Recommendations you can check.
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman, 2006
Who uses, recommends or left Amusing Ourselves to Death, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.
4 people
Form limits function.
His 'Highly recommended things!' page — a five-star list he introduces as 'my favorite things in all the world', one line of his own commentary per item. The page carries no date; the earliest Internet Archive capture is 2011-05-25 and the page's own markup references an earlier /Links2007/ version.
2024-11-06·worrydream.com ↗
On his bookshelf, marked as substantially above average.
It's a little outdated, but still worth reading just to see how the world has, or hasn't, changed in the past 40 years.
His year-end post listing and reviewing every book and magazine he finished in 2025.
2025-12-26·arslan.io ↗
Everyone needs to read this book. The observations were made in a pre-internet era, and they’re 10x as relevant today. Nothing will do more to help cure your information addiction that the healthy dose of reality provided in these pages.
His book-notes index at nateliason.com/notes, where every book carries a star rating and his own one-line verdict; the index is undated (each book's own page prints only the date he finished reading it).
2020-02-07·nateliason.com ↗
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.