AI Summary
5 min readIn his essay "How I Learned to Read Way, Way More," writer John Paul Brammer described a feeling many people recognize: the inability to focus on a book despite wanting to. He told Charlie Warzel on Galaxy Brain that he was a "dire case of brain being addled by social media," and that he knew on an "intuition level" he had to make himself hungry for books again. "It's like giving yourself homework as an adult," he said. "As long as the option is there to not do it, you probably just won't do it." The conversation that followed was not another lament about the death of attention, but a careful unpacking of what attention actually is, and how curiosity—not discipline—might be the lever that gets people reading again.
Two kinds of attention
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:03) **Episode Introduction & Host Framing** - Charlie Warzel introduces the episode's theme: the difficulty of deep reading in the age of distraction, and the goal of "rewilding" our attention.
- 2 (04:30) **Guest Introduction: John Paul Brammer's Reading Origins** - Brammer describes his childhood as a voracious reader, fostered by his mother, a high school English teacher.
- 3 (07:11) **The Quality of Attention: Muscular vs. Pure** - Brammer defines two types of attention: "muscular" (forced effort) and "pure" (immersive, effortless flow).
- 4 (13:32) **Cracking the Shell: Curiosity as an Attention Multiplier** - The core mechanism: curiosity is the key to overcoming the "muscular attention" barrier.
- 5 (19:56) **Applying the Theory: The Logistics of the Reading Jag** - Brammer details his practical method for rekindling his reading habit.
- 6 (26:13) **The Cost of Social Media: The "Absolute Present"** - Brammer describes his former relationship with Twitter, which "ate him alive."
- 7 (32:04) **Reading as an Antidote: Stillness and Contemplation** - Reading provides a break from the "kinetic present," offering stillness and the space for "quality thoughts."
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Do you wish you could read more books? You’re not alone. These days, fewer people are reading for pleasure, and even those who do tend to struggle with distractions. Is this a literacy crisis, or has our attention just been warped? And what can we do?
In this episode of “Galaxy Brain,” John Paul Brammer joins Charlie Warzel to talk about how he managed to ditch the allure of his screens and social media and rewild his attention. This is a conversation about how to reignite your curiosity, what deep reading does to your mind, and how anyone can learn to love to read again.
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This episode of “Galaxy Brain” was produced by Renee Klahr and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Hadley Robinson is our senior supervising producer. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
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