer Read. I hope she inspires you as she does me, and that you’ll consider our soon-to-be-announced virtual Book Club later this summer, because reading together is even better.

Many years ago, I went on a long summer vacation with friends. Even though our destination was a sunny stretch of coastline in France, I was worried that I’d be bored. Hard to believe, but with my mother’s voice ringing in my ears, I followed her advice. “Take a book.” And to feel like I could accomplish a summer project, I tackled a classic: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It was my first Big Summer Read.

It wasn’t lost on me that I was reveling in Russian winter in Saint Petersburg while floating in an infinity pool overlooking the Mediterranean. That summer, I cried with Anna, screamed at her in frustration over her insecurities, and lamented the unfairness of her precarious social status. I turned the last few pages on the airplane home. Closing that book was so satisfying. I’d accomplished something and was better off for it. On subsequent summer vacations, I chose other weighty classics and so began a personal tradition.

Last summer, at LitHub wrote about the Big Thick Book Summer or “project reads.” No matter what you call them, the reason for tackling big books has to be yours and yours alone. They’re not trendy beach reads you’ll read about in magazines or see on airport paperback stands. And the value? That has to be yours, too.

If you’re looking for some reasons to start, you might find a few to explore:

1. Big books improve your focus, reading stamina, and vocabulary. Maybe you are preparing for a reading group or book club or maybe you just want to slow down and experience great writing. Either way, there’s great value in taking a big book slowly with a pen or pencil in your hand to make notes, ask questions, or even track complicated families. There’s also something to be said for immersing yourself in a new world and losing track of reality. And for writers? You’ll be shocked at how much your writing begins to improve when you read great authors.

2. Big books improve thinking, patience, and discipline. When you start an 1800-page behemoth, it can be hard to imagine finishing it, but setting a goal can mean finding a way to get it done. Maybe it’s breaking the reading into sections or chapters. The first time I read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, I set a vacation goal of 50 pages a day. Seem like too much like work? Consider it a personal improvement project. Write summaries in a journal or track your progress on paper. You’ll be happy with your accomplishment.

3. Big books give you cultural references, confidence, and an intellectual payoff. Once you finish a giant classic, you’ll see references to it everywhere. These books are our cultural touchstones, and once you know the characters, circumstances, and even scenes from major works, they will become part of your reference set as well. Plus, don’t discount side quests. Along the way with War and Peace, you might learn about the importance of the Battle of Borodino or reading Les Miserables, why Victor Hugo went into English exile. One classic begets another and they all become less intimidating. And who doesn’t love the idea of an intellectual payoff!

Looking to start your own summer reading challenge? The only rule is that there are no rules. You can set your own qualifications for books to choose. Traveling and looking for a book to set the tone? Try looking for classics or even mystery series set in your destination. A trip to Istanbul was how I discovered The Janissary Tree, the first of Jason Goodwin’s wonderful Inspector Yashim mysteries, full of Turkish history, culture, and food. Finally ready to tackle that book you’ve never been able to finish? How about a modern translation of Dante’s Inferno by poets like Mary Jo Bang or Robert Pinskey for a trip to Tuscany?

These days, I plan at least one big book each summer, and sometimes, two. This year, it’s a re-read of The Count of Monte Cristo, and Lonesome Dove, which I’ve never read. Maybe you choose by length or location (like Middlemarch for a trip to the English countryside?) Or it can be a book you’ve always wanted to finish (Moby Dick, perhaps?) paired with the time to tackle it. And who could resist The Odyssey for a trip around the Greek Islands.

No matter what you choose, choose it knowing you are with a group of compatriot readers all looking for answers that only the enduring classics can answer. The Big Summer Read is the opposite of reading to escape. It’s reading to explore new ways to think and see the world. And maybe, just maybe, these classics can help us discover something new about ourselves. If we can all come together, we feel less alone – that the world chaos and uncertainty we feel now can bring us together through Austen, Bronte, or Proust.

Feel like you need a little encouragement or a group of friend to join? Try a virtual reading group. This summer, we’re tackling The Count of Monte Cristo. You’ll find details here next week!

Today, I thought I'd once again share a few of the things I've been enjoying recently. As always, I'd love to hear what's captured your attention lately. Recommendations are always welcome.

You guys… I know we are sooooo late to the party, but…Ted Lasso. This just might be the best television show ever. The whole family is watching it together, so there’s that. But also, it’s hysterically funny while also being deeply moving. Quite a trick. May it go on much past the eagerly awaited Season 4.

This powerful EconTalk episode with has really stuck with me. Junger and Russ Roberts discuss his new book, In My Time of Dying, recounting the gut wrenching medical emergency that almost killed him, as well as his transcendent experience as he was slipping away. Junger, an avowed atheist (spoiler alert- he still is!) then went on an intellectual journey to find out what happens when we die. I’ve ordered the book- sometimes the podcast just isn’t enough- so stay tuned.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve been reading my friend ’s new book, The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty, in part to commemorate America’s 250th. This book will be featured in the GoodRiches Books inaugural collection, and Brad and I are planning a conversation on it to kick off a new podcast series. We hope you’ll tune in and be inspired to grab a copy of the book.

In conjunction with Birzer’s book, I’ve been reading Gordon Wood’s primer on the American Revolution.1 I’ve read other Wood books, and I’ve always loved his narrative style. This slim volume is no exception, and is very helpful as Birzer takes me step by step through the moments that led up to the Declaration.

Speaking of the Declaration, another of my favorite writers and thinkers. , recently appeared on one of my new fav podcasts to discuss it with and . I’ll have more to say on this soon, so for now, I’ll just leave you with the link:

The Pursuit of Liberalism

The Declaration of Independence with Zena Hitz and Hollis Robbins

Welcome to the sixth episode of our new podcast season about liberalism and the arts…

Listen now

2 months ago · 1 like · The Pursuit of Liberalism and Rebecca Lowe

Now for the fun stuff. Since my teens I’ve been a horror fan, and my new favorite horror write is undoubtedly Grady Hendrix. Last week, I read his Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, and it was worth the wait. Hendrix is a master at both relationship depiction and gore.2 His gore is not gratuitous; the bad guys generally get their due. Witchcraft, about a Florida home for unwed mothers in 1970 revolve mostly around the relationships of its teenage inhabitants- invariably sent there against their will to hide their shame from family and community. They form strong friendships and yes, dabble in witchcraft, thanks to the librarian who comes twice a week in a Bookmobile!!!- to help each other out of situation from morning sickness to sexual abuse. And it works, mostly.

I also finally read The Vanishing Half, which was very popular a few years back. It’s the story of two light-skinned black twins who run from their hometown, one of whom then chooses to pass and the other who returns home. It’s a terrific family saga as well as biting commentary and race, appearance, secrets, and the extent to which you can choose your own life’s course. Next up, Nella Larson’s classic, Passing.

In addition to wrapping up Birzer, I’ve got a few titled on deck that I’m looking forward to having conversations about here. Joel Miller’s [ ] The Idea Machine and another book on the Declaration co-authored by Tony Williams and David J. Bobb, Divided Over the Declaration: How an Enduring Debate Sustains the Vision of America. And later this week, we’ll publish our first guest essay on the pleasures of the “big summer read.”

Thanks for reading, and let’s continue the conversation below.

The episode is titled “How Reading Made Our Politics,” which is a bit misleading. He covered more of that in the second episode in his discussion of the spread of mass literacy. He also has already made the case that the decline of reading is changing our brains and prompting what Sherry Turkle has called the empathy crisis. But this charge is more serious; the stakes feel higher. The question is no longer how reading shaped modern political life, but whether a decline in reading might contribute to its unraveling.

Why the urgency?

As in the previous episodes, Marriott cites evidence that the habit of reading is in steep decline.1 Marriott also worries about the “news deserts” that have emerged, particularly as evidenced from the decline of newspapers and local new. s. There are fewer newspapers in operation today than any time since the 18th century; that’s a stat that admittedly shocked me. The marginal cost of providing printed news to people has declined dramatically in this same time. This leads one to assume that this is a demand-side problem, not a supply-side one. Marriott is particularly worried about what we’re replacing these news sources with- particularly short form video.

Marriotts’ guest Naomi Alderman suggests that democracy has to reinvent itself in response to this “information crisis.” The question lingering over the entire episode is whether our political institutions can adapt to a world in which traditional reading habits continue to erode.

Is democracy also in decline?

Marriott cites one of my favorite references, Our World in Data,2 which suggests that answer may be yes. While democracy has flourished over the last two centuries, in more recent years, there is evidence of decline.

Marriott says less about the relationship between reading and democracy than between reading and autocracy, and this is significant. He reminds listeners that restricting access to books has long been a means of social control; every dictatorship has censored books. The irony of course is that there is no greater publicity for the book in question.

Writer Jung Chang, for example, grew up in Mao’s China, not a safe space for readers. She longingly and lovingly describes her father’s home library, where books were regarded as sacred. She also recalls when the Red Guard came and took them away. Mao, himself an avid reader, knew he needed to keep books from the people. As Chang says, reding “works on people’s souls.” Mao didn’t want his subjects to be human; the ruling class had much greater power over a public they considered stupid.

But books survived, Chang also remembers the black market for books under Mao. Chang also argues that books were even more important for the illiterate. Tea houses became clandestine spots for reading aloud and sharing ideas dangerous to the regime. I recall a prescient comment from my previous post about the value of a teacher reading aloud in the classroom; there’s something important there.

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Does democracy depend on deep reading?

Marriott returns to a theme of the previous episodes- the ways in which reading helps us to think for ourselves, both critically and independently. This is of course incredibly important for individual flourishing and intellectual development. It also seems true that democracies function at their best when inhabited by citizens who care capable of scrutinizing those in power. But does this require deep reading?

Historian Robert Darnton3 argues that the information environment that best complements democracy is a combination of written, printed, and oral communication. Suddenly “ordinary” people could be involved in discussion of politics and policy. He notes, like Chang, the importance of a learned person reading aloud to a crowd, offering a “mixed media experience,” which he compares to the memes of today. He looks back to the dawn of the printed age as prompting a “war of words” in politics- an expansion of political discourse Darnton characterizes as vituperative shift in rhetoric away from elites and in favor of the everyman.4

Perhaps, then, deep reading by a majority of individuals then isn’t necessary to sustain democracy. Democracy requires informed citizens. Maybe it’s enough that some do, assuming they then share what they’ve learned with their fellow citizens. Information can circulate through multiple media. This naturally makes thinkers like Marriott- and champions of reading generally- understandably uneasy. Surely the more people read deeply about the issues of the day the better, right??? But the real issue may be the quality of the information ecosystem rather than reading alone.

Guest Naomi Alderman argues that democracy has to reinvent itself in response to what she calls the “information crisis” of today. If democracy is in peril, it’s not about whether people read, but about the information environment they inhabit. Like Marriott, she worries about the decline of newspapers, radio, and the evening news, and shares his concern about the power of short-form video. They wonder together whether bad ideas translate better into video that into text. Marriott goes so far as to suggest that screens are the perfect media for personalities, and credits then with the rise of charismatic strongmen. But didn’t people say the same thing when JFK debated Nixon on television for the first time? These concerns strike me as nothing terribly new.

Not everyone in the episode shared Marriott's pessimism. Nick Harris, the youngest guest, the only digital native of the group, and self-described "screen-to-page reader," offered a useful corrective. He reminds listeners that YouTube is more than a morass of false news and authoritarian propaganda. He even chides the BBC for not putting enough long-form content on such sites; he notes that this documentary series on YouTube is how he discovered- and subsequently read all of- Gore Vidal.

Financial Times correspondent John Burn Murdoch is also more optimistic about the future of reading- even in what can seem to be a challenging digital environment. While it may not be obvious, he says, the decline in reading is not necessarily indicative of any loss in our innate ability to process and think about ideas, but rather a disruption in our ability to express them. What we really should be talking about, he says, is willpower. We must learn to go against our instincts as we engage with technology. We’ve been conditioned by our digital environment to think less deeply and reflectively, but if we look at users like Nick Harris, we can see the possible.

Marriott and Murdoch muse about how long-form content might be made more attractive. Perhaps those of us of a certain age need spend more time searching out- or creating- long from audio and digital content. They point to this very platform- Substack- as an example of demand-driven emergence of a platform specializing in long form written content. While they also think it’s a positive sign, they don’t think it’s enough. I remain hopeful, of course, else why I would I engage in what may be a fool’s errand?

I hope you’ve found something of value in my musings on this podcast series. Maybe you’ve checked it out yourself. In closing, I’d love to get your replies on the following:

1. To what extent are you convinced the decline in reading is linked to a decline in democracy? Which should we attend to more- the former or the latter?

2. What can those of us interested in promoting a greater reading culture do now to effect change? What have you done to improve your own reading habits?

3. What are some books, authors, ideas, etc. that you initially discovered through digital media? Where did you make these discoveries?

4. To what extent can the Internet be a space for curiosity, conversation, and community?

I’m working on my next post on James Marriott’s BBC podcast series, as well as a more direct and complete introduction to the larger GoodRiches project. In the meantime, here’s a sampling of what’s caught my eyes and ears of late.

• In my previous post, I wondered about the value of reading aloud, so this essay from the Card Catalog Substack was timely for me. It confirms my own bias toward the value of handwriting while affirming the value of oral culture:

Research has confirmed that concern on one specific point: when we write things down, we do remember them less precisely than when we hold them in memory alone. The oral cultures Socrates belonged to had developed extraordinary memory practices, and writing did erode those practices over time. But Thamus’s prediction that writing would produce shallow thinkers turned out to be wrong about the trajectory. Writing made possible an entirely new kind of thinking that oral memory couldn’t achieve: it accumulated knowledge across generations and gave individuals the ability to reason at a scale no single mind could sustain.

• In a somewhat similar vein, as a huge fan of ’s book Range, I was happy to listen to his EconTalk interview with on his new book, Inside the Box. It’s an interesting inquiry into how adding constraints to our lives might actually make us more creative and productive. It’s an intriguing and counterintuitive idea that I’d like to try.

• I finally watched Hamnet. I’d read the book and liked it a lot… This may be one of the very rare instances in which I think the film is better! This is especially true for the production of Hamlet that Will stages at the Globe at the end of the film. I really saw the play differently, and I think in the way O’Farrell intended. I recommend, and I recommend that you bring tissues…

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• I recently read Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life, by , who’s also one of my favorite Substackers. It’s filled with vignettes of some of the greatest late bloomers, including Katherine Graham, Vera Wang, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Julia Child, among many others. If you’re looking for some inspiration and tips on making a midlife change, I think you’ll profit from it as well.

• I have a new hero, Sister Rita! I devoured this New York Times story about a retiree’s dream of a mobile bookstore (sound familiar???). So many of you sent it to me as well, which made my heart happy! I love her description of the van as “a vehicle for the cross-pollination of people and conversation.” A kindred spirit!

• Lottie Hazell’s Piglet was a compulsively (pun intended) readable novel on relationships, body image, and [British] social class. It’s a book that can double as a beach read and scathing social commentary. Delicious.

• Many of you know my love of crime fiction, as well as my insistence on reading them in the order in which they’re published. While I’ve not finished all of her Hercule Poirot novels, I started on Miss Marple anyway with Murder at the Vicarage. Speaking of British social class… Too soon to tell whether I prefer the old busybody to the Belgian brain cell master.

• Finally, tis the season for the dreaded and lauded commencement address. I was sadly not surprised to see that NYU students protested the selection of as speaker, based in part on his book The Coddling of the American Mind, co-authored with FIRE’s . While Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has gotten all the press, I’ve LONG recommended Coddling to parents and educators alike. Here, Lukianoff fires back (pun intended).

That’s all for now. Do let me know what you’ve been reading/watching/listening to. I always appreciate new recommendations!

At a moment when anxieties about reading seem to be everywhere — disappearing novels in school curricula, smartphone bans, declining attention spans — ’s recent podcast series arrives at exactly the right time.

Is this time different???

This is the question Marriott opens the series with. (TL/DR, he thinks it’s not; I’m inclined to agree.) He follows with a more interesting question: “Could reading disappear, and what would happen if it did?” Marriott invites a slew of experts to help him tackle these questions over the course of four episodes.

The real question is not whether people can still decode words on a page. It is whether reading still cultivates the kinds of attention, empathy, reflection, and conversation upon which liberal culture depends.

How Reading Made Our Brains

First up is cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolfe on how we teach children to read. She reminds listeners that it took 2,000 years for humans to move from hieroglyphs to an alphabet. By contrast, children today have only a few thousand days to master the alphabet and learn how symbols on a page become language, meaning, and thought. This is a complex cognitive process linking what is seen to what is known, building cognitive network connections. We’re wise to not underestimate this cognitive challenge. As you’ll see, part of their message of this episode is that both becoming a reader and trends in individual reading are best seen as long-term propositions.

Reading is a fundamental part of human development; Marriott and friends argue that our brains actually change via reading. It seems obvious that your brain changes in terms of adding content to your neural network (inputs!), but Marriott is looking at a deeper sort of change. Reading allows for interiority. Part of the process of reading is inhabiting the thoughts and feelings of those you read about.1 As Marriott says, “reading is itself a creative act,” certainly as compared to consuming video, for example. And as I have expressed before, the process is best completed through conversation with others.

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John Burn Murdoch has been watching the data on reading trends for decades. He notes that time spent reading has been on the decline for some time, and he agrees the trend accelerates around 2010. Murdoch argues we are absolutely witnessing a clear and fast change in people’s use of their leisure time. It’s not that people don’t want to read, Murdoch counsels, but that the world around is making it harder. The reason, however, is murkier than it may first appear.

It’s not “just the phones,” Murdoch says. How we relate to digital technology as a whole has changed dramatically in just the last decade. The information environment we now inhabit is both ubiquitous and passive. When was the last time you took out your phone to do something, not to kill time, he challenges? Today’s technology doesn’t prompt our brains into reflective mode the way that reading can do. Similarly, if you aren’t in a reflective mode, “conversation” becomes broadcasting rather than dialogue.

I mentioned the importance of taking a long-term view above. Marriott also reminds us that the cultural shift the brought reading into mainstream culture took millennia, not morphing into widespread literacy until after the invention of the printing press delivered economies of scale and rendered books an asset for the common man, not just the elite. The time we’ve lived since is an historical blip. Still. reading has wrought significant changes to society.

Enter Joseph Henrich (economist!)2 who argues that literacy reshaped not only cognition but social attitudes, fostering greater individualism as people learned to read earlier in their lives and more independently. He also points to widespread literacy as evidence of skepticism to authority, particularly with the dawn of Protestantism, giving permission to adherents to read the Bible themselves rather than mediated via clergy. Literacy then followed the spread of missionaries, and competition among orders bred ever more literacy. Henrich also notes the popularity of commonplace books, emphasizing that a burgeoning writing public spurred greater communication, and ultimately the Republic of Letters.

Ever the economist, however, Henrich points us to some of the losses that came with widespread literacy- way before the advent of the smartphone. He suggests that as people became more adept at decoding texts, for example, they lost some aptitude with facial recognition. He also points to widespread schooling as one of the first harbingers of declining literacy. He’s not wrong, and “lower scores” are not a new educational phenomenon.

So maybe, just maybe, the shrill cries warning of a post-literate society, while not wrong, may simply be too late.

How Reading Made Our Feelings

Or, why can’t we read just to have a good time? As I suggested above, Marriott’s main concern with the apparent decline in reading isn’t about literacy rates so much as empathy rates. In the second episode of the series, he digs deeper.

Books, Marriott insists, change the way we see ourselves and others. The process creates empathy; it allows us to create intimate and sometimes intense relationships with people we may bever meet and may not even exist. Steven Pinker calls reading “a technology for perspective-taking,” a phrase I love. He credits popular reading as a causal factor ushering in the “humanitarian revolution” of the second half of the 18th century, coincident with the European and American enlightenments. He notes the barbaric customs widely abolished during this time- slavery, many forms of corporal and capital punishments, and absolute despotism, to name a few.

Pinker resists the common explanation of widespread affluence, staying the timing just doesn’t work. Instead, Pinker argues the environment changed with the economies of scale to be found in printing and the subsequent widespread rise of literacy. This humanitarian revolution also needed free speech and conversation among citizens to be realized- both in large part made possible by literacy and engagement with the printed world.

Pinker notes two forms of empathy honed by reading- cognitive and telepathic. The former is the sort one achieves by reading a book like Machiavelli’s The Prince, a thinly veiled handbook on sovereignty and governance. The latter can be experienced via such classics of the time as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the novels of Charles Dickens.

While reading no doubt has all these salutary benefits and more, Marriott also cautions that the same processes may work toward what we consider “bad.”3 He also notes that video may have even more empathic effects than text, as it offers the opportunity to “see” those with whose thoughts and feelings ewe are engaging. The whole series, as witnessed first with Henrich, is very much a good news-bad news performance.

But reading can also isolate us, he cautions. Marriottt recounts how reading has become a much more solitary pursuit over the centuries. Indeed, “reading” in the ancient world generally meant someone reading aloud to an audience. The notion of silent reading had not yet emerged. If one follows this train of thought, the current malaise about our lack of civility may have started with the book, not the smartphone. I wonder is reading aloud is ripe for a comeback? It’s a project we’re thinking about for GoodRiches Books. I mean, witness Patrick Stewart reading all of Shakespeare’s sonnets if you’re not convinced, You’re welcome.

Alternatively, we could view books as primarily a technology of connection, and the online world (Substack!) as only a continuation of this trend. Pinker, in particular, draws a distinction between social media and other forms of digital connection. (Pinker has a Substack, too!) While a book is an exercise in perspective taking, he says, social media is an exercise in perspective hating. Social media he sees as inherently biased toward rage and partisanship, obsessed with the external versus the internal world.

Soon I will post on the other two episodes in this podcast series. In the meantime, I wonder what your thoughts are on books as agents of connection versus isolation, and the potential of real conversation in online spaces and/or social media.

Thanks for reading!

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As the second in this occasional series, here’s a sampling of what has held my attention over the last couple of weeks. Given the backdrop, you can see I’ve attended more to pleasure than writing. But as you’ve heard me say before: Read what you want, dammit! Just read.

• I’ve been poring over the issues of the New York Times Book Review I’ve missed. (If you follow me on GoodReads, I think you can tell when that is happening!) Some of the reads below, like Baby X, were a result of such poring; it’s always a reliable narrator. Speaking of book reviews, this NYT piece on book reviews before algorithms- and the link between Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain- is terrific. As is this essay by the inimitable on the value of the book review.

• Ben & Me. I found this book in a recent wandering at the Central Library in Indianapolis. Franklin is my favorite founder, so I’m always eager to find new titles on him- and always open to suggestions! This one was OK…there was a lot more of the “me” in there than I would have preferred, and nothing terribly new to me about Franklin’s life. That said, I enjoyed the author’s journey in Franklin’s shoes- touring all the places he lived and worked, trying to glean lessons for his own life based on what he learned of Franklin’s. If you’ve not yet read a ton about Franklin, this book would be a nice place to start.

• Before we departed, I really enjoyed Netflix’s House of Guinness. The saga begins with the death of the Guiness patriarch, and the resulting struggles of his four children. The series does an especially good job depicting the roles and struggles of women in 18th century Dublin, particularly through Guiness sister Ann and Fenian leader Ellen. It’s also simply gorgeous; the cinematography and costuming are both amazing. If half this story is true, what a history it is.

• I’d almost finished Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age by the time we arrived in Vancouver. I’m late to the party on this one, but I was absolutely charmed. If you loved The Thursday Murder Club, don’t miss this one about four lady spies put in the cold. Suffice it to say, that don’t stay there. There’s only one more in this series, but I am already hoping for more.

• On the plane I watched Song Sung Blue, the 2025 movie about a Neil Diamond tribute band starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, whose performance is simply terrific. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry… It’s a love story of redemption with a bitchin soundtrack.

• Kira Peikoff’s Baby X, another great vacation read imagines a future where advanced technology can create eggs or sperm from any person’s cells and celebrities face the alarming potential of meeting biological children they never conceived. It’s twisty turny, and raises frightening questions about choosing future children with the “best” DNA.

• Finally, I’m starting to hatch my next reading series, which I lovingly think of as reading about reading. I started Evan Friss’ The Bookshop this week, and it’s very promising so far! Friss explores some of the greatest outlets and trends in bookselling in America, starting with…Ben Franklin! I’m excited to dig in further, and I hope you all will suggest some additional titles for this next series… We’re getting tantalizingly close to sharing more with you about the physical incarnation of GoodRiches Books; we need your input!

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Philosophy has spent a long time in the ivory tower.

Christopher Phillips decided to walk out of it.

Christopher Phillips’ Socrates Cafe is the fourth and final book of the initial reading plan I laid out when I started this Substack, and it was a fitting choice to close this initial chapter.

Phillips, who holds a PhD in philosophy, was disillusioned with the professionalization- and isolation of philosophy. Rather than abandon it, he chose a different path: to bring philosophy back into everyday life and to rediscover the philosophic style and method of Socrates. Since founding Socrates Café in 1996, he has spent decades facilitating conversations in coffee shops, bookstores, schools, retirement homes, and even prisons. His aim is simple and ambitious at once: to revive the Socratic method as a shared, lived practice. He has since made a life doing so, having launched the nonprofit Socrates Cafe in 1996. The book is the story of Phillips’ journey, and a recounting of the groups he has facilitated over time. It’s an inspirational tale.

At its core, Phillips’ method begins with a question. What is home? Why question? What is silence? Participants gather, propose questions, and explore them together. Phillips’ role is not to teach, but to facilitate—to create the conditions under which others might think more clearly, more honestly, and more openly.

And yet, as I read, I found myself thinking not only about what Phillips is building, but about what I hope to build through GoodRiches.

Phillips constructs conversations from questions alone. GoodRiches, at least as I envision it, begins somewhere slightly different: with texts.

This is not a rejection of the Socratic method—far from it. If anything, it is an attempt to anchor it. One of the most fruitful ways I have found to explore ideas is not simply by asking questions in the abstract, but by asking them of something—a shared work, a common text, a piece of writing that gives us a starting point.

My desire with GoodRiches Books is not to “do philosophy” in the same way is Phillips, though I do want to emulate his “Johnny Appleseed” mentality.

Phillips is focused particularly on the Socratic method. Each gathering opens with a question, often proposed by one of the participants, such as, What is home? Why question? What is silence? All are interesting absorbing enquiries.

In GoodRiches’ conversations, the text provides a kind of discipline and shape for the conversation. I am interested in employing the Socratic method for discussions based on common texts. With each text I hope we can ignite a new spark of curiosity and open new avenues for exploration.

Ultimately, our goal is to build a community of curious people whose curiosities may be shared, often overlap, and welcome others to the journey. We’re also starting to build the space for this community to come together- both physically and virtually- where we can revel in each other’s curiosity.

Where Phillips and I are most closely aligned is in our understanding of who these conversations are for. They are not reserved for specialists or experts. They are not performances of intellectual ability. They are, at their best, shared acts of curiosity.

He learned early on that a life without books and ideas was not the life for him (#relateable). He also knows that “there are experiences that cannot be had from reading about the about the experiences of others.” (166) Phillips is right to emphasize that conversation alone is not enough. There are forms of understanding that only emerge through experience—through encountering other people, other perspectives, other ways of seeing. Books matter. Ideas matter. But so does the act of testing them, together, in conversation.

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One of the themes in Socrates Café that resonated most strongly with me is Phillips’ emphasis on wonder. (Yes, of course this did remind me of Adam Smith. Surprised?)

For Phillips, wonder is the starting point of philosophy. It is the hallmark of the true philosopher—and children. Somewhere along the way, many of us lose that sense of wonder. We stop asking questions, we fear the prospect of asking, or we begin to think that the questions we do have are no longer worth asking.

As I read, I considered whether Phillips’ notion of wonder is synonymous with the notion of curiosity as I have been exploring, with thanks to . I’m left thinking that Phillips’ wonder is a sort of precursor to Leslie’s curiosity (and subsequently, studiosis). Wonder is the spark that ignites curiosity- that moment of cognitive confusion when one recognizes they know little about some thing in which they are interested. Curiosity resides in the flame that drives one to intellectual action.

Phillips suggests that part of the problem is that we are trained to think in binaries: right or wrong, good or bad, correct or incorrect. Questions become something to answer, rather than something to explore.

It isn’t just that many of us fear questions. Rather, many of us seem to have only the flimsiest idea of the question’s power and potential. And many of us no longer seem to have the faintest idea how to use it. (194)

But questions, as Phillips reminds us, are powerful- not because they lead us quickly to answers, but because they open up space for thinking.

That insight sits at the heart of what I hope GoodRiches can cultivate: a space- virtual or physical- where questions are not rushed, not dismissed, and not treated as problems to be solved, but as invitations to think more deeply. While our specific methods may differ, the education that emerges from both Phillips’ cafe conversations and what I hope to be true of GoodRiches’ conversations is the same:

Education is a process of making us less ignorant without necessarily making us jaded. In fact it can endow us with an even greater sense of wonder. (203, emphasis mine.)

Is Phillips’ style of inquiry the only or even best mode of intellectual discovery? Of course not. No single mode could be.

Alternatives and/or complements to our method will- hopefully!- emerge. (Some of you have heard me describe my business model as that of Macy’s Santa Clause in the 1947 classic Miracle on 34th Street. Here’s a peek.)

What Socrates Café offers is a reminder of something easily forgotten: that the intellectual life is not meant to be solitary, nor is it meant to be inaccessible. It is something we can practice together, in ordinary places, with ordinary people, asking questions that are anything but ordinary.

GoodRiches will not look exactly like a Socrates Café. It will be shaped by texts, by curation, and by the particular kinds of conversations that emerge from reading together. But it is animated by the same underlying impulse: to create spaces where curiosity is taken seriously, where conversation is meaningful, and where community grows out of both.

The goal is not simply to read more, or even to understand more.

It is to remain open—to ideas, to questions, and to one another.

And perhaps, in doing so, to recover at least a little of that sense of wonder that first drew us to books in the first place.

The last couple of months have been a blur of conference travel, starting with the Public Choice Society annual meeting in San Antonio, to a week in Charleston for the Center for Public Choice and Market Process annual Adam Smith Week, to the 50th anniversary meeting of the Association for Private Enterprise Education.

So while I haven’t been writing here, I have, in fact, been writing.

One project connects the stories in Gulliver’s Travels (Adam Smith’s favorite novel!) to the public choice tradition in economics. Another explores the novels of Horatio Alger as part of an American Smithian tradition of political economy. (Yes, it’s pretty much all Smith, all the time, in my world.) In due time, I’ll share these essays here, because I’d really love to get the feedback of all you smart people!

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Finally, if you follow me on social media, you know I’m the queen or #ReadMore. I am loving all the attention reading- and especially reading the classics- is getting, particularly among young people.

But I don’t love the idea that you’re only a “real” reader if you’ve worked your way through some prescribed list. Read what you like, dammit. Just read.

That said, I realized something as I was thinking about this: what I share here often looks like…a particular kind of reading list. In reality, I read far more widely than what shows up in these posts. (Quick note: I’m almost finished with Socrates Café and plan to write about it next week.)

So today I’m borrowing a familiar Substack format and sharing a few things I’ve been enjoying lately.

• I am a devoted reader of the New York Times Book Review. Based on a review of a later book in the series, I recently read Ed Lin’s Ghost Month, a crime story set in the might markets of Taipei. I gave it a reluctant 3 stars (almost 4). In this first book, I am more charmed by the setting than the characters, but Lin sets the latter up very well, and I look forward to spending more time with them in subsequent books.

• I am hooked on this Audible original podcast, The Space Within. A series of people around the world start to go missing. Upon their return, there is no evidence of foul play, but they are somehow… different. Enter psychiatrist Maddie Weil (played by Jessica Chastain) to get to the bottom of the mystery. Gripping!

• As part of the above-mentioned Horatio Alger project, I’ve been digging back in to Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric, which is a joy. I’m looking at what Smith thought made a good writer, as well as what types of writing we might expect to have which sorts of effects. It’s been very useful for my paper so far.

• We also just finished watching the first season of Netflix’s The Gentlemen. Super slick and stylish, and a hilarious look at the state of the aristocracy (and organized crime) in the UK today.

• Finally, I also have recently returned to PG Wodehouse and read The Inimitable Jeeves. Goodness, I had forgotten how funny these are! There are a few more loaded on my Kindle now…

Thanks for reading. I hope you’ll share what you have been enjoying below!

A lot is at stake in attention. Where we put it is not only how we decide what we will learn; it is how we show what we value. (213)

Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation is, at its core, a book about empathy. Her central claim is straightforward: as we replace face-to-face conversation with digital connection, we are losing the habits that make empathy possible.

I find this persuasive. But it’s not quite what interests me most. What concerns me is something closely related, but distinct- what this shift is doing to curiosity and, ultimately, the intellectual life.

Turkle’s book is more a digital self-help refocusing our attention away from mere connection and toward real conversation. Her advice is not about abandoning technology, but about cultivating a more self-aware relationship with it. It is efficiently summarized as, “Accept your vulnerability. Remove the temptation.” (114)

Readers may recall that among the things I appreciated in the previously reviewed titles by and was that they inspired me to think in terms of how to do the intellectual life and how to practice curiosity. As we have become increasingly distracted by our tech, we begin to prefer device-based communication over face-to-face interaction. Turkle blames this shift for people’s flight from conversation:

It all adds up to a flight from conversation-at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, conversation in which we play with ideas, in which we allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. (4)

As a definition of conversation, this resonated. This is exactly the kind of conversation I am seeking, and the kind that is increasingly rare. Turkle emphasizes that these sorts of conversation require both time and space. She promises the reader a better understanding of what conversation is, and how technology gets in its way. She is much stronger on the latter.

Turkle argues that the pull of digital technology has led to a flight from conversation, with real consequences for empathy—especially among young people. Smartphones and social media offer constant “connection,” but it this is only a thin substitute for genuine conversation. And that distinction matters. Conversation does something that information alone cannot: it slows us down, forces us to clarify what we mean, and exposes us to perspectives we did not anticipate. It invites us to revise, refine, and sometimes abandon our initial thoughts. In this way, conversation stretches curiosity. Without it, curiosity becomes thinner—less a pursuit of understanding and more a habit of collecting quick answers and offering equally quick replies.

Curiosity is not just internal—it is sustained in conversation.

Technology has made information instantly available, which on it surface seems like a boon for conversation. Ian Leslie would say all this information piques our diversive curiosity but turns our attention away from the epistemic. What concerns me about this dynamic is what it does to the kind of curiosity that actually sustains the intellectual life. If answers are always instantly available, the temptation is to treat curiosity as something to be satisfied quickly rather than something to be pursued at length. Ian Leslie would describe this as the triumph of diversive curiosity—the quick itch for novelty or information—over epistemic curiosity, the deeper desire to understand. The former thrives in an environment of constant digital stimulation; the latter requires time, effort, and often the friction of sustained attention. Epistemic curiosity rarely develops in isolation. It grows through conversation. Conversation is not just a way of exchanging information. It is a way of developing thought.

Turkle offers Thoreau’s image of three chairs as a helpful way to think about what is being lost when we drift away from conversation. In Walden, Thoreau writes that he kept three chairs in his house: one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society. Each represents a different mode of the intellectual life. The first chair—solitude—is where reflection begins. It is where we read, think, and wrestle privately with ideas. The second chair—friendship—is where those ideas are tested through conversation with another person. The third chair—society—is where ideas circulate more broadly in a community of discussion.

Even the first chair is under pressure from our attachment to our devices. Solitude requires the ability, even the desire, to be alone with one’s thoughts- able to reflect on ourselves, our experiences, and our relationships with others. Because we are no longer comfortable being bored and/or alone, we retreat to our screens. Thoreau’s three chairs remind us that the intellectual life requires all three modes: solitude to think, the company of others to refine those thoughts through conversation, and community to share them more widely and keep the spark of our curiosity alive.

GoodRiches Books aims to sustain the spirit of all three chairs. We want to help individuals discover new avenues for their curiosity- to fan the spark or light a new curiosis spark. To help people find the interested others to occupy their second chairs, realizing their curiosity is most likely to be sustained in conversation with others. And finally, we want to provide the space- the third chair- to build community around these conversations, whether virtually or in person.

Most of Turkle’s book contains practical advice for teachers and students. I’m more interested in what it has to say to the foxhog readers, curators, and conversation collectors among us. To that end, there are some useful prompts in Turkle’s book for thinking about how to engage in conversation, and especially about the importance of creating and maintaining space (both physical and intellectual) for conversation.

One important reminder I took from Turkle, like Hitz, is that living a thoughtful life need not be the purview of the intellectual elite.

Reclaiming conversation begins with the acknowledgement that speaking and listening with attention are skills. They can be taught. They take practice and that practice can start now. (14)

Boredom is the space where curiosity ignites.

This was perhaps the strongest lesson I took in my reading of Hitz; if you want to engage in the intellectual life, you must commit to “doing the work.” One of the ways you can practice, according to Turkle, is to allow for and relish in boredom while inhabiting your single chair. Our inability to sit with “life’s boring bits” for even a moment worries Turkle, and rightly so. She cites examples from a young dad who can’t enjoy his toddler’s bathtime without checking email to US Senators busted for playing poker on their phones during hearings. Our attention is everywhere and nowhere at once. Boredom isn’t a problem for curiosity, it’s a precondition. Boredom represents the brain space in which the spark of curiosity is lit. The spark is struck on your prior knowledge infrastructure, and lights when it finds a “hole” in your knowledge- something you want to learn more about. It starts paving a path from diversive to epistemic curiosity.

I particularly appreciated Turkle’s insistence that boredom plays an important role in conversation as well as in solitude. Conversation is a process; there are, and should be, quiet spaces. Says Turkle:

If a moment in conversation is slow, there is no way to know when things will pick up except to stay with the conversation. People take time to think and then they think of something new. (39)

Individuals engaged in true conversation need time both to refine and then communicate their own thoughts, as well as time to take in and consider the thoughts of others. Conversation is more about exploration than information gathering:

You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things- his or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation- I think of it as a whole person conversation”- if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don’t look away or text another friend. (151)

Turkle also offers some insight into the important role of questioning in learning and conversation. Here I recall Leslie’s explanation of why we don’t ask questions. First and foremost, Leslie says we trying to avoid embarrassment; Turkle would agree. In a world in which people would rather communicate via text, Turkle says we’ve lost the confidence, and perhaps even the ability, to engage in “live” conversation; we have become dependent on the ability to edit our texts to craft the “perfect” message.

Real conversation, unlike digital connection, is not broadcasting, but simply casting- casting out ideas for others’ consideration as well as your own, subject to the reactions of your conversational colleagues. To ask a question in conversation is to risk being wrong. To express an idea is to risk revision. To engage with others is to risk change. That is not a flaw of conversation. It is its purpose.

Finally, I appreciated Turkle’s thoughts on attention. In my reading of Turkle, individuals’ diminishing ability to closely attend something is the greatest threat to genuine conversation. Turkle argues that having been misled by the “myth of multitasking,” we have lost the art of attention. She comments many times throughout the book on the interruptions we accept all the time- a friend checking their phone while we’re talking, people at a restaurant talking to phones and not one another, etc. It is indeed magical that whenever we wonder about some particular fact, we can find the answer in our pocket or our purse. But this magical ability has also denigrated our ability to uni-task.

Books are of course an excellent proving ground on which to test one’s ability to pay attention. This is time well-spent in Thoreau’s first chair, and an argument I assume you’re on board with having read this far. However, like Turkle, I don’t want to give up the magic in my pocket; I do want to mostly leave it aside when engaged in the work of the intellectual life. Turkle would like people to develop fluency in both deep and hyper attention. Turkle calls this “attentional pluralism” (219)

Again, this recalls Leslie’s insistence on knowledge scaffolding. One ought to be adept at locating information faster than ever in our digital world- but also have a store of knowledge to which they are adding. Then one can take the time to focus deep attention on this store, which includes the time and space to think. The next step naturally turns to conversation, which includes presenting opinions, hearing the objections of others, and then refining each other’s ideas. This is the space where serendipity lives and conversation lives ever on.

In a world full of answers, what we need are better questions—and the conversations that sustain them. I hope you’ll join me there.

• Stay foolish. The main point of Leslie’s first suggestion regards the importance of a curious culture. He offers several vignettes to illustrate this point- from Steve Jobs and Pixar to 17th century China. Curious cultures, Leslie suggests, are often led by people who have a high “need for cognition.”1 While such leaders are certainly driven and intense, being ensconced in a curious culture seems to push them into overdrive. Says Leslie, “There is no formula for creating a curious culture,” (139) but he does offer some clues. The first involves sheer numbers. We need others- we need the opportunity for conversation- to truly engage our curiosity. A curious culture’s emphasis is on exploration rather than exploitation. That is, its members are continually seeking questions that have yet to be answered- or perhaps even asked. This is a very important reminder to me. Thus far, the GoodRiches project has centered on my thoughts. I know that’s insufficient. And that’s why the next step will be to engage others’ curiosity to lead new and different intellectual adventures. (There are schemes afoot, I promise.) So while there may be no exact formula for building a curious culture, we’re going to give it our best shot!

• Build a database. This suggestion reinforces all Leslie has had to say earlier in the book about the role of content knowledge in fostering curiosity. Remember, you have to have something to learn about, and the way you do so is by continually adding to your stock of knowledge and then combining that knowledge in new and novel ways to satisfy some of your curiosity. Further, to the extent that you build your database of knowledge is the surest route to producing ideas that will someday become part of someone else’s database.” (148) The relationship between content and curiosity, you may recall, is why I took some issue with ’s rule about reading for wisdom, not facts. Creativity isn’t magic, according to Leslie. It’s built on a bedrock of deep knowledge and habits of mind:

Highly curious people, who have carefully cultivated their long-term memories, live in a kind of augmented reality; everything they see is overlaid with additional layers of meaning and possibility, unavailable to ordinary observers. (145)

• Forage Like a Foxhog. This section hit me hard, in part because it opens with a museum curator who describes curators as being one of two types- conservers or hunter-gatherers. The curator in question is decidedly the latter, “interested in gathering and synthesizing different materials from disparate fields.” (149) Didn’t I see myself in this description? And more importantly, I saw my vision for the retail GoodRiches. Our goal is to one day create curated collections of books-not an endless and unrelated array. And this is where we will take advantage of the varying “databases” and curiosity paths of our guest curators. If that sounds cryptic, I suppose I mean it to be. Besides, we must get to the foxhog.

The foxhog is of course an allusion to the famous distinction between the fox and the hedgehog, commonly associated with Isaiah Berlin; Leslie uses this to discuss the relationship between depth and breadth of knowledge. While Berlin proposed all thinkers could be categorized as either a fox (the wily fellow whose breadth of knowledge enables him to evade capture) or a hedgehog (a creature with very deep knowledge of just one topic or strategy and hunkers down and lets his spikes do the work). Foxes, that is, know many things, while hedgehogs know one big thing. Leslie argues that this dichotomy is insufficient:

…it’s crucial to know one or two big things and to know them in more depth and detail than most of your contemporaries. But to really ignite that knowledge, you need the ability to think about it from a variety of eclectic perspectives to be able to collaborate fruitfully with people who have different specializations. (151-2)

In other words, big ideas are often a result of big databases from different domains coming into contact with one another and combining elements from each to form new knowledge. Sounds like great conversation to me.

• Ask the Big Why. Negotiation is the focus of this piece of advice. Leslie again offers fascinating examples of successful negotiations, such as that between Northern Ireland and the UK government- to highlight the importance of empathic curiosity. To negotiate well, Leslie argues, you must be able to put yourself in the shoes of the person on the other side of the table. Says Leslie, “Only negotiators curious enough about the other side’s fundamental beliefs and feelings will discover them.” (160) Largely this can be done by asking “why” instead of “what.” Tense negotiations tend not to be about specifics, but about what’s sacred. When one side or the other is asked to trade-off their sacred, negotiations often break down. While a fascinating suggestion, I confess I failed to see the immediate relevance of this advice to my project. Perhaps that’s naïve. Any space devoted to ideas and conversation will eventually encounter disagreement. If GoodRiches is to become a place for real dialogue, not just polite agreement, then learning how to ask “why” rather than “what” may matter more than I’d like to admit.

• Be a Thinkerer. Another lovely made-up word! As my partner says, someone’s gotta make up new words!2 Leslie invokes my favorite founder- Benjamin Franklin- to introduce this concept, specifically, one of Franklin’s unsuccessful experiments to determine whether oil could soothe choppy seas. (It can’t.) The real point of the story is that Franklin was never satisfied thinking only of big ideas; he also spent a lot of his brain space on the practical. A failed experiment was no obstacle to Franklin; he delighted in shifting between the practical and the philosophical. He was a thinkerer, employing a,

…style of cognitive investigation that mixes the concrete and the abstract, toggling between the details and the big picture, zooming out to see the wood and back in again to examine the bark on the tree. (166)

Thinkerers are the sort of people we want to engage in conversation with. And they are certainly the sort of people we will look for to curate our reading collections. We’re looking for people who, like Franklin, would love “to sit around a table with friends and new acquaintances, drinking coffee, telling stories, and making plans for a better world.” We assume Franklin enjoyed a robust text-based conversation as well.

• Question your teaspoons. This recommendation is really about “the transformative power of attention.” Leslie recounts his experience at London’s Boring Conference. (Yes, it’s a thing, and it sells out.) Speakers at the conference give talks on topics such as the intricacies of supermarket checkout machines, or the proper way to make perfectly browned toast. All would qualify as deep explorations of “the mundane, the ordinary, and the overlooked.” (172) It’s mostly an admonition to slow down, think of the “now,” and appreciate the extraordinary of the ordinary things right in front of us. Leslie worries that we have collectively made ourselves too “goal-oriented,” or future focused, disallowing us to adequately appreciate the present. We fear that focusing on the immediate and less interesting comes at the expense of our future selves. The kicker is that when we lose our focus on the less interesting present, we miss out on learning a lot of “tricks.” In short, when we focus on our immediate experience, rather than on some future outcome, we both have a more enjoyable experience, and we learn more from it. We need to allow our epistemic curiosity time to bloom, to get into the sort of “flow” state that we want to return to again and again.

Curiosity is likely to lead to better work, but only if it’s allowed to breathe…If diversive curiosity is the flash and splash of novel stimuli, epistemic curiosity is a path you want to keep traveling down, even when the road is dumpy. (176-7)

• Turn puzzles into mysteries. Puzzles can be solved. Mysteries can sustain our curiosity indefinitely. Puzzles can be attacked like a goal; you gather the information you need to solve it, then you’re done. You move on. A mystery, on the other hand, lives just beyond your currently available scaffold of knowledge. Like diversive curiosity can lead to epistemic, puzzles can lead to mysteries. The former are not to be avoided, it’s just best not to dwell there.

Puzzles are stepping-stones to mysteries. The more mysteries we pursue, the more knowledge we gather, the greater our intellectual and cultural range. (183)

I hope I can encounter more mysteries with you, friends. My attention is all yours.

A note of caution before I dive in. Those who know me well know that I chafe as soon as I hear the word “rules.” This of course is more with regard to externally imposed constraints, but it still makes me uneasy. I’ve also followed recent discussions about the merits of “reading goals,” such as the virtually ubiquitous Goodreads reading challenges. Full disclosure, I adore Goodreads for tracking my reading, especially the “want to read,” and for finding new suggestions from friends. My son’s fourth grade English teacher, now retired, is my #1 most reliable source for new fiction recommendations. I’m looking at you, Mrs. Germain! I’ve also never participated in one of their new year reading challenges…

But on to Holiday. He opens by arguing that there are no short cuts or hacks for good reading. Instead, he offers strategies for individuals to be able to read more and to get more out of the books they read. So far, so good.

Within his list, there’s a lot of gems, and a lot of redundancy, and a fair amount of disdain for reading for pleasure. I’ll comment on each rule:

1. Quality over quantity. Holiday wants you to read only “great” books, the “right” books, time and life being short. His emphasis is on helping the reader better process and retain what she’s reading, ultimately being able to apply it. Sounds great. That said, there are many books I read just “for fun.” There are many I won’t remember years after reading them, and that’s OK. If you think about what I could be doing in lieu of reading horror novels, for example, I still feel I’ve made the rights choice. Read what you want! Get serious about some if you want. Or not. It’s up to you.

2. Always carry a book. I mean, what is there to say? Of course you should always have a book on you.

3. Read with a pen or you’re not really reading. Holiday and I are advocates for marginalia, highlighting, and taking notes. (Show me your most-loved book in the comments!) He asks us to think about reading as “the great conversation,” an apt analogy. I would say I view reading as exchange- with the author, with others who have read the same text, and often in conversation with others about the text. And as for your favorite genre for pleasure reading, see above.

4. Books are not precious. Holiday urges that books are meant to be read and that’s how you show your respect to the author. Write in them, note your favorite passages, add questions you’d love to ask the author and/or discuss with friends. It’s also a way of marking your history. Someday, someone might be interested in what you thought. Agreed, again with the caveat of your “fun” reads. Here I must also make an exception for rare books. If you write in my 6th edition Theory of Moral Sentiments, look out. And if you spill food on it, look out…

5. Read while you eat. This one is just gross. Yes, I agree reading in a bar is cool and I will 100% lurk and try to find out what you’re reading. If it sounds interesting, I’m going to try to talk to you, too. There are definitely accidental coffee, tea, and wine stains in many of my books. But slopping food on books is not an inherent sign of respect, nor is showing off your stains the same as showing off your marginalia. I have no problem with people reading while they eat but use your manners for heaven’s sake.

6. Stop watching the news. This is advice I’ve been following for years. Holiday argues that reading books as the best way to understand what’s happening in the world. The news is designed for curiositas, not studiosis. Do yourself a favor and consume less of it.

7. Re-read books. I love how Holiday says that when you re-read a book, the book is the same, but you are different. Re-reading offers you what you need at this moment. It can also good way to get out of a reding slump; it’s a sure thing. I seldom re-read. If you’re a re-reader, tell me what you re-read and why. How was it different the second (or twenty-second) time around? How do you know what you want to re-read?

8. Don’t be a snob. Yes! If something is popular- whether a “classic” or a new bestseller. Find out what the hype is all about. Sometimes you’ll disagree, as I did with Where the Crawdads Sing. Other times, you’ll be moved more than you know, as I was with A Gentleman in Moscow. It’s also interesting to see the new seasons of an old book. Look at the love The Count of Monte Cristo and Wuthering Heights are getting online today- and only one with a new movie coming out. Much though I like this rule, though, it seems contrary to Holiday’s rule 1. What do you think?

9. Keep a commonplace book. I aspire to keep a record of taking extracts from my reading. In practice, if it’s a book I’m reading for “work,” generally one I plan to write about, I will have extensive marginalia and follow-up notes. I don’t do this with books I am reading purely for pleasure. Should I? If you’re a writer, you might be intrigued by Holiday’s note-card method. I include his explanatory video on that below.

10. Quit bad books. Another one I agree with and really need to work on! You’d think I’d take my own classroom advice and ignore sunk costs. Holiday asks why we’re so willing to stop watching a bad TV show, but feel we have to finish a bad book? His proposed formula of 100 pages minus your age seems…er, short. What say you? Give me advice on this if you’re good at this quitting!

11. Good books aren’t hard. I’m taking a hard pass on this one. It’s certainly the case that good books aren’t necessarily hard. But you know what is hard? Learning! And if you want to learn from a book- whether in terms of knowledge acquisition or emotional intelligence- it takes effort. But it’s effort that’s worth it! Perhaps Holiday isn’t equating “hard” with “effort.: Regardless, I’ll stick by what I’ve been saying in my ongoing reading series, and particularly in my last post. Real learning takes more than just curiosity; it also requires sustained cognitive effort.

12. As people you admire to tell you about a book that changed their life. 100% yes. I’d add not just people you meet in real life. Find out what people from the past you admire have read. Some of my own favorite lists are a catalog of all the books in Adam Smith’s library, along with Liberty Fund founder Pierre Goodrich’s list of recommended reading. (I’ve got a long way to go…)

13. Look for wisdom but not facts. Look for both; you can’t build wisdom on a fact-less foundation. This rule is totally contrary to ’s advice, with which I agree. Wisdfom is built on a foundation of facts. seeking facts don’t necessarily mean you’re preparing for something concrete, like a test or for trivia night. But you are preparing your scaffolding for future learning. You don’t need to know what you’re going to do with the information.

14. Find your next book in your current book. In my mind, this is largely the same as rule #12. Holiday recommends reading the bibliography, notes, acknowledgements, etc. in each book you read to find your next one. I do love his analogy of reading like a monkey swinging from vine to vine. But this also contradicts his previous rule. Finding a book this way is synonymous with discovering a knowledge gap you wish to exploit.

15. Read everything by authors you love. Again, I think this is effectively the same advice as in earlier rules. Holiday does make the excellent point here that doing so enables you to follow the evolution of the author’s thinking.

16. Buy books immediately. I am an aspiring bookseller. What else can I say? But I’ll also make a plug for using your local library. (Below is a picture of the stunning Gloversville Public Library, where I spent many happy hours as a kid.)

17. Speed reading is a scam. I suspect this is true but admit I’ve never tried it. What fun would that be??? Holiday argues that increasing your pre-existing knowledge the only way to speed up your reading. (True, though contradicts his rule 13…)

18. Build an anti-library. This one is fun. Your TBR pile should be ambitious. Holiday insists you should look for books that humble you and illustrate what you don’t know yet. Yep.

19. Read like a spy in the enemy’s camp. Again, Holiday and I both believe that reading is a conversation. It can also be an argument. Read authors with whom you disagree. It’s true you can’t argue your own case if you don’t understand the enemy’s. Take a lesson from high school debaters.

20. Go to bookstores. Enough said, and again plugging the library. This is the best way to find the books you didn’t know you were looking for. Give chance a chance, as Holiday says. Browsing is a better discovery engine than any algorithm.

21. Don’t skip prefaces. I have mixed feelings here. On the one hand, I fear this can decrease serendipitous enjoyment. But Holiday has a point if you’re reading with a specific goal in mind, He motes he reads everything he can about the book he’s reading- reviews, podcasts, whatever. This one strikes me purely as personal preference,

22. Pay it forward. If you love a book, share it. Literally or by recommending it. If you’ve made it this far, I’ll just go ahead and assume you agree.

In the video below, Holiday explains his three-step method to read like a pro, posted especially for those interested in learning about his note card system.