⭐⭐ The Closing of the American Mind by Bloom

I came to Bloom’s book with lofty expectations, having heard it referenced so often.

Parts I and III certainly offered some intriguing observations. Bloom’s comparison of American and European students, and his analysis of how our cultural norms have shaped education — long before today’s “woke” debates — provided some thought-provoking moments. If the book had ended there, it would have earned a solid 3 stars from me.

However, the journey was derailed by the sheer slog of Part II. This lengthy middle section felt less like a continuation of the argument and more like an exercise in academic peacocking, a showcase for the breadth of the author’s reading list. Its inclusion felt so extraneous that it ultimately soured the entire experience, knocking my rating down to a 2-star “would not recommend.”

If you feel compelled to read it for cultural literacy, do yourself a favor and skip Part II entirely.

June 16, 2025 Book Reviews

⭐⭐⭐⭐ How Children Learn by Holt

Continuing my recent deep dive into childhood learning, I picked up Holt’s book, my third read after Free to Learn and The Anxious Generation. I was immediately charmed by Holt’s approach. Unlike the more pedagogical tone of the other books, this reads more like a collection of diary entries. Holt presents simple, direct observations of children interacting with the world, followed by his own insightful reflections on what these moments can teach us.

What I particularly appreciated was Holt’s willingness to turn the lens on himself, applying the lessons he learned from children to his own life (even when his experiments were failures!) It added a layer of humility and relatability that is often missing from parenting literature.

While I think I’m ready for a break from this topic for a while, and would rank this third in my recent reading trio, How Children Learn was still a worthwhile read.

June 15, 2025 Book Reviews

AI Pace of Change

Just over two months ago, I wrote about Perplexity’s R1 model and mentioned it was one of the three ‘defaults’ I use via Msty. I happened to send a link to the post to a friend today and noticed that I’ve actually swapped out all three models — my three go-to’s are now ChatGPT’s o3 (was o1), Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro (was Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking), and Perplexity’s Sonar Pro (was R1). Just wild how quickly this stuff changes — these upgrades are quite noticeable for me just as a user. Exciting times.

April 30, 2025 AI

Focusmate

I recently started using Focusmate again. It’s a tool to help you stay on task — you get paired with another user and turn your webcam on to ‘keep you honest’ and on task. I initially used it in 2019, back when I was between jobs and needed to focus on grinding out Leetcodes in preparation for interviews. Recently I ran across a thread where people were talking about it and decided to give it a shot again. I forgot how great it is! What I especially like is that they recently released a “Focus Now” feature, where you simply click you’re ‘ready’ to be paired with someone right away to start a 50-minute focus session (before, you needed to use a calendar to schedule coworking sessions). I really don’t enjoy having specific start times, so I much prefer this free-for-all feature.

Would recommend folks give it a shot — their free plan allows you to use it up to 3x per week, enough to figure out if you like it. I have been using it enough that I subscribed to their yearly plan that allows unlimited usages. I’m not sure it’s something I’ll use every day, but I do think of it as akin to the Pomodoro technique — a tool to return to at least every few months so that it feels like an asset you can turn to for increasing focus.

April 9, 2025

⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Anxious Generation by Haidt

I read this immediately after Free to Learn by Peter Gray. It’s interesting how much overlap there is in the two books on the subject of play, even though this one is published over a decade later. Indeed, Haidt mentions Gray as a source multiple times in Anxious Generation, but I’m not sure he necessarily adds much more to that side of the topic than Gray already went over. One thing that I thought was cool to include from this side though was data on how injury rates among boys dropped quite significantly during the 2010s. In 2012, they were the age range with the highest rate of unintentional injuries — a decade later, they were the lowest! That’s crazy.

Excerpt from Chapter 7, What Is Happening to Boys?

I thought the inclusion of statistics like this one was great — Haidt includes quite a few throughout the book, and they are well-sourced through the online supplement.

The second part of the ‘anxiety’ is online-based stuff, primarily social media, pornography, and (to a limited extent) gaming. The idea is that these products are particularly bad for children with developing brains. As someone that had a serious gaming habit as a teenager and young adult (one that I can still summon if I find a particularly good title), I think I’m on-board with this argument. The basic reforms that Haidt proposes I find to be quite reasonable — disallow phone use during school hours; no smartphones or social media before high school. It made me consider: would something like the first rule be a good idea for parents as well? If I’m going to be asking my child not to use a phone from wake-up to ~3pm, it seems reasonable that I could lead by example, especially since as an adult I use my phone for alot more than simply ‘utility’ needs like calls/texts before that time.

Overall, I thought this was a solid read, though I think less aspirational and clearly much more targeted towards parents / future parents than Free to Learn, which is why this gets 4 instead of 5 stars. Ultimately, though, it leaves me with an uncomfortable feeling: what will the authors of the future Anxious Generation-style book be writing about raising kids in the 2030s~40s?

April 8, 2025 Book Reviews

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Free to Learn by Gray

This was an awesome book. One of my favorite attributes of it is just how positive and optimistic it is — while it of course is motivated by the decreases in free play in recent decades, it only spends a little time on those, instead opting to talk at length about the promise of what more free play could enable.

The book really shifted my perspective on corporal punishment. In the past, my perception of the arguments against it were that it is somehow morally wrong to hit children, or that doing so might damage their upbringing. I haven’t historically and still do not buy this as a good argument. However, Free to Learn provides motivations that are completely orthogonal to these: primarily drawing on evidence that shows primitive cultures did not do such hitting, Gray links the motivation for that type of punishment in the first place to the Neolithic Revolution (and further, the Industrial Revolution). Needing kids to do specific things in a specific way is an attribute of the society that they are being brought up to live in, not some objective requirement of upbringing in general. I found this to be quite an intuitive explanation, and now I feel I’m more on the side of ‘avoid’ for the practice. I love when a book reverses a long-held opinion of mine like this.

I’m honestly not sure when I have felt this excited by a book’s thesis. Would highly recommend basically everyone read this, in particular those with some relationship to young children.

March 31, 2025 Book Reviews