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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   23878 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Rules on attire have relaxed but other rules around work have become stringent. Smoking and drinking when staying late at your white collar office job is obviously gone; off-color and boyish humor is gone; flirting with female employees at work is gone. Progressive shibboleths have been instituted. Where you go to school matters more, whether you’ve stayed at the same job matters more. Appearance of hair and teeth matter more. So is the workplace really more “relaxed”? It’s just no longer uniform regarding clothing, but it’s less-permissive in a whole lot of other areas.

the boilerplate celebrity interview question "What book are you currently reading?" was retired years ago: no one is reading books anymore

A lot of this is that non-fiction is filled with filler as it’s considered more respectable to publish a book rather than a pamphlet or booklet (so diminutive!). You can glean a lot of the valuable information of a non-fiction book from reading reviews and seeing discussions online.

I dunno, a lot of the filler in non brilliant non fiction books is serving the role of making space for you to think about something a lot, and trying multiple ways to teach something to up the odds of it lodging in the reader's mind. You can read a one page version of Atomic Habits and get all the actual informational content, but you won't have marinaded in it and spent time applying the advice to your own life in the way that you will if you read the whole thing. The ideas won't come across as so throwaway.

I'm truly not citing Atomic Habits as some example of genius! It's just I really don't think it's only status considerations that are driving book length works with relatively little informational content.

A lot of this is that non-fiction is filled with filler as it’s considered more respectable to publish a book rather than a pamphlet or booklet (so diminutive!). You can glean a lot of the valuable information of a non-fiction book from reading reviews and seeing discussions online.

The first sign of a dullard is that they read non-fiction.

Harsh, but fair.

I read a great deal of non-fiction and I still snorted at this.

I love you for this. Wow. I forgive all our previous arguments and even your comment about humans being machines. ;P

Thank you!

Boooo! Some nonfiction is great.

Hey, I read non-fiction! 😡

I do engage with a ton of fictional content, although it’s generally not in the form of novels. (I’ve recently started reading novels again as part of a sort of two-person book club with my mother, but it’s still not generally my preferred mode of imaginative reading.)

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