This is one of those long essays you come to the end of and wonder “What the hell was that?” It’s entertaining but what does it even say? Books need commitment

This is one of those long essays you come to the end of and wonder “What the hell was that?” It’s entertaining but what does it even say? Books need commitment and mental labor and most people on a podcast tour or radio tour never even read the book, just the talking points? Some people read deeply and well? Having a conversation on the same set of talking points can be valuable even if you wrote an entire book on the same topic as the talking points? That’s probably the meat of the thing. The riffs on books and video games and social media are less well developed. He’s trying to fit a book into an essay and it won’t go. The compression leaves you with a copy of the idea in the book so blurry you can’t see anything but the shape of what he’s trying to say. And then there’s an annoying postscript that can be safely skipped. I wish he’d told us who the teenage Korean podcaster was. He sounds interesting.