Dee’s Reviews > Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again > Status Update

When they sued him, he (Alex Jones, InfoWars/Youtube recommended his vids 15million times) admitted in court that the massacre was real and said he had been suffering from a form of psychosis when he denied it. This is just one of many insane claims he has made. Let’s compare that—what is the aggregate traffic of the NYT, the Washington Post, the Guardian? All that together is not close to 15 billion views.”

YouTube had recommended videos by Alex Jones and his website Infowars 15 billion x. Jones is a vicious conspiracy theorist who has claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was faked, and that the grieving parents are liars whose children never even existed. As a result, some of those parents have been inundated with death threats and have had to flee their homes. This is just one of many insane claims he has made.

This is the business model that built and sustains the sites on which we spend so much of our lives. The technical term for this system—coined by the brilliant Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff—is “surveillance capitalism.”

“ He said our attention is being deeply altered by huge invasive forces in the wider society. Saying the solution is primarily to personally abstain is just “pushing it back onto the individual,” he said, when “it’s really the environmental changes that will really make the difference.”

“If, by contrast, you expose yourself for hours a day to the disconnected fragments of shrieking and fury that dominate social media, your thoughts will start to be shaped like that. Your internal voices will become cruder, louder, less able to hear more tender and gentle thoughts. Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.”

“The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular when they are first articulated.”

“Many of the things we need to do are so obvious they are banal: slow down, do one thing at a time, sleep more. But even though at some level we all know them to be true, we are in fact moving in the opposite direction: toward more speed, more switching, less sleep. We live in a gap between what we know we should do and what we feel we can do.”

“During slow-wave sleep, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open up more and remove metabolic waste from your brain,” Roxanne explained to me. Every night, when you go to sleep, your brain is rinsed with a watery fluid. This ******cerebrospinal fluid****** washes through your brain, flushing out toxic proteins and carrying them down to your liver to get rid of them. ”

my “non-fiction November” pick ….