Last week, Rose Horowitch published a splashy Atlantic article titled “The End of Reading is Here.” (Ironically, given the subject matter, it weighed in at ... Read more The post Why Reading Matters appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Few recent technological innovations were better poised to become a productivity slam dunk than the personal computer. Spreadsheets, word processors, databases, presentation software, email – ... Read more The post Beware of Productivity Paradoxes appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Imagine, for a moment, the following scenario. The Ford Motor Company releases a slick whitepaper making the alarming claim that they’re concerned their popular F-150 ... Read more The post Dear AI Companies: Stop the “Doom Trolling” appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
The Financial Times recently reported an interview with Rebecca Hinds, head of the Work AI Institute. Hinds was discussing a new survey of 6,000 digital ... Read more The post AI Isn’t Breaking Work. It’s Already Broken. appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
The leaders of AI companies often compare their technology to industrial automation: just as machines eliminated jobs that depended on human brawn, AI will eliminate ... Read more The post Why Isn’t AI Taking Our Jobs? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last fall, the Notre Dame philosopher, Meghan Sullivan, participated in a closed-door meeting at the Vatican. She was there to discuss AI ethics with a ... Read more The post The Pope vs. Silicon Valley appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
The second chapter of Genesis poetically describes the beginning of the human story. “The Lord formed Adam from the dust of the earth,” it reads. ... Read more The post On God and LLMs appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
If you’ve been following technology news recently, you’ve probably noticed a sudden increase in references to a 19th-century economics theory called the Jevons Paradox, which ... Read more The post The Dark Side of the Jevons Paradox appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
“Something is up in academic research,” write the members of an AI Task Force convened by the journal Organization Science. As they go on to ... Read more The post Easy is Overrated appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
David Epstein, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Sports Gene and Range, has a new book out called Inside the Box. As ... Read more The post On Bottlenecks and Productivity appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last week, Elizabeth Lopatto published an insightful article in The Verge. It boasted an intriguing title: “Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want.” “Within ... Read more The post Who Asked For This? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Late last year, the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson gave a talk at Dragonsteel Nexus, an annual conference organized by his media company. It was titled, ... Read more The post Brandon Sanderson vs. AI Art appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last week, millions of New York Times readers were subjected to an alarming column by Thomas Friedman. “Normally right now I would be writing about ... Read more The post Is Claude Mythos “Terrifying” or Just Hype? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Ten years ago, I published Deep Work. It was my second mainstream hardcover idea book. The previous title, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, hadn’t ... Read more The post In Defense of Thinking appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last week in this newsletter, I summarized some interesting results from a study that analyzed the behavior of 164,000 knowledge workers. It found that introducing ... Read more The post Avoiding Digital Productivity Traps appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I’ve been studying the intersection of digital technology and office work for quite some time. (I find it hard to believe that my book, Deep ... Read more The post Why Hasn’t AI Made Work Easier? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I recently heard from a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford. He forwarded me an essay he wrote about Nicolaus Steno, a seventeenth-century ... Read more The post The Original Attention Crisis appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I recently came across an interesting academic article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. It was titled, “The relationships between social media use, time management, ... Read more The post What Do Social Media Companies Fear? Time Management. appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last month, The Atlantic published an article with an alarming headline: “The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films.” The author of the ... Read more The post Film Students Can No Longer Sit Through Films appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last fall, I filmed a course for MasterClass. It’s mainly based on my book Slow Productivity, but there’s some Deep Work in there too. It’s ... Read more The post What I Learned from MasterClass appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last week, news broke that Amazon would be laying off 16,000 workers. Here was the headline from an article about this news published in Quartz: ... Read more The post The Dangers of “Vibe Reporting” About AI appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
A reader recently sent me a viral video. It features a heavily muscled and perpetually shirtless fitness influencer named Ashton Hall demonstrating what he calls “the ... Read more The post Is the Internet Hijacking Our Ambition? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In 2018, the NYU social scientist Jonathan Haidt co-authored a book titled The Coddling of the American Mind. It argued that the alarming rise in ... Read more The post What’s Worrying Jonathan Haidt Now? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last week, Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Anthropic’s popular Claude Code programming agent, posted a thread on X about how he personally used ... Read more The post Be Wary of Digital Deskilling appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Exactly one year ago, Sam Altman made a bold prediction: “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ ... Read more The post Why Didn’t AI “Join the Workforce” in 2025? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In 1939, Simon & Schuster revolutionized the American publishing industry with the launch of Pocket Books, a line of diminutive volumes (measuring 4 by 6 ... Read more The post On Paperbacks and TikTok appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
As of last week, children under the age of 16 in Australia are now banned from using a long list of popular social media platforms, ... Read more The post Australia Just Kicked Kids Off Social Media. (Is the U.S. Next?) appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
The recent announcement that Netflix formalized a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s television and film studios, as well as the HBO Max streaming service, ... Read more The post Why is the Internet Becoming TV? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last year, the celebrated New Yorker writer David Grann spoke with Nieman Storyboard about his book, The Wager. The interviewer asked Grann how he manages ... Read more The post David Grann and the Deep Life appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
James Somers recently published an interesting essay in The New Yorker titled “The Case That A.I. Is Thinking.” He starts by presenting a specific definition of thinking, attributed in ... Read more The post When it Comes to AI: Think Inside the Box appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
The address that I use for this newsletter has long since been overrun by nonsense. Seemingly every PR and marketing firm in existence has gleefully ... Read more The post Why Can’t AI Empty My Inbox? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Back in 2012, as a young assistant professor, I traveled to Berkeley to attend a wedding. On the first morning after we arrived, my wife ... Read more The post Forget Chatbots. You Need a Notebook. appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, Ezra Klein interviewed AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky about his new, cheerfully-titled book, If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies. Yudkowsky is ... Read more The post Why Are We Talking About Superintelligence? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Back in 2008, when I was still early in my writing career, I published an essay on my blog that posed a provocative question: Would ... Read more The post What If Lincoln Had a Smartphone? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
On my podcast this week, I took a closer look at OpenAI’s new video generation model, Sora 2, which can turn simple text descriptions into ... Read more The post Is Sora the Beginning of the End for OpenAI? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
This week on my podcast, I delved deep into the neural mechanisms involved in making your phone so irresistible. To summarize, there are bundles of ... Read more The post What Neuroscience Teaches Us About Reducing Phone Use appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last week, I published an essay about the so-called Great Lock In of 2025, a TikTok challenge that asks participants to tackle self-improvement goals. I ... Read more The post The Great Alienation appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
If there’s one thing that I’m always late to discover, it has to be online youth trends. True to form, I’m only now starting to ... Read more The post The Great Lock In of 2025 appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
At a time when educators are increasingly concerned about technology’s impact in the classroom, the Washington Post published an op-ed with a contrarian tone. The ... Read more The post Does WiFi Make Students Smarter? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Many of you have been asking me about the assassination of the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk earlier this week during a campus event at Utah ... Read more The post On Charlie Kirk and Saving Civil Society appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last fall, a Norwegian psychology professor named Lars Dehli was asked to give a lecture on intelligence. It had been a while since he had ... Read more The post On the Reverse Flynn Effect appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last month, a 22-year-old entrepreneur named Emil Barr published a Wall Street Journal op-ed boasting a provocative title: “‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre.” He ... Read more The post Does Work-Life Balance Make You Mediocre? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In the years since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, it’s been hard not to get swept up in feelings of euphoria or dread about the ... Read more The post What if AI Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
A reader recently sent me a Substack post they thought I might like. “I bought my kids an old-school phone to keep smartphones out of ... Read more The post On Additive and Extractive Technologies appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In the wake of my recent (and inaugural) visit to Disneyland, I read Richard Snow’s history of the park, Disney’s Land. Early in the book, ... Read more The post On Engineered Wonder appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I want to present you with two narratives about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point ... Read more The post No One Knows Anything About AI appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Most summers, my family and I retreat to New England for much of July. From a professional perspective, I see this as an exercise in ... Read more The post Dispatch From Vermont appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In a recent New Yorker review of Matt Richtel’s new book, How We Grow Up, Molly Fischer effectively summarizes the current debate about the impact phones and social media are ... Read more The post Don’t Ignore Your Moral Intuition About Phones appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading