March 13 Friday roundup

In this week’s podcast episode, I talk about the most divorced men in history, who all seem to be in or adjacent to the White House these days. (Please note that #notallguys who are divorced are divorce guys.) You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here.

Later today, I’ll hit the road for the far side of Virginia, where I’m holing up in a cabin alone for the coming week to revise the draft MS of my next book, Snowblind: Death on the Polar Ice. I’ve been prepping my research materials, stacking and packing them up so that I’ll have everything I need there. This ritual has been making me think of how much of my life is actually devoted to books, even though so much of this newsletter is focused on studies, articles, and current events—for reasons that are probably apparent [looks around at everything].

Though the same is true of many who subscribe to this newsletter or read my books, I realize that’s not true of the general population. A YouGov poll out from December reported that “the median American read two books in 2025. On average, Americans read eight books.” Epidemiologist Jessica K. Bone and her co-authors reported a 10% decline in the percentage of individuals reading for pleasure in the U.S. between 2003 and 2023. (Bone studies what social factors affect health, including leisure activities.)

Which is not to say no one is reading. Silent book clubs reported more than a million members in 2025. But an informal poll of my friends suggests that even many lifelong enthusiastic readers find the firehose of grim news combined with expanded opportunities for watching or listening to media are interfering with their previous book habits.

I’ve been undergoing an accidental experiment about all this. I agreed to judge a literary competition a year ago that’s still underway. I won’t talk more about it until it’s over, except to say that I have been reading a lot of books. I counted 170 when I gathered them for the photo accompanying this post (though later realized that I had left a small pile out). I had no idea when I started that judging would involve quite this many books.

I know everyone is swamped these days, so I’m not making any special claim to being overwhelmed. But I’ve found it hard to meet my regular commitments as an author, a journalist, a newsletter writer, and a reluctant podcaster while getting all this reading done. It was particularly hard at the beginning, when the other judges and I had no agreed-on frame of reference for the many very different texts we were considering.

For the first months, I spent a lot of time reading whole volumes cover to cover before dismissing a single title. Then, after several books stood head and shoulders above the others, it became easier to put a new entry down after 50 or 60 pages it those pages clearly fell short of the standard already set by other nominees.

But any time a title struck me as solid after those first chapters, I felt I had to read it to the finish. Who knew how an author might surprise me if I kept going? Reading this many books in proximity to each other was deeply instructive. It made me think about what books are for, what their authors ask them to do, how they teach the audience to read the book (or don’t!), what readers might hope to find when opening them, and what the point of the whole enterprise of book-writing is.

But along with all that, it was a fantastic exercise to force myself out of day-to-day developments in the world for a while to read books in which an author had created a serious longform experience that I couldn’t consume passively (I didn’t listen to audiobooks at all for this judging). Taking control back of my mind and immersing myself in other times and places not only restored some of the focus I’d lost to my huge tendency to be online, it also felt like a really valuable mental exercise of choosing what to think about each day.

I felt less like a victim doomed to live through the current era and more like a free agent deciding to engage with the world in a number of ways. (I know e-readers are really valuable for a lot of literary and literate people, but for me, there’s something about the pleasure of a book as a physical object that feels very grounding and also helps with this aspect.)

All of which is to say that if you feel like you might be throwing some part of yourself under the bus by obsessing over the news these days, doing something offline that’s physically and mentally engaging can be a wonderful experience for rehabilitating the part of your mind that is all too often roadkill on the digital highway.

The other judges and I will be winding down and making our final decisions by summer, at which point I’ll write more about the books we chose. But for now, I hope you’re also remembering to do the things you love, immersing yourselves in worlds that challenge you or give you relief, and remembering that the universe and its history are both bigger than the current moment.

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