You're listening to Reading Glasses, a show about book culture and literary life designed to help you read better.

I'm author and book devour, Mallory O'Mara.

And I'm Brea Grant, filmmaker, and e-reader.

This episode, we're talking about reading while doing other activities.

Is it a good idea?

Is it a bad idea?

Does multitasking exist? We'll examine. Plus, we test out the popular walking pad. I'm here at Mallory's to give you a live test, let you know how it goes. And we interview glass or favorite, Mike Chen. Very exciting. But first, Brea, what are you reading? I am listening to a book that came out

a year or two ago, maybe just last year. It is inshittification, why everything suddenly got

worse and what to do about it by Corey Doctor. You know, I love Corey Doctor. I read his science

fiction books, but this one, not science fiction. I wish it was, but it's not. Yeah, we're

living through the great inshitting. Basically, it's like, here's all the things that we rely on and we need, and here's why we've made them bad and how we've made them bad. We start with going like, you know what's good is like, Kendall's, wow, they can provide such great opportunities for us to read and anyone can read. but here's how they got gradually worse to the point, or now they're not useful to us anymore, and they are shitty. And so how we get there. And he takes everything. He goes, like iPhones. He goes, Amazon. Like all these things that we, at first were like, oh, isn't it great that we have Twitter and we can talk to each other and like how the great and shittifying happened?

It is, it will make you really mad.

I'm already really mad.

Basically, it's like, here's the policy choices that they go.

We don't care about our users.

We don't care about the people involved.

We don't care about what, we just start to care about money. And so we're going to make it shitty for you. If you want to be mad, this is a great book. It also kind of helps you understand where you are. Yeah, I think it might be good for me to read because I think a lot of us are having that feeling of like everything feels really bad right now and everything, nothing works anymore and you don't really know why. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't work anymore. And it, and it's, it is kind of on purpose

because they've chosen that, like, their loyalty to you doesn't matter. And it's like you are

just a number and a product and something to give these companies money. And, you know, this is

part of living in capitalist society. But there's also things that you can do about it. Apparently, I haven't gotten to that part of the book. Does it involve walking into the sea? I don't hope not. Apparently the sea has been in shit of fine. I'm just kidding. Imagine? You walk into the sea and it's like, you cannot enter sea until you have joined what are you reading you must watch

this 30 second ad before you put toes into water i am reading a really highly anticipated book but

first i have to put my cat on blast about it oh so i am reading agnes oberts mystical cat shelter

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