Books And Blogging

by hilzoy

Naomi Baron has a rather silly op-ed in the LATimes. (Short version: now that students have Google, they don't have to read books. This threatens their ability to understand sustained arguments. Short answer: Baron is a professor. She can assign papers that require students to construct sustained arguments, and she can require drafts, which would let her tell the students exactly where they're falling short before the paper is due.)

What makes this interesting is that Kevin Drum and Jeanne d'Arc have similar responses to this piece. Kevin Drum:

"It's not just that I spend less time reading books, it's that I find my mind wandering when I do read. After a few paragraphs, or maybe a page or two, I'll run into a sentence that suddenly reminds me of something — and then spend the next minute staring into space thinking of something entirely unrelated to the book at hand. Eventually I snap back, but obviously this behavior reduces both my reading rate and my reading comprehension.

Is this really because of blogging? I don't know for sure, but it feels like it's related to blogging, and it's a real problem. As wonderful as blogs, magazines, and newspapers are, there's simply no way to really learn about a subject except by reading a book — and the less I do that, the less I understand about the broader, deeper issues that go beyond merely the outrage of the day."

Jeanne d'Arc:

"I find that the more I read online, the less I read off. I don't think it's even a matter of using up my reading time. It actually destroys brain cells or something, because if I've been doing too much online reading, I lose the patience for following a sustained or subtle argument, or reading a complex novel. One of my reasons for frequent blogging disappearances is recovery: I need to get away from the fast and facile and let my brain heal. It actually feels like recovering a bit of humanity that I forgot I had."

My experience is exactly the opposite of theirs.

As background, I read a lot: I always have, and I hope I always will. Luckily, reading books is actually part of my job, which is, for me, a truly wonderful state of affairs -- even better than the summer I worked in a bookstore. (The owner was very smart to hire me: I spent a large proportion of my salary in her store.) So my book-reading baseline is high. Fortunately, I also read very fast. And following sustained arguments is also part of my job, so it would be strange if blogging could seriously damage my capacity to follow them.

Reading blogs has led me to read books I wold not otherwise have read. Most obviously, there are books that I heard about on blogs and decided to pick up as a result. (For example, without blogs I would never have heard of The Economist's Tale, which is great.)

But besides that, there have been several times when I have encountered a blog post and thought: you know, I know nothing whatsoever about that topic, and I should; and then gone out and read up on it. For instance, a few weeks after Josh Marshall put House of Labor on TPM Cafe, I thought: how odd; I don't know anything at all about the history of the labor movement in the US. I should learn. And so, for the next few weeks, I read a bunch of books on labor history, thereby filling in a pretty big lacuna in my knowledge. (I have always assumed that part of Josh's motivation was to provoke this sort of effect. So Josh: in my case, it worked.)

However, I'm not sure whether reading and commenting on blogs has increased the number of books I read. That would depend on whether the books I have read as a result of reading blogs just substituted for other books I would have read instead. (And on the answers to such questions as: do 90 page GAO reports count?) But I am absolutely convinced that writing for Obsidian Wings has made me read more books than I did before.

First, as soon as I started writing, I became acutely aware of all sorts of things I really didn't know anything about. I don't think that bloggers need to be superhuman or omniscient or anything; a lot of the time, just indicating that you don't know something, or are unsure, will do. But I did think: other things being equal, it would be a good idea if I knew more about X, for many, many values of X. Then I would have a better and richer background, and more connections between different stories, and different areas of policy, would be clear to me. Moreover, I think that when, for whatever peculiar reason, people actually read what you write, you have an obligation to say things that are both true and in some way helpful, and I thought I was much more likely to do that if I knew more about, oh, debt crises and welfare policy and things like that.

I never really made a conscious decision to try to learn more about all the various Xs, but I did find that when I was shopping for books, I tended to gravitate a lot more towards books about my various areas of blogging-related ignorance than I had before. This meant, for starters, that policy-oriented books largely displaced fiction in my non-work-related reading. But it also meant that I read a lot more books than I had before.

Second, I have also always thought that every so often I should write what I think of as 'infoposts': posts in which I set myself the task of explaining something clearly. (Similarly, I think that every so often I should write posts about obscure countries that people in the US might not know a lot about.) Sometimes this is easy enough. Knowing about stem cells is part of my job, for instance, so it's easy for me to write on that. But sometimes it requires actual research. If I hadn't decided to write on Bush's record on nuclear non-proliferation before the election, I would never have read Graham Allison's Nuclear Terrorism. Likewise, I read up on methods of controlling epidemics before writing the quarantine post, and on avian flu before writing about that; in both cases, I read not just journal articles, but books.

The fun thing is that this is all stuff I'm interested in anyways. Blogging doesn't make me do things I don't want to do. But it does make a difference in which of the things I want to do I actually choose to do. Blogging has replaced a lot of more or less worthless things I used to do (watching Law and Order, for instance.) It has cut into some things I like: I birdwatch less than I did before. But it's all fun. And a lot of it involves reading books.

***

The books also matter because for me, blogging is a form of political action. I don't mean this in the obvious sense: asking people to write their Senators, or even arguing that people should vote for Kerry. I mean something more like: trying to help address deep-seated problems with our political lives.

(Note: what follows is a lot more reflective and explicit than I usually get about this. As a result, it will sound all pompous and silly, the way giving a detailed explanation of the unsuccessful joke you just tried to make does. Hearing such an explanation, someone might ask: good lord, do you actually think like that on a regular basis? No. Normally, I just pick up a book and think: you know, I should really know something about this, and read it, without going on and on about the theoretical underpinnings of what I'm doing. Also, this is the (normally unconscious) theory; I make no claims about my own practice.)

Anyways:

I have thought for a long time that it is one of our jobs, as citizens, to try to be informed about policy questions. Obviously, I don't think that everyone has to know everything, but I do think that it's our responsibility to try to understand enough that we can make something like an informed decision among candidates, and also that when we need to know about some specific point, we have enough background knowledge to figure out how to go about finding out more.

I also think that one of the real problems we face, as a democracy, is that there are not nearly enough people who do understand these things. And I don't think that this is because people don't take their civic responsibilities seriously. (Some don't, but that's nowhere near the whole of the problem.) It's very, very hard, even for a very conscientious person, to know enough about the various policy decisions politicians have to make to really understand what on earth those politicians are doing, and what we should make of their actions. Moreover, it's hard to figure out how to even start to understand policy questions, and the pros and cons of various options, and harder still if you don't have a fair amount of background against which to consider things.

(I think that part of the reason people decide who to vote for on the basis of personalities is just that understanding policy questions is difficult, whereas (for instance) understanding what's wrong with having an affair with Monica Lewinsky is easy. Everyone understands that. But pushing a change in some arcane Medicaid regulation can be not just vastly more damaging, but much more deeply cynical and treacherous, than any affair. It's just harder to see. But it's really important to know whether your representative is cynical and treacherous (or, alternately, a genuine hero on Medicaid.)

Likewise: isn't it obvious that the ideal solution to the influence of campaign contributions on politics is an informed citizenry, whose members would never make up their minds on the basis of TV ads, since they already knew more than any 60 second spot could convey? Before anyone tells me, of course I know that this will never happen. Nonetheless, I think that the more we know, the less influence advertising and money have, and any diminution of their influence, however tiny, is a good thing.)

Imagine what a difference it would make if most people actually understood the basic facts in the debate over Social Security; for instance; or the impact, over time, of running a sustained deficit; or the pros and cons of different proposals for prescription drug coverage. The quality of debate by politicians would have to go up, since we would not tolerate it at its present level. Politicians would also have to be more honest, since if they weren't, people would be more likely to notice. Policies that are obviously crazy would not be proposed, because everyone would laugh at them.

Obviously, everyone is not going to take the time to learn this stuff. But I don't think it's necessary that everyone understand things like this in order for our political lives to be improved. The more people who have some basic understanding of these debates, even if they don't understand all their twists and turns, the better. And the more knowledge each of those people has, the better. Every little bit helps.

Blogs can obviously help a lot with this. People with real expertise are blogging -- Brad DeLong and others on economics, and Mark Kleiman on drug policy, for instance. They can make complicated problems a lot more accessible, and even entertaining. Moreover, it's amazing how much background knowledge about an issue you can pick up by reading a blog by someone who knows about that issue and discusses it. And the more background you have in these questions, the easier it is to expand your knowledge. It's hard to think about some huge daunting unknown thing like "all of economics" or "health policy" and figure out how to learn about it. Where would you even begin? It's a lot easier to fill in little bits here and there once you've got a basic outline in place.

Moreover, while I am a wonky person myself, I realize that reading GAO reports is not everyone's cup of tea. But while picking up a nice fat study of crime control in inner cities strikes dismay into the hearts of most people, a lot of people actually enjoy reading blogs. This is partly because a lot of them are well-written and funny, but it's also because bloggers and commenters are actual people, and therefore blogs can engage people who do not take well to reading whole books about the ozone treaty, but who do enjoy dealing with, and coming to understand, actual people.

Similarly, one of the great things about blogs, I think, is that they allow you to decide who you trust. For whatever reason, personalities come through a lot more clearly in blogs than in, say, op-ed pieces. Moreover, it's easy to keep track of who said what when, and to assess people's reliability that way. And if you have decided who you think is trustworthy and who is not (where thinking someone is trustworthy does not mean you agree with them, just that you take that person to be honest, and what they say to be worth taking seriously), you know how to take those people's arguments as well. And that's invaluable when you're trying to figure out an issue: it certainly beats working through all the arguments anyone has ever put forward.

(Knowing who you think is basically trustworthy and who is not is especially useful when it comes to putting things in context: saying things like: this proposal comes from X, who has not said anything serious in decades, or: it comes from Y, who would never have made it without really thinking things through. And that's both essential information to have, and very hard to get unless you have either first-hand knowledge of the people in question or a trustworthy source.)

So blogs have always seemed to me to be one (partial) solution to this problem of ignorance about policy. It's not a solution for everyone, obviously: not everyone is the sort of person who reads blogs with pleasure. But it is a solution for some people, and it's especially good since (a) reading blogs is fun, and (b) it engages the side of people that likes following not just abstract arguments, but individual people. Moreover, blogs don't have to be a solution for everyone, since (it seems to me) any increase in the number of people who are conversant with real policy issues helps our democracy as a whole.

When I started writing for ObWi, one of my first thoughts was: I have to at least try, however unsuccessfully, to contribute something, however minor, to this fascinating ongoing experiment. This wasn't because I thought that I could have a huge effect on, well, anything. I didn't think that. It's because I thought: any effect I have, however small, should be for good. I do not want to add even a tiny bit to the mass of falsehood and distortion that people have to wade through when they're trying to figure things out. I do want to try to make things easier for people, in however small a way. Especially since, as I said, I think that this particular problem is the sort that will be solved, if at all, by a nearly infinite number of tiny steps, not by some one big "solution".

But if you take this view of democracy and blogs, and someone asks you to join a blog, then you have to think that all the reasons for reading books for background just got a lot stronger. According to me, if I'm going to do this at all, I had better be informed, since it would be worse to spread falsehood and darken counsel than to say nothing at all. For me, at least, it's hard to be informed about something just by reading newspapers, or even magazine articles. (If Kevin is in fact reading fewer books, it doesn't seem to have affected him the way it would me -- I am often amazed at how quickly he manages to say something really interesting and informative about an issue. All I know is that I couldn't do it without reading more books.) Moreover, informing myself is doing my job as a citizen; blogging just helps me to do it better.

So I think: for me, delightfully enough, there's a version of political activism (in the broadest, non-partisan sense) that actually involves reading books. And honestly, how cool is that?

Comments

[john miller]

As a reader of, not creator of or poster on, blogs, I find an additonal plus.

I have always been an ecletic reader, including most genres of fiction, as well as a wide variety of non-fiction. Among my favorite categories have been religion, politics and history.

Since I have started reading blogs, and occasionally throwing in my tow cents worth, I have found that my critical approach to reading has increased, particularly in the non-fiction area.

One of the things that has drawn me to this particular site si the variance of opinion. I may disagree with Charles frequently, but I do find him trustworthy, in that I believe he really has a sincere commitment to his views and is not just trying to make sure he follows the latest talking points. (Others may disagree with me).

I adore you Hilzoy, although I am not currently in the market for a wife. And I also consider you trustworthy, although I may on a rare occasion disagree with you as well.

My point is, that in reading blogs which present a variety of views, or readig different blogs that are fairly one sided, but reading both sides, when I read a book on, say, the current state of religion in the United States, I am better prepared to look at the arguements presented with a more critical eye.

I will find myself reading something and suddenly stop (perhaps like Kevin) and think about something I read here or at Kos or at Red State.

Although it may slow me down, it does enrich the reading process a great deal.

[Bruce Baugh]

Good stuff, Hilzoy. I agree.

I also note a not-directly-related-to-blogging shift in my reading habits: these days I listen to more unabridged readings of big books (fiction and non-fiction alike) than I read. This is because of my iPod and my back problems. I often do better moving around gently on a walk or chores and getting the book that way than trying to sit still for extended periods. I still need the print for maps, footnotes, and the like, of course, a good reading gives me a lot.

[nous_athanatos]

As a Literature and New Media critic it is my decided opinion that Baron and Drum's pieces are smack dab in the center of the "Why the Internet is Destroying Literature" genre -- to be placed opposite the "Our Students Have Social Computer Literacy" genre where the two sides can glower at each other in suspicion and the rest of us can ignore them and go on with the business of processing information in whatever form we can find.

All that has really changed is that those of us with regular internet access have gone from having more limited access to informtion sources on any given topic (book store, local libraries, friends and associates) to having convenient and near immediate access to a vastly expanded body of information. I spend less time reading a particular book because I have access to more sources and can find one that fits my interests and requirements much more closely. I also have tools which allow me to locate the useful information much more quickly via database searches.

Does this affect my reading habits? Yes. Does it affect my comprehension? No. I just do not have to spend the same amount of time looking for a particular piece of information.

What all this translates to with my students is that I spend a lot more time teaching them to evaluate sources and find ways to get a quick understanding of a particular topic and locate the most relevant sources so that they can spend more time on those works and less time going through books and journal articles hoping to find something useful. The underlying process of critical reading and writing has not changed much at all.

[bob mcmanus]

1) I seem to have lost the ability to read light fiction. I get 100-200 pages into a mystery or horror novel, and set them down and never pick them up again. I have a half-dozen unfinished and laying around.

2) I have become more comfortable reading off a computer screen. Maybe I need new glasses, but just the physicality of not having my hands free, the weight in my lap, the need to turn pages, the different focusing distance, the sitting posture, adjusting the light...I have just become habituated to using a computer.

3) Lord knows there is enough available online. Last week when the HBO Rome series ended I read Caesar and 6 books in the Osprey military series. I don't read the latest and hottest non-fiction the rest of the blogophere does, but the gist will filter down eventually, and I can't deny an irrational prejudice for older stuff. Although I keep looking at Questia.

4) Data isn't knowledge, quantity never becomes quality, and reading is not a substitute for thinking. 300 Chess books and never made Expert.

[lily]

I used to believe that computer literature could not possibly replace books because one cannot read a computer while in the bathtub. However my boyfriend does read his laptop from the hot tub, so I guess I was wrong.

[Mo MacArbie]

I find myself more towards Kevin Drum's end of the spectrum. Perhaps it's that I read primarily for entertainment, even if I do like thick history books. As a consequence I read fairly lightly and would probably fail a quiz on the book when I finish it. Perhaps my mind is one of the flightier ones to begin with.

That said, I do feel a conscious need to step away from the computer and spend some time chewing on something more substantial than blogs. It's been slow going restoring to my mind the ability to read something big and boring. Fiction has helped as a sort of halfway house.

[King of Pants]

You're deliberately misunderstanding the argument. Kevin and Jeanne are wondering if blogging harms attention spans, not whether or not people don't read books.

[DaveM]

I haven't found that computers cut down significantly on my reading; an infant and a toddler did that all on their own. I'll have to wait a few years before I can answer whether my reduced ability to follow sustained arguments is kid-related exhaustion or computer-related brain atrophy.

Your timing though, Hilzoy, is spot on. Yesterday, I read Drum's peice and glanced at Jeanne's. Eventually, after wandering over to ObWi, I found myself thinking, "Hilzoy is an academic who also blogs, I wander what her take is on this issue?" And lo and behold, here it is.

[trilobite]

Personally, I read almost as many books as ever, having sacrificed such ephemera as sleep and a social life to keep up with that datastream. YMMV.

re, Kevin Drum, my observation is that most people a few years into their career (i.e., prime political blogger age) read fewer books, because a) they have less time, b) they have kids, and/or c) they've read the basics already.

re Jeanne d'Arc, some might view being struck by a thought mid-book and feeling compelled to stop and follow it through a feature, not a bug. This is what books are supposed to do, though we have lost track of this fact in a world where books are, too often, things you have to take a test on.

[Jake - but not that one]

Reading blogs - reading anything online - develops TOS (TOS is a euphemism for banned profanity - just apply whichever profanity you might use were you the author) detectors in regular readers. Watching the debates go back and forth, seeing which arguments hold water and which are leaky buckets is an education all its own. That is, if you read where the debate is honest and muscular. Like here.

I don't know that reading blogs reduces the ability to follow long arguments (argument as a statement of position or thesis). Most books are far longer than necesary to make the important points contained within. Blog posts and comments tend to be pithy - and not well footnoted. Usually, someone gets the footnotes out there.

Somebody proposed, or quoted, a truly interesting idea the other day. It might have been hilzoy, or it might have been some other place on the net, I simply don't recall. The heart of the idea is that the left, in it's embrace of intellectual honesty and open discussion, actually prepares the ground for takeover by the radical right. Lies, told convincingly by the powerful, have their own unequivocal power. Intellectual honesty takes the back seat until the inevitable fall.

As McCain's Chief of Staff said of Norquist, the radical right truly believes the truth is for suckers. Which is what brings me back to this discussion - the left blogosphere is filled with discussion that educates the TOS detectors in the readership. A book couldn't offer that kind of educaton. It takes a free flow of ideas and passionate speakers. Where else can modern human beings get that kind of exposure, except here?

When I think of the quality of debate that attended the framing of our constitution and the bill of rights, I think that the so called left of today is the true child of the American revolution. The radical right would have all been Tory sympathizers. And their children wouldn't have served then either. The British troops were supposed to do the dirty work. (I just made that last part up - I don't know if it's true or not - it sounds good :) )

Jake

[judson]

My reading habits haven't changed much, a book a week, and I'm online 8 hrs a day. Books are one thing and blogs are another and movies yet another, radio, tv, conversation etc. What the internet has displaced is the library. As affects attention span I think it depends on the age at which you were introduced to the digital method.

[Nell]

Just curious; which books did you read on labor history?

[Alopex Lagopus]

I'm sure this is a good post, but my mind started wandering at about the fifth paragraph and I just had to break to research some digital cameras...

[hilzoy]

Nell: Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism 1945-1968; Robert Zeiger and Gilbert Gall, American Workers, American Unions; Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union; Michael D. Yates, Why Unions Matter; Julian Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin: Left Out: reds and America's Industrial Unions. Alas, I bogged down before I read Paul Buhle: Taking Care of Business.

[DaveC]

hilzoy, do you ever sleep? you smart people are making the rest of us look bad. why don't you look into that new Xbox :)

[hilzoy]

DaveC; you've found out my secret: no X-box. My brother had something that might have been an X-box, and I played it once, but skiing through that Mad Max urban landscape just made me seasick. In an addictive sort of way.

[Fraser]

I have a "monkey mind" problem, but it has nothing to do with blog reading.

Jake, while some books are longer than necessary, most of the ones I read aren't. Exceptions being those where I simply don't care to learn a whole book's worth of information about the topic, but only discover that midway through (which I consider a matter of taste, not bad writing). And yes, I think a good book can also improve one's bull-detectors. Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers, for instance, has a lot to say about secularism in American society that I hadn't heard before.

[Jake - but not that one]

Fraser, I think of it as building a neural network. It takes training to make it work. You can train it slow, or you can train it fast. Seeing as most people in America don't read books at all (I am not sure of that fact - we have conflicting evidence - I think it can safely be said that few Americans read thoughtful books - at least more thoughtful than, say, 7 Habits, or Chicken Soup) whereas blog reading increases every year, it is most likely that neural net training will occur, if it does at all, with blogs, not books. You'd have to read a LOT of books to get the quality of bs training that a few weeks of blog reading will provide. Except, of course, if you read only radical right blogs. Then you will get training, but such training could better be described as "conditioning".

Jake

[Tewny Blah]

I find that wrapping my head in tin foil while reading blogs dramatically reduces stray electromagnetic interferences generated by the electronics, improving my overall mental abilities. The book: The Body Electric, Robert O. Becker.

[Frank]

Jake bnto- I am a counter-example of your thesis. I used to be a libertarian, then after 9-11 I started reading war-blogs.

Personally I think anyone thoughtful who reads Tacitus generally, or Charles Bird specificly, will end up a rabid Democrat.

[dr ngo]

I'm with the original complainants: as I read more blogs, I read fewer books. (And as my students become more at one with the Internet, they become more strangers to the library.)

The fact that Hilzoy's experience is otherwise proves yet again, if any proof were needed, that she is of a species superior to the rest of us.

Long may she bless us with her radiant (and well-informed) presence.

[Anarch]

I find myself increasingly illiterate, but I honestly can't tell if that's from the blogging or, more likely, the grad school. It's actually got to the point where I have to force myself to crack one of my favorite books each month -- no matter how hard or easy a read -- just to prevent myself from losing what little grasp of English I still possess.

[Jackmormon]

Anarch,
I'm also supposed to be a grad student at a good school. I advocate for sane-making, in decreasing shots of severity: 1) good narrative history (memoires, overviews, letters), 2) contemporary literature (the good stuff, have I mentioned Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black>?), 3) genre fiction: go on, gorge yourself; it keeps your soul alive.

Yeah, before #1, you're supposed to do your work, and between all the sane-making you're supposed to keep track of the world and the progression of culture. I'm working on the sane-making, myself, for now.

[Jackmormon]

Did that kill the blue?

[Roxanne]

My experience is much closer to yours, hilzoy. Then again, I'm not an echo-boomer who grew up in front of a computer screen.

[dutchmarbel]

I read blogs instead of watching tv. I read about as many books (finally, having small children made a hugh dent in the habit) but I find myself reading more non-fiction books than I used to, 'cause they are recommended or are about a specific topic that interests me.

More fiction books too actually, after recommendations online: I bought The Phone Tollbooth because everybody here was so enthousiastic and both me and spouse loved it ;) (I buy lots of books for my kids, in eager anticipation of their fun whilst reading them).

[Gary Farber]

Mindreading Hilzoy: "You're deliberately misunderstanding the argument."

How many fingers am I holding up?

"re, Kevin Drum, my observation is that most people a few years into their career (i.e., prime political blogger age) read fewer books, because a) they have less time, b) they have kids, and/or c) they've read the basics already."

A and B make perfect sense to me. C makes absolutely no sense to me unless we assume that the person(s) under discussion have little interest in any knowledge or experience other than in a specific (professional?) field, and has absolutely no concept of "reading for pleasure." (Otherwise I'm pondering the concept of a given set of books that contain "the basics" on life, the universe, and everything; oh, wait: 42.)

I do watch a fair amount of tv, and play quite a lot of computer games (note to Hilzoy: "games" and simulation/"entertainment" software are an even more sweeping set of variant presentational formats and genres than "books," or "movies" or "music"; imagine generalizing about what "books" are like from a single, solitary, example, please).

I do read a great many fewer books than before I had regular online access, but my information, and text, intake has only gone up, not down. When one still spends about 9/10ths of one's day, every day, reading, all one's life, I really don't think that whether it's in a trade paperback, hardcover, pocket sized, magazine, manuscript, proofs, scholoarly journal, or via SMTP or NNTP, or any other trivial matter of format or delivery system, matters greatly in terms of overall benefit.

I have had other changes in reading habits, at times, over my life, but not related to what's previously been discussed here. They've tended to be things like experiencing some periodic burnouts in reading science fiction after my early years of fanaticism, and to having established the pattern in my life in some decades of being paid to do a lot reading in my favorite areas of interest, which did also have a distinct effect on what I could or desired to read for pleasure. (Working in publishing, at least fulltime, tends to significantly affect the way people approach reading-for-pleasure and time-allocation, albeit often in somewhat different ways, ranging from whether or not you can shut off, or turn down, the editorial voice in your head, to your concerns about spending time on non-work-related reading, to how slowly you read for pleasure versus speed up to get the job done, to how sensitive you are to cliches and writing problems, to other thangs that would enable me to close this sentence; and, of course, one's professional interests always affect, one way or another, one's reading for pleasure.)

[Gary Farber]

"I bought The Phone Tollbooth "

I'm guessing "The Phantom Tollboth," but I could be wrong. (This is not an attempt at correction; this is an attempt at clarification.)

"...wrapping my head in tin foil while reading blogs dramatically reduces stray electromagnetic interferences...."

Check out the skience linked here.

[dutchmarbel]

Ah, tnxs Gary, I was busy with too many things when I wrote the post :)
I am working my way through some old Dr. Who eps with my kids, I think that is where the Phone came from ;)