By Andy Brack
With all of the turmoil roiling the country, a new way to show your love for these 50 states is to get off the damned phone and mind-numbing social media channels. Instead, embrace reading.
Most of what you see on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok is material picked by someone else to try to get you to stay on a device as long as possible so you can see their ads for some crap that you don’t need.
Don’t think all of this screen time is having an effect? It doesn’t take a crack Internet researcher to learn that phone screen usage is increasing dramatically. A 2025 study showed the average amount of time Americans spend on phone screens is a whopping 5 hours and 16 minutes – every day. That’s a 14% increase over the previous year and represents almost as much time spent pondering nothingness on the phone as spent in a 40-hour per week job!
All of this being glued to a device also is shortening our attention spans. Two decades ago, according to one psychologist, the attention span of someone working on a computer document was about 2.5 minutes. In other words, they focused on the document for that long until they checked email or did something else. In the ensuing years with the rise of people on phones all of the time, that number has dropped to (wait for it) 47 seconds. Geez. Talk about cultural attention deficit order.
Furthermore, all of this bouncing around from one thing to another isn’t bringing us closer together. It’s forcing us into individualized cocoons that keep us apart – except for those people who transmogrify into some kind of digital Karen or Ken and have to comment on everything and irritate kith and kin alike.
So with so much info-trash assaulting our brains daily as we feed a national addition to tiny idiot boxes, what do we do?
Perhaps something radically conservative: Step back some. Turn off the screen and what some algorithm thinks you need. Visit a bookstore or the public library. Ask for a suggestion. And read for enjoyment. You might find it to be a vacation from a world spinning out of control.
Just this week, I devoured a soon-to-be-released, 363-page novel by Alabama storyteller Sean Dietrich. “Over Yonder” is a true delight, filled with laugh-out-loud moments and as well as some misty-eyed passages in the story of a defrocked Episcopalian priest just out of prison who finds himself interspersed in the life of a 17-year-old girl and her emotional support goldfish named Gary. They’re chased by domestic terrorists. The FBI steps in at one point. There’s speeding, gunshots, wrecks and the lure of Confederate gold. It’s a rollicking tale. Dietrich even worked in a tribute to Mark Twain by cribbing this observation: “Grasping an angry cat by the tail teaches a man something he can learn in no other way.”
Or maybe you ought to read anything by the late Kurt Vonnegut, comedian Jon Stewart’s favorite author. “Line your desk with Kurt Vonnegut and you cannot go wrong,” Stewart said in 2024. “I felt like he educated me in the genre of optimistic, cynical humanism.”
Consider “Breakfast of Champions,” which I read as a teenager and marveled at the creative use of an asterisk (IYKYK). Or you might want to pick his breakout “Slaughterhouse Five,” a darker tale that tries to make sense of war. (Vonnegut was a World War II soldier who was taken prisoner and survived the British firebombing of Dresden.) Vonnegut blends science fiction, pithy observations about humans, creativity and Midwestern common sense – just the kinds of things we need in these days of too many blue screens.
Read more. It will do you – and the country – a world of good.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the Charleston City Paper and Statehouse Report. Have a comment? Send it to feedback@statehousereport.com.
