I bought my first self-help book at nineteen. It was about organization, because I couldn’t find my socks and thought this meant something deep about my character. The book told me I needed a specific planner, a morning routine, and a color-coded closet system. Three hundred dollars later, I had a beautiful planner I never […]
Author: Adam Boyd
Why the Best Life Advice Is the Advice You Already Know You Should Take
Why the Best Life Advice Is the Advice You Already Know You Should Take Last Tuesday, I sat on my kitchen floor eating cereal straight from the box while scrolling through an article titled “17 Morning Routines of Highly Successful People.” The article recommended waking at 5 AM, meditating, journaling, and drinking lemon water. I […]
BookTok Is Five Years Old and I Have Feelings: What the Data Says About Who It Actually Made Rich
The Midnight Text Era: When Algorithms Met Longing Five years. BookTok has been a force in publishing for five years now, which means there’s an entire generation of readers who came of age thinking it was always normal to discover your next emotional crisis in a thirty-second video. I still remember the first time I […]
Banned Books in 2025: How the ALA’s Latest Data Reveals a Changing Battlefield in the Fight for Library Shelves
The Numbers Are Staggering, and They Tell a Story I spent last night scrolling through the American Library Association’s newly released data on book challenges and bans, and I need to tell you about it because I genuinely cannot stop thinking about what these numbers mean. In 2024 alone, 1,247 unique titles were either challenged […]
Reading the AI Debate: The Best Books Published in 2025 That Actually Explain What Artificial Intelligence Is Doing to Society
Why This Moment Matters for Readers I need to tell you something that kept me up last night scrolling through publishing catalogs and year-end reading lists. There is a genuine crisis happening right now in how we understand artificial intelligence, and it is not the crisis Silicon Valley wants you to think about. According to […]
The Complicated Victory: What Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Win Really Means for American Literature
The Prize Nobody Expected (Or Did They?) I need to tell you about the feeling I had when I saw that Percival Everett’s James had won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It wasn’t pure joy. It was something more complicated, and I think that’s actually the point. Here was this book that had already […]
I Read All 6 Books on the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist So You Don’t Have To — Here’s My Unhinged Ranking
The Setup: Why I Did This to Myself Look, I know what you’re thinking. Six books in two months? That’s not a personality trait, that’s a cry for help. And you’re not entirely wrong. But when the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025 longlist official announcement dropped in March with sixteen titles, I found myself in […]