Neil Postman

The 40-year-old book that predicted today’s dystopian politics.

Neil Postman was a prophet of the new information era... When you read this book, you have to keep reminding yourself that he’s talking about television and Reagan, not the internet and Trump.

A brilliant scholar... [an] erudite, yet snappily titled treatise.

Few writers are prophetic. An American media studies professor called Neil Postman was... His great insight was that the way we entertain ourselves matters.

Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” at 40 is truer than ever.

It is hard to read [Postman's work] without feeling he is speaking specifically about us.

It's unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman.

Television, [Postman] wrote, had created a new “species” of information more properly described as disinformation... One trembles to think what [he] would have made of social media, which contains infinitely more creative forms to amuse ourselves.

Postman predicted that America wasn’t trending towards existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell’s 1984, but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that resembled Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. He was right. Democracy was not in danger of being overthrown, but over-entertained. 
 
If he were alive in 2025, Postman would not be surprised to see that our Soma comes in the virtual variety: TikTok's infinite scroll, crypto speculation and algorithmically tuned content streams designed to blur time and lull us into its flow state.

Postman was on to something important... Amusing Ourselves to Death charted the beginning of a process by which communication has become ever broader and ever shallower.

All I can say about Neil Postman’s brilliant Amusing Ourselves to Death is: Guilty As Charged.

I can’t think of a more prophetic, more thoughtful, more necessary – and yes, more entertaining – book about media culture.

VICTOR NAVASKY, author of The Art of Controversy

Postman's remarkably prescient argument was that television was fundamentally changing the way we think, forcing a move from a literate culture to a visual one in which entertainment was becoming more important than reason.

A book that was like putting on a new set of glasses. I consider its argument almost every day.

GAL BECKERMAN, author of The Quiet Before

A brilliant, powerful, and important book. This is an indictment that Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one.

As a fervent evangelist of the age of Hollywood, I publicly opposed Neil Postman’s dark picture of our media-saturated future. But time has proved Postman right. He accurately foresaw that the young would inherit a frantically all-consuming media culture of glitz, gossip, and greed.

CAMILLE PAGLIA, author of Free Women, Free Men

Public Discourse in the Age of the Screen

First published in 1985, Neil Postman’s groundbreaking polemic about the effects of television on our politics and public discourse has become a modern classic. With the rise of the infinite scroll, collapsing attention spans, dwindling literacy rates and the outsourcing of our cognitive abilities to AI, his ideas seem more prescient than ever. 
 
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands to what we now call the attention economy. With a brand-new foreword written by Jonathan Haidt, it is the definitive examination of how we are abandoning our ability to reason in the name of entertainment.

Neil Postman

Praise for Amusing Ourselves to Death

The 40-year-old book that predicted today’s dystopian politics.

Neil Postman was a prophet of the new information era... When you read this book, you have to keep reminding yourself that he’s talking about television and Reagan, not the internet and Trump.

A brilliant scholar... [an] erudite, yet snappily titled treatise.

The 40-year-old book that predicted today’s dystopian politics.

Neil Postman was a prophet of the new information era... When you read this book, you have to keep reminding yourself that he’s talking about television and Reagan, not the internet and Trump.

A brilliant scholar... [an] erudite, yet snappily titled treatise.

The 40-year-old book that predicted today’s dystopian politics.

Neil Postman was a prophet of the new information era... When you read this book, you have to keep reminding yourself that he’s talking about television and Reagan, not the internet and Trump.

A brilliant scholar... [an] erudite, yet snappily titled treatise.

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