A Book That Was Like Putting on ‘a New Set of Glasses’

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The literary internet is full of lists that suggest books that will inform you about one subject or another—we just published one last week in this very newsletter (on what to read to better understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). But recently, we decided to go a bit deeper and asked Atlantic writers and editors for books that changed how they think. We were looking for reading experiences that went beyond just adding knowledge—not a small thing, I know—and that gave readers a whole different way of perceiving the world. The entries were revealing and fun. Graeme Wood wrote about Steve Martin’s collection of stories Cruel Shoes and how it opened him up to the possibilities and joys of strangeness. Clint Smith explained how Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom allowed him to appreciate what it might be like to experience life with a chronic illness. After reading James Nestor’s Breath, Olga Khazan realized she was breathing all wrong. I didn’t add my own contribution to this list, but I thought I would share it here, because I think about its argument almost every day.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

The book that gave me “a new set of glasses,” as we put it in the prompt to our writers, was Neil Postman’s 1985 diatribe, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman was a media-studies professor at New York University who worried about the dominance of television and the way it was molding our public sphere, making political rhetoric more superficial and more concerned with entertaining and holding attention. He was basically taking Marshall McLuhan’s aphoristic insight that “the medium is the message” and applying it to an age of sound bites, televised debates, and pervasive commercials. The medium we use sets the limits for what we can think and how we can think, McLuhan established. So Postman argued that if our lives as citizens take place on television—a fast-moving, visual medium—then our politics will be molded to fit these biases (as Megan Garber succinctly put it in her insightful essay on the book, “There are dangers that can come with having too much fun”). Postman saw great peril in the degradation of discourse as society moved from print, a medium that demanded reasoned argument, toward one overwhelmed by what we would today call optics.

So why do I think about Postman’s book every day? Because his worries—and worse—have been borne out. God only knows what he would have thought of X (formerly Twitter). The way social media has warped our politics is just further confirmation of McLuhan and Postman’s point. If our public square is located on a medium that privileges emotional and bombastic speech, is performative, and leaves little room for nuance or deliberation, then we shouldn’t be surprised that American politics has landed where it has. Postman saw the rise of Ronald Reagan as the result of television’s pervasiveness; one could make the same case for Donald Trump and social media. Amusing Ourselves to Death was a cri de coeur about how the dominant technology of the day was affecting every aspect of our society. But for me, it also presented a new way of looking at how the tools we use to communicate can, in turn, shape us.

A Book That Changed How I Think

What to Read

We Want Everything, by Nanni Balestrini (translated by Matt Holden)

Admired by writers such as Umberto Eco and Rachel Kushner, this 1971 cult classic by Balestrini, an Italian novelist and poet, dives deeply into the long hours and stifling working conditions faced by employees at the Fiat factory in Turin that fueled strikes in 1969 that briefly paralyzed Italy and preceded the Years of Lead. The story is told from the perspective of a nameless factory worker originally from the south of Italy, whose narrative I compellingly transforms into a collective we in the novel’s second half as the employees band together in protest. The concern here is with power: who has it, who lacks it, and how the latter might wrest it from the former—in this case, by flooding the streets with the strength that can emerge from acting as a collective. “Now the thing that moved them more than rage was joy,” Balestrini writes triumphantly of the striking crowds toward the book’s end. “The joy of finally being strong. Of discovering that your needs, your struggle, were everyone’s needs, everyone’s struggle.” — Rhian Sasseen

From our list: Nine books that push against the status quo

Out Next Week

📚 Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe, by George Musser

Your Weekend Read

Only Wes Anderson Could Have Adapted Roald Dahl This Way

“The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” which Roald Dahl published in a 1977 short-story collection, has been cited by Wes Anderson as one of the early inspirations for his habit of nesting narratives inside one another. The tale is about a wealthy, narcissistic man who stumbles upon a handwritten notebook in the library of a friend’s country house and has the course of his life drastically rerouted. The story that Henry reads is a first-person account of an encounter with a performer, who in turn relays his own strange biography. Add to this Dahl’s own narration, as Anderson does, and suddenly you’re several layers deep into a grand metafictional mille-feuille.

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