Amusing Ourselves to Death

First published in 1985, Neil Postman’s groundbreaking polemic about the effects of television on our politics and public discourse has become a modern classic. With the rise of the infinite scroll, collapsing attention spans, dwindling literacy rates and the outsourcing of our cognitive abilities to AI, his ideas seem more prescient than ever. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands to what we now call the attention economy. With a brand-new foreword written by Jonathan Haidt, it is the definitive examination of how we are abandoning our ability to reason in the name of entertainment.