I’ve been reading a lot of pieces lately on the virtue of unplugging. Of downgrading our devices and getting offline. A recent Washington Post article detailed a group of would-be neo-luddites experimenting with a Month Offline which included an oath, a makeshift lock box for your smartphone, and a TCL flip phone with a replacement phone number and T9 texting instructions. The irony wasn’t lost on me that I’d purchased the same phone last month in my own attempt to reshape my relationship with modern technology. The article in turn led me to August Lamm, an “anti-tech activist” who has almost 200,000 followers across Twitter, Instagram, and Substack. One of her most recent viral articles is about selling her laptop and committing to only using a computer at the public library.

These are all wonderful ideas. But they are also privileged and exclusionary.

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What I Read

I officially started my graduate certificate program in science communication, so now that I’m back in school, most of my reading is for class. I'm reading Ian Boyd’s Science and Politics along with essays and articles about the politicization of science and the scientization of politics. It’s fascinating but also mentally tiring. As a brain break, my fun reading has been pretty light this month. I picked up R.L. Stine’s latest installment in the House of Shivers series, The Last Sleepover, at the Library of Congress National Book Festival. I haven’t read the other books in this series yet, but I really enjoyed this one! Siblings Rory and Lily move into an old rundown home that their parents have spent months renovating and outfitting with all the latest technology, including a smart device called Mastermind that controls everything. But what happens when something sinister takes over Mastermind? Several years ago, Stine spoke about the challenges of writing scary stories in a modern world:

"You have to get rid of the phone when you’re writing the book. Everyone has a phone now and everyone can just call for help."

My middle grade WIP is a Black Mirror meets The Baby-sitters Club series, and the first book centers around a cell phone, so I found this advice a little discouraging. If The Last Sleepover is any indication, Stine has changed his tune and has leaned into the spooky stories we can tell with modern technology.

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