Social media, brain rot and the slow death of reading

My favourite non-fiction book this year — and an excellent antidote to brain rot — is Edwin Frank’s Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel . Covering 33 books with a bibliography of further suggested reading, it’s both a way to exercise deep reading and a portal for re-engaging with some of the greatest works in history.

The Oxford University Press word of 2024 was “brain rot”— meaning both the “low-quality, low-value content” found online and the intellectual deterioration from its overconsumption. First recorded in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden , this year’s uptick in usage is (ironically) attributed to references in TikTok videos.