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Experts pick Toyama's Saburomaru at No. 1 for its hands-on experience

• Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

• The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature.

• People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.

• that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text. Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

• Reading is more than a skill, or one mode of communication among many. The media we use to interact with one another shape the world we inhabit. Early humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.

• Going to prison meant many things: an immediate loss of freedom, bruising reputational damage and powerlessness over how it would affect my family. It also meant that for the first time in the decade and a half since I first got a smartphone, I’d be forced to disconnect.

• At the prison, one of the first things I saw was a poster warning inmates and their visitors against—and threatening punishment for—bringing contraband, including phones, onto the compound.

• Soon, I’d see inmates unveil smartphones all around me. The economy inside prisons is an incredible testament to the power of capitalism, and how creatively goods will flow to those who want them, so long as the buyer can make it worth it for the seller.

• Being caught with a phone was the most frequent reason that inmates at my prison were sent to the Special Housing Unit—also commonly called the hole—where prisoners could be kept for 23 hours a day in a small cell.

• In the evenings—when there were fewer guards around and their patrols were more predictable—my housing unit was filled with the sounds of men sharing the latest prison gossip with their wives and girlfriends, asking their children what they did at school that day and checking in on aging parents.

• Still, part of the demand was the unappealing conditions of the alternative: the prison phone room.

• The connection was frequently lousy, and every five minutes, an automated voice would interrupt to announce “This call is from a federal prison”—as though either party on the line needed reminding.

• At first I thought it was a function of wide-open days unfurling before me. I had gone from a high-intensity profession, a full family and social life and various volunteer commitments—all frenetically coordinated through my smartphone—to the unstructured rhythms of prison.

• As winter gave way to spring, I tracked the almost hourly change in blossoming trees beyond the fences, grateful to see the physical manifestation of new beginnings. I discussed and debated life’s big questions and foundational topics with my celly: the complication of family dynamics, our greatest fears and regrets, our deepest longings for the future. I wrote poetry—something I’d never done before (or since).

• But within just a few months, I’d reverted to my old habits—immediately glancing at and engaging with every ping and alert, and reflexively picking up my phone to scroll through my rotation of go-to websites. It’s an irony I’m still grappling with: That a kind of freedom I learned in prison, I couldn’t manage to bring back home with me.

• nothing of significance in life is achieved alone. To do great things, we rely on teammates. And to win, team leaders must find ways to draw the best physical, mental, and emotional performance from the players working with them.

• Leadership comes down to two things: Do you care about your teammates and their role on the team? And do you care about winning, which is what you’re ultimately trying to do together? Leadership requires trust, and trust usually comes from deeply caring about one another and the belief that winning is about the team. You must feel passionate about both.

• re’s an old saying in sports: Do you want to be a star, or do you want to be a champion? At Michigan, I was focused on our team goals—on winning games and championships for our school, and on being a great teammate rather than achieving individual goals. That attitude stayed with me throughout my NFL career.

• Some players take all the credit when things go right, but when things go wrong, they make excuses and place the blame on everyone else, including referees, teammates, and coaches. They focus too much on individual statistics or records or awards. They are self-serving, and their teammates recognize it. When I see players like that, who seem to care more about themselves than the team, I can also see how that makes the people around them less motivated to give their best effort.

• Put the team first, always, even when facing personal adversity.

• Show appreciation for unsung colleagues.

• Michigan has an awesome tradition: In the locker room after a win, the captains stand on chairs and lead the team in singing the fight song. I was crushed that I hadn’t played in the second half, but I stood up on that chair and I screamed those lyrics out as loud as I could. I’m sure people knew I was disappointed, but I wanted to show everyone that I supported Drew and the team.

• making a habit of giving credit to players in those underappreciated roles—not just because they deserved it but also to point out to others that no player should go unnoticed.

• Good team leaders go further and find ways of recognizing those who don’t play on the field yet support us in less visible ways. Football teams have big support staffs—trainers, the people who prepare our meals and clean the locker room and wash our uniforms, among others. I found that a simple high five or word of appreciation means so much. To be a great team, everyone needs to feel valued—and it’s up to the leaders of the team to make sure that happens.

• Set the standard and create a culture of 100% effort.

• I remember practices where the coach would tell us we needed to run 20 wind sprints, each under seven seconds, with a 30-second break after each one. I’d stand up and say, “No, guys, we’re doing 24 sprints, six seconds each, with 15-second breaks in between.” (Remember, I was the slowest guy on the team.) Some of the players would start arguing and yelling. I’d tell them: “I don’t give a f— what the coach says.” We needed to work harder because it mattered to us, not just give enough effort to satisfy the coach.

• I wish I had a foolproof method for going into any situation where a player is giving 70% and finding a way to squeeze out that remaining 30%. I’m not sure I ever was able to do that. But by modeling team-focused behavior and creating higher expectations and accountability, I could reliably get another 5% or 10% out of players—and that often made a big difference.

• when people give me tough love and tell me the truth, it’s often the best sign that they really care about me.

• Recognize teammates’ individual psychology and the best ways to motivate them.

• Every NFL player is unique. Some are motivated by money and contracts. Some are motivated by recognition, like making the All-Pro team. Some are motivated by what the media is writing about them. Some are motivated by winning championships, while others are just trying to avoid losing their job. Great leaders recognize these things instinctively and are able to find each person’s motivational levers. It’s almost like love languages—the idea that different people express and receive love differently in relationships—and it’s an essential skill that leaders must learn.

• Understand and complement the style of the formal leader.

• In his leadership style, Coach Belichick never got too close to his players. He wasn’t one to mingle and form personal relationships with players or coaches, because it’s difficult to do that when you know you’ll have to trade, cut, or fire most of them at some point down the road. So I often took the opposite approach: I tried to get to know my teammates deeply and show that I cared about them personally. I asked about their families and the things going on in their lives off the field. I made it clear that if we connected as teammates, they’d be my teammates for life, and I’ve tried to live up to that. My relationships are the most important thing in my life.

• Recognize and counteract the external forces that can cause selfish behavior.

• Create opportunities to connect as people outside the office.

• The same is probably true for corporate employees—they have a spouse or parents asking when they’re going to get promoted, or if they got the raise they deserved. We all have vulnerabilities that can make us act in more self-centered ways, and everybody is surrounded by people who can either amplify those instincts or help manage them. Team leaders must recognize outside pressures and continually reinforce the team-first message.

• Some people criticize corporate offsites or team-building events as wasteful junkets. That is enormously short-sighted. Leadership is about improving the quality of teammates’ relationships and building trust, and that comes from shared experiences. Those experiences should not be limited to the office—in fact, they often deepen more easily away from work.

• People focus on the physical attributes and skills that we as athletes brought to competition, but so much of our success was built on our emotions and how they helped us perform better. The more we were interested in and concerned about one another as teammates, and didn’t want to let one another down, the more motivated we were to do our absolute best, every day.

• The emotions and behaviors that define individuals are formed early.

• My experience working with hundreds of teammates has taught me that the core behaviors that make any of us a good teammate—unselfishness, discipline, humility—are wired into us when we’re very young.

• Leaders work within a system.

• “people, processes, and protocols.”

• When football fans look back on the Patriots’ success from 2001 to 2019, they spend a lot of energy trying to divide up the credit. Who was responsible for it? Was it the coach? The owner? The quarterback? The truth is that we won championships because of all three of us—along with dozens of other contributing factors.

• The Japanese author, now in his seventies, has come to embody both the romance and futility of literary yearning, not unlike his own protagonists who drift through dreamscapes in search of meaning, cats, or lost love. So, the question lingers: why hasn’t one of the most read, translated, and loved writers alive ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature?

• Perhaps it’s because Murakami’s rebellion is too inward, his women too unreal, or his sadness too seductive. His greatest strengths as an author – the ability to make the ordinary shimmer with strangeness, to romanticise solitude until it glows – may also be what keep him at the Nobel’s margins.

• Few writers can make boiling spaghetti or a walk on a sunny morning feel like revelation. Murakami transforms the banal into the mystical, giving loneliness its own vocabulary. His novels capture the modern ache, the quiet sorrow of existing in a detached, emotionally barren world. And yet, the very emotional texture that enchants readers is also what alienates the prize committees.

• Murakami’s universe, for all its beauty, is steeped in the male gaze. His women are often vessels for male longing: Ethereal, sexual, sometimes disappearing without explanation. They are dreamed more than lived, existing mainly to haunt, heal or catalyse a protagonist’s journey. Even when they speak, they are filtered through the eyes of men who desire or often misunderstand them. It isn’t malice, but habit; a kind of quiet, unexamined gaze that feels increasingly out of step with how literature now engages with gender and representation.

• His novels are sensual, but the sensuality often slips into objectification, turning women’s bodies into metaphors for male emptiness. As the world demands more nuanced portrayals, Murakami’s women can feel like artefacts of an older sensibility – haunting, but hollow.

• Then there is the issue of narrative passivity or detachment. His narrators are too emotionally numb to rage, too passive to rebel; they drift, observe and internalise. His absurd settings (Sputnik Sweetheart, Birthday Girl) blur the line between the real and the surreal, ending in silence and ambiguity. Readers linger, re-read, and find comfort in the unresolved. While hypnotic, his works are inward-looking, subjective, and deliberately evasive. His stakes are emotional or metaphysical, rarely moral.

• Murakami’s books feel so intimate. He doesn’t demand belief; he invites reflection. His books aren’t about answers but atmospheres; learning to live with emptiness, finding beauty in repetition, sitting still with longing, and sometimes not looking for answers.

• If the Nobel celebrates global conscience, Murakami writes about global solitude. And solitude, as every reader knows, rarely gets a standing ovation.

After the First World War, traumatized soldiers were often prescribed a course of reading.

• First, commission well. George R.R. Martin once said the job of editors is to “clip the wings” of writers, and “tell them in which direction to fly”. When it comes to LLMs, that means giving clear instructions about exactly what you want, and asking them to refine their output as many times as necessary.

• Second, pay attention to detail. AI writers will make mistakes and offer phrases that sound good but mean nothing. They like to lavish their prose with Latinate words, talking about the “bi-directional flow” and how to “expedite grid enhancements”; remind them that Anglo-Saxon words are often punchier. They like clichéd metaphors: there are lots of “Achilles’ heels”. And AI tends to use the “rule of three” far more than humans. The Economist also likes this rhetorical trick. But whereas we try to group three sensible bits of advice, AI offers such redundant sentences as: “The mystery has been solved—not partially, not ambiguously, but definitively.” Such lines should be cut—definitively.

• Finally, know your audience. The editor is an intermediary between writer and reader. llms are sycophants and their smarmy tone is often off-key. If you are writing an email to break some bad news to your boss, tell your bot to skip the exclamation marks. ai can be pretentious or pontificating (it was trained on human writing, after all). Most people are short of time, but a verbose ai pins you to the wall like a bore at a party.

• that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do

• Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

• I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.

• Literate people read fiction.

• Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable.

• People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

• The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

• I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.

• Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

• And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.

• Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

• Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

• Another way to destroy a child’s love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books.

• I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

• Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today.

• According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the “only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account”.

• Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

• I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have obligations. I thought I’d try and spell out some of these obligations here.

• I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

• We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

• We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

• One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading.

• We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

• I’m going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It’s this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

• Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” He understood the value of reading, and of imagining.

The brand conceives of itself as a distribution system for utopian values as much as a clothing company. Can it become the world’s biggest clothing manufacturer?