Adam Tooze: preference

Transcript context

…I give the exact same answer, by the way. What is your most unusual habit for how you absorb and process information? You read an enormous amount. What’s your trick? You mentioned Twitter early on. That’s been transformative for me. I’ve yet to figure out whether it enters into note-taking in any kind of conventional form, but the odd effect of that is that when I’m, for whatever reason, deprived of Twitter, I feel suddenly that I’m less motivated to read. [laughs] So sharing has become a key element in my reading, and the trying to figure out what the interesting thing is that I want to share is a very good way of focusing your mind on what the core — I read a piece, so what are the three sentences here I want to cut and paste? Which is the graph that is really telling? And how do I nuggetize that into whatever it is — 280 characters? I found that, at this stage of my life, I know this isn’t necessarily the best way to read complicated philosophy of history, which I also spent a lot of time doing at various points in my career. But from the point of view of parsing the flow of macroeconomic news, which I know we’re both kind of addicted to, this is a good way of doing it. It’s a bit like sharing slides back and forth amongst wonky friends. “Look at this graph. This is a really good one.” That has become, for me, that metabolic system of reading, and then reproducing and sharing has become a key motivator of consumption. It’s not just, as it were, production for its own sake. It’s actually a way of structuring how you consume. Here’s a question from a reader. Feel free to pass on it if you wish. “Your grandparents were nutritionists on top of everything else. Your grandmother wrote on the nutrition and health of the wives of coal miners. How did that affect your upbringing?”…

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