Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better (2025)

For several years now, I have been wracking my brains to understand why more of my students don't seem to be very engaged - why are there so few who evince genuine curiosity, passion to learn and debate about the world? I talk about this with my colleagues; this year I started asking some of the curious students at my school what their explanations are. It's an issue that's often on my mind. So I was very pleasantly surprised when I found this book sitting on my coffee table - Stacy had come across it and ordered it for herself. The book turned out to be very interesting, and I plan to recommend it widely. My own explanation of student disengagement had revolved around two things: the pressure to achieve academically, which has only grown over the last 30 or 40 years and which I thought might be crowding out genuine interest; and - of course - the phones. This book isn't mainly concerned with the causes of the crisis (they do provide quantitative evidence of a disengagement crisis), but when they do they focus on the increased pressure to achieve. They see phones and tech, not as a cause, but as a response to previously existing disengagement. The book is engagingly written, fluently combining often-moving stories of individual teens, quantitative data, and relevant psychological and neuroscientific studies, which they explain quite well. Anderson and Winthrop helpfully distinguish between three kinds of disengagement: passenger mode (in which half of all students may be!); resister mode; and - surprisingly - achiever mode (in which praise and grades are the only motivators). Their ideal, by contrast, is explorer mode, in which students are driven by intrinsic motivation, are agents in their own learning, and are resilient, i.e. can handle setbacks. I appreciated many of the pieces of advice the authors give and hope to incorporate it in my teaching (and perhaps parenting, as well). There are some small bones I want to pick, though. The authors regularly emphasize the importance of teachers trying to engage students and make the material relevant to their lives and interests. But how can one do this with a class of 25 or 30 different students? And I wonder (frankly) how many students really have passionate interests? (In the book, almost all disengaged students had some deep passion, which seemed to me to be unrealistic.) Maybe I just don't know my students well enough....More fundamentally, isn't it possible to make things interesting without appealing to what students already care about? Obviously, some bridge has to be built to what they know, but.... Relatedly, Anderson and Winthrop repeatedly downplay the importance of knowledge transmission and elevate the importance of skills, learning how to learn, and what they call "transcendent thinking" - i.e. more abstract or reflective thinking, stepping away from the given to ask about causes and alternatives. They cite the progressive guru Paulo Freire admiringly. But somehow transcendent thinking only requires the time and space to daydream. (I'm being a little unfair.) Here's where E.D. Hirsch's emphasis on mastering knowledge can come in. Transcendent thinking requires more than just the chance to daydream (the brain's default or mindwandering mode), but the material to daydream with - i.e. knowledge, schemas, etc. The combination of new material and the option to pause and daydream/ruminate/reflect is precisely what Maryann Wolf (Reader Come Home) identifies as the secret to reading's transformative power. It's a mark of the quality of The Disengaged Teen that it so often won me over, even when some of its progressive tendencies rankled.

Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture (2024)

I read this book for my book club. I came to it with high hopes - the topic is an important one, Chayka writes for the New Yorker about social media, and I had enjoyed one of his pieces I'd read. Alas, the book was something of a disappointment. Chayka almost never delves deeply into a question, his reading and thinking seem suprisingly shallow. For example, he talks about the importance of cultivating "taste," but then has little to say about what this means, about the presumably extensive discussions of it. Next he laments that elite critics and curators no longer point us in the right direction - but he doesn't stop to weigh the losses and gains of elite guidance, or to say how that guidance and one's own cultivation of taste coexist. Compared to other journalists writing about our present digital moment - Chris Hayes, Nicholas Carr, Jenny Odell - Chayka seems dull and insipid.

John Cassidy, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities (2009)

Another Will Pyle-recommendation, another hit! I plan to use selections in my upcoming course on "capitalism(s) since 1945. Cassidy writes about the economy for the New Yorker and in this book he explains even difficult ideas quite clearly. While I was generally familiar with much of what Cassidy covered, I still learned quite a bit; and the refresher was most welcome. The book is divided into three sections: 1) utopian economics; 2) reality-based economics; and 3) the 2008-9 Global Financial Crisis. In the first part, Cassidy focuses on how economics became a mathematical science, based on many unrealistic assumptions, describing the fiction of innumerable, interconnected markets, i.e. where supply and demand are in equilibrium. This was known as "general equilibrium theory." One of the unrealistic assumptions, previously unfamiliar to me, was this was a world made up only of small producers - large oligopolies and monopolies would ruin the equilibrium. (One of my only quibbles with this excellent book, perhaps my only one, is that Cassidy barely discusses Schumpeter, who wrote a lot about how companies seek to escape price competition, by dominating markets, innovating, or creating niches.) Utopian economics depends on three illusions of the market - that market interactions are harmonious, stable, and predictable. It is more unified than reality-based economics, which has identified endemic externalities, informational asymmetries ("lemons"), skewed incentives ("moral hazard"), prisoner's dilemmas, Keynesian beauty contests, Minskyian ponzi schemes, herd behavior, heuristics and biases, etc. One of the points that was new to me was that Adam Smith's vision of the market depended on negative feedback, which brings the system back to equilibrium (as a thermostat and heating/cooling system do), while in reality, especially in financial markets, there are positive feedback loops, which take the system ever further away from equilibrium.

Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload (2021)

Call me a Cal Newport fan. I was drawn to this book because I have increasingly found myself overwhelmed at work by the sheer variety and frequency of claims on my attention, much of which comes through email. And I had heard good things about Newport from my wife. The book didn't disappoint. Newport is an unusually gifted individual - an expert in one field (computer science, distributed systems, in particular), but also knowledgeable about the business world, widely read, and, crucially, a talented communicator. Newport makes the case that the "hive mind" enabled by email is bad for productivity and bad for our peace of mind. He provides an interesting, multifaceted account of the reasons for email's rise to ubiquity: evolutionarily, we are predisposed to hive-mind communication, but in small groups (think of a hunting expedition in which many small adjustments have to be made in real time); knowledge work, as Peter Drucker claimed, relies on individual autonomy, seemingly precluding centralized control; finally, various vicious circles (such as the "tragedy of the attention commons" - once one person begins expecting a rapid response to email messages, it's only natural that one respond in kind) cemented email's grip. Perhaps most valuably, Newport argues that this hive mind workflow is not something fated and unavoidable. He offers many suggestions, illustrated by accounts of bold experimenters in the business world, for how an organization or individual can minimize and even abandon email (and Slack), thereby rediscovering focus. Next up in my Newport queue: Digital Minimalism, which I think captures my philosophy or, at least, aspiration.