Stephen Harrison

Writing a book about the value of print for St. Martin’s Press. Rep’d by Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media Group.

[Stephen Harrison @harrisonstephen]

Case study in the power of print: TikTok creator @jackbenedwards reaches millions with his videos, but always dreamed of seeing his work in physical form. He's now a books columnist for @EsquireUK and made a video about the thrill of tracking down a copy of the magazine.

[ᴅᴏᴏᴍᴇɴɪᴄ @dinosaur_info]

Nobody is complaining loudly enough that Wikipedia is sometimes no longer even on the first page of google results. Like what the hell are we doing

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

No, I do not want the AI overview.
I want to read a Wikipedia page that leads me to another Wikipedia page, and another, and another, and get lost for hours down a completely unrelated rabbit hole as the gods intended.

[Will Oremus @WillOremus]

@TheAtlantic My story on the "educational" games your kid is almost certainly playing in school, which often turn out to just be ripoffs of popular time-wasting iPhone games with a few multiple-choice questions bolted on: https://t.co/QMuXlBML6C

[Stephen Harrison @harrisonstephen]

@sarahhepola Someone who has become stuck in and defined by their day job of real estate broker. But their true vocation is novelist.

[Stephen Harrison @harrisonstephen]

Worth noting that Pope Leo’s background is Augustinian. St. Augustine is the patron saint of printers.

[Stephen Harrison @harrisonstephen]

This story is one of Lovett’s best. It’s rare that anything on Wikipedia gets a true conclusion, much less a relatively happy one where the parties agree they both made honest mistakes. Sometimes “assume good faith” works.

https://t.co/GKLkizQqhi

[Karen Vaites @karenvaites]

This post is an excellent example of the role of background knowledge to comprehension.

You only understand it if you know the song and the singer. If you do, it’s hilarious.

Consider how this reads for someone who doesn’t know the song. It’s nonsense.

[Stephen Harrison @harrisonstephen]

The irony is that this post, which raises genuine concerns, was clearly written with ChatGPT

[Yasir Ai @AiwithYasir]

🚨Just IN: If you've used ChatGPT for writing or brainstorming in the last 6 months, your creative ability may already be permanently damaged.

A controlled experiment just proved the effect doesn't reverse when you stop using it.

3,302 creative ideas. 61 people. 30 days of tracking.

Researchers split students into two groups. Half used ChatGPT for creative tasks. Half worked alone. For five days, the ChatGPT group outperformed on every metric. Higher scores. More ideas. Better output. AI was making them better.

Then day 7. ChatGPT removed. Every creativity gain vanished overnight. Crashed to baseline. Zero lasting improvement.

But that's not the bad part.

ChatGPT users' ideas became increasingly identical to each other over time. Same content. Same structure. Same phrasing. The researchers called it homogenization. Everyone using ChatGPT started producing the same ideas wearing different clothes.

When ChatGPT was removed, the creativity boost disappeared -- but the homogenization stayed. 30 days later, same result. Their creative range had been permanently compressed.

Five days of use. Permanent damage 30 days later.

A separate trial confirmed it. 120 students. 45-day surprise test. ChatGPT users scored 57.5%. Traditional learners scored 68.5%. AI reduces cognitive effort. Less effort means weaker encoding. Weaker encoding means less creative raw material.

You're not renting a productivity boost. You're financing it with your originality.

The interest rate is permanent.

[Karen Vaites @karenvaites]

One year into cell phone bans, Dallas schools see 24% increase in library book checkouts.

👏👏👏

"Public school districts in Texas are almost one school year into the first statewide cellphone ban, and a North Texas school district is seeing positive impacts.

Dallas ISD officials said that, district-wide, they have seen a significant increase in library book checkouts, which they largely attribute to students no longer having cellphones with them during the school day.

"I started hearing, 'Oh, I'm so bored. I can't get on my phone after I do my work or during lunchtime,'" Hillcrest High School librarian Nina Canales said. "Once they lock into these stories, they don't seem to care about their phones at all."

From the first day of school to March 31, 2026, the district reported an increase of more than 200,000 additional books checked out compared to the previous year.

A look at the library checkouts for the previous year:

2025-2026 Total Circulation (1st day of school to March 31, 2026) – 1,084,837
2024-2025 Total circulation (1st day of school to March 31, 2025) – 872,430

Total library book checkout increase: 24.35%

At Dallas ISD's Hillcrest High, students are following this trend.

Canales said there were roughly 500 books checked out in the first nine weeks of the 2024-2025 school year. This school year, that number spiked to about 1,800 books.

"That floored me," Canales said. "I had to re-do the report again because I was like, 'What, are you kidding me?'"

Students felt the impact too.

"Now that I'm busy with a bunch of work and college, I don't find myself missing my phone that much, even at home," said Yamilet Jimenez, 9th grader."

By @laceybeasnews.

@JonHaidt @safe_screens

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

We've got the myth of Narcissus all wrong. It's not a story about falling in love with yourself, it's about the dangers of being seduced by things that look human but aren't, wrongly ascribing to them human will & intelligence. Which makes it a perfect metaphor for AI.

[Stephen Harrison @harrisonstephen]

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964

[Edward Wong @ewong]

From the Gutenberg press to now: People still love seeing their writing in print.

[Neil Agarwal @regalstreak]

i accidentally discovered one of the coolest features on the internet

the Wikipedia app has a "nearby" feature that shows wikipedia articles around your location!

i opened it and instantly fell into a rabbit hole of random places, local history and weird things around me

try it and tell me what shows up near you

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

Haunted by something I read this morning in a book on the Vikings: “A society without books is ... a society without a history.” We have no idea what we’re throwing away when we abandon literacy as a culture. The rejection of reading is the birth of a new dark age.

[Stephen Harrison @harrisonstephen]

@JackieSmith114 @pubity Yay! Think this is a good development.

[Ismael Sanz @sanz_ismael]

Una generación que no lee bien tendrá más dificultades para entender política, contratos o información básica. New York Times: la caída de la lectura es un problema democrático y laboral, no solo educativo. Los propios estudiantes piden soluciones claras: más lectura real en clase, menos vídeos y atajos, estándares académicos más exigentes y límites al uso del móvil y la IA https://t.co/HaDWLIcTy3

[Bruce Arthur @bruce_arthur]

This is as good as everyone says it is, and to me it’s not really about losing the money, which most gamblers do; it’s about how gambling changed Coppins, and changed his relationship with the people around him. A perfectly executed piece.

[Christopher Ingraham🦗 @_cingraham]

For Slate, I wrote about what it's like to get a terminal cancer diagnosis when you're 42.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

I can't stress enough how important it is that you buy physical books.

[Stephen Harrison @harrisonstephen]

One lovely part of book research is reading these deep cuts