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
Last fall, I published a New Yorker essay titled, “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT?”. My goal for the piece was to better understand how ... Read more The post Does AI Make Us Lazy? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
One of the topics I’ve returned to repeatedly in my work is the intersection of smartphones and children (see, for example, my two New Yorker ... Read more The post An Important New Study on Phones and Kids appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
A few days ago, I went to Disneyland. I had been invited to Anaheim to give a speech about my books, and my wife and ... Read more The post Dispatch from Disneyland appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last month, Anthropic released a safety report about one of its most powerful chatbots, Claude Opus 4. The report attracted attention for its description of ... Read more The post Why Can’t We Tame AI? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In the spring of 2019, while on tour for my book Digital Minimalism, I stopped by the Manhattan production offices of Brian Koppleman to record ... Read more The post Are We Too Concerned About Social Media? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Over the past four years, a remarkable story has been quietly unfolding in the knowledge sector: a growing interest in the viability of a 4-day ... Read more The post The Workload Fairy Tale appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
One of the main topics of this newsletter is the quest to cultivate sustainable and meaningful work in a digital age. Given this objective, it’s ... Read more The post AI and Work (Some Predictions) appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
On Saturday, the Washington Nationals baseball team played their first spring training game of the season. I was listening to the radio call in the ... Read more The post Back to the (Internet) Future appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
A reader recently sent me a clip from Chris Williamson’s podcast. In the segment, Williamson discusses his evolving relationship with productivity: “Look, I come from ... Read more The post Productivity Rain Dances appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I recently listened to Tim Ferriss interview the prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson (see here for my coverage of Sanderson’s insane underground writing lair). Tim ... Read more The post Let Brandon Cook appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
On Saturday night, in compliance with a law that the U.S. Supreme Court had just upheld, TikTok shut down its popular video-sharing app for American ... Read more The post The TikTok Ban Is About More Than TikTok appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In 2006, a high school student from Ontario named James Hobson started posting to a new platform called YouTube. His early videos were meant for ... Read more The post Lessons from YouTube’s Extreme Makers appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Between this newsletter, my podcast, my books, and my New Yorker journalism, I offer a lot of advice and propose a lot of ideas about ... Read more The post The Tao of Cal appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I’m writing this post about eighteen hours before the first polls open on Election Day, and it feels tense out there. The New York Times, ... Read more The post After You Vote: Unplug appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Many predictions and concerns tumbled into the slipstream trailing ChatGPT’s dazzling, turbulent entrance onto the technology scene in late 2022. Few of these initial warnings ... Read more The post The Perfect Cheating Machine? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In 1973, an author named Alan Lakein published a book titled How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. It wasn’t the first ... Read more The post When Time Management Was Easy appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Growing up in New York, first in the city and then later in Albany, a young Herman Melville made frequent trips to stay with his ... Read more The post Dispatch from Herman Melville’s Farm appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I’m writing this from a rental property, on a hillside overlooking the northern reach of the Taconic Mountains. A key feature of this property is ... Read more The post Dispatch from a Writing Shed appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
When I visited London last month, a large marketing push was underway for the paperback edition of Chris van Tulleken’s UK bestseller, Ultra-Processed People: Why ... Read more The post On Ultra-Processed Content appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Earlier this month, Jim Ratcliffe, part owner and operations head for the storied English football club Manchester United, announced an end to the flexible work-from-home ... Read more The post Manchester United Embraces Pseudo-Productivity appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In recent months, I’ve been doing a fair number of interviews about my new book, Slow Productivity. I’m often asked during these conversations about the ... Read more The post Do We Need AI to Revolutionize Work? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I really enjoyed meeting so many of you at my Politics and Prose event a couple weeks ago. It was meaningful for me to be ... Read more The post Two Chances to See Me Next Week appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Earlier this month, a group of scientists from universities around the world published the results of an ingeniously simple experiment in the journal PLoS ONE. ... Read more The post Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
A brief book update: I wanted to share that Slow Productivity debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list last week! Which is ... Read more The post ChatGPT Can’t Plan. This Matters. appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I know it’s been a minute since I’ve published one of my normal essays. I’ll be returning to these soon as the chaos of the ... Read more The post Come See Me Saturday in DC + TikTok Falters appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Conclusion Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Conclusion Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:04:21 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:04:21 | Continue reading
Chapter 5 Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Chapter 5 Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:07:27 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:07:27 | Continue reading
Chapter 4 Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Chapter 4 Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:07:50 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:07:50 | Continue reading
Chapter 3 Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Chapter 3 Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:08:37 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:08:37 | Continue reading
Chapter 2 Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Chapter 2 Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:05:12 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:05:12 | Continue reading
Chapter 1 Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Chapter 1 Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:07:05 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:07:05 | Continue reading