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How to Think is a contrarian treatise on why we're not as good at considering as we assume - but how recovering this lost art work can save our interior lives from the chaos of modern life. As a famous cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper's, Alan Jacobs has put in his adult life owned by areas that often clash in America's culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that separate us - political, social, spiritual - Jacobs has discovered that many of our fiercest disputes take place not because we're doomed to be divided but because individuals included simply aren't considering. Most of us don't want to think, Jacobs writes. Thinking is trouble. Pondering can drive us out of familiar, comforting behaviors, and it can complicate our associations with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is gradual, and that's an issue when our behaviors of consuming information (typically online) leave us lost in the spin pattern of social mass media, partisan bickering, and confirmation bias. In this particular smart, endlessly entertaining book, Jacobs diagnoses the countless forces that act on us to avoid thinking - pushes which may have only worsened in the age of Twitter, "alternative facts", and information overload - and he also dispels the countless myths we keep about what this means to think well. (For example: It's impossible to "think for your self".) Drawing on resources as far-flung as novelist Marilynne Robinson, baseball legend Wilt Chamberlain, Uk philosopher John Stuart Mill, and Religious theologian C. S. Lewis, Jacobs digs into the nuts and bolts of the cognitive process, offering hope that each of us can reclaim our mental lives from the impediments that plague us all. Because if we can figure out how to think alongside one another, maybe we can figure out how to live alongside one another, too.
