Books like Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

Shoshana Zuboff explains how digital data is turned into a new market form—surveillance capitalism—where corporations predict and shape behavior for profit, reshaping power, privacy, and democracy in the digital age.

Industrial Society and Its Future is a manifesto written by Theodore Kaczynski under the pseudonym FC, addressing his opposition to modern society and technology.

Neil Postman warns of the growing dominance of technology—its impact on politics, intellect, religion, history, privacy, and truth—in his critical examination of the late twentieth‑century “Technopoly.”

A practical handbook for today’s information‑churned consumers, teaching how to manage, filter, and effectively use digital data in the age of the internet and the information superhighway.

Postman critiques antiquated teaching practices and offers bold, practical reforms to align education with contemporary realities.

An analysis of the decline of public reason in American politics and society, focusing on the role of religious fundamentalism and the erosion of democratic values.

Alain de Botton examines how everyday news shapes our priorities and emotions, using twenty‑five archetypal stories to show why we react to disasters, celebrity gossip, politics, and distant conflicts the way we do.

Neil Postman contends that television’s pervasive presence in homes exposes children prematurely to adult ideas, undermining their capacity for abstract thought and eroding the very notion of childhood.

Anarchist Politics

Virginia Heffernan explores how the Internet transforms everyday experiences, revealing both its magical potential and the losses it brings to physical, emotional life.

In this brilliantly challenging response to the education crisis, Neil Postman returns to the subject that established his reputation as one of our most insightful social critics. Starting from his belief that schooling is now too often a trivial pursuit, a mechanical exercise, he argues with stunning clarity that we have lost sight of the inherent value and substance of learning, and sets out to restore it for our time. Postman begins by portraying the American education of an earlier part of this century, when we knew what schools were for - to create a coherent, stable, unified culture out of a people of diverse traditions, languages, and religions. Shifting his focus to contemporary education, Postman outlines the markedly different narratives, or "gods," that underlie our present conception of school, and shows how poorly they serve us. The new gods are economic utility (education only as a means to a good-paying job), consumership (the belief that you are what you accumulate), technology (a reliance on mechanical solutions, not critical judgment), and separatism ("multicultural" instincts that split groups off from a unifying cultural pluralism). In describing how education may reasonably and creatively respond to - or redefine - these problems of modernity, the author presents useful narratives to help schools recover a sense of purpose, tolerance, and respect for learning. These include the Spaceship Earth (preserving the earth as a unifying theme), the Fallen Angel (learning driven not by absolute answers but by an understanding that our knowledge is imperfect), the American Experiment (emphasizing the successes and the failures of our evolving nation), the Law of Diversity (exposure to all cultures in their strengths and their weaknesses), and Word Weavers (the fundamental importance of language in forging our common humanity). Postman's The End of Education heralds a new beginning. It seeks to provide solutions while provoking debate. Postman offers a redefinition of the end of education - the essential first step before we rethink and freshly determine the means.

The rampant illnesses of our society - including the disintegration of the family, the degradation of the environment, unlimited commercialism, and unrelenting stress - are familiar to us all. For the first time, Stephen Bertman attempts to explain these disparate, overwhelmingly negative phenomena with a single, unifying principle: that the accelerated pace of American society is eroding the essence of our most fundamental values. We live, according to Bertman, in a society ruled by the "power of now," a power that gives us instant gratification even as it demands our instantaneous obedience. As a result, we have adapted our lives and values to match the speed-of-light electronic technologies that surround us. But, in so doing, we have paid a high price in spirit and mind. Hyperculture dares to suggest that the cure for our condition lies not in an "information superhighway" or "third wave information revolution," but in the radical and painful process of decelerating our lives enough to reclaim them.

The first issue of the paper appeared on January 17, 1953 in Washington, D. C. during the height of the "McCarthy era" and became a bi-weekly in 1968, closing down in December 1971.