It's Not Just You. Reading Is Harder.

Cal Newport, a Georgetown computer science professor, writes in The New York Times that our digital habits are triggering a cognitive crisis as serious as the mid-20th century heart disease epidemic.

The data is stark. Attention spans have collapsed to one-third of their 2004 levels. Basic reading and math struggles are rising.

Just as our bodies atrophied when modern life removed the need for physical labor, our minds are atrophying now that technology removes the need for hard thinking.

He draws parallels: Junk food = TikTok and Instagram. Sedentary lifestyle = constant phone access. Cardio = deep reading. The gym = deliberate contemplation.

The uncomfortable implication is that using AI to avoid a blank page isn't a productivity hack — it's skipping leg day, every day.

A cleaning service in Shenzhen, China, just showed up at someone's front door — and half the team was a robot.

The robot tidied shoes, cleared tables, picked up toys, folded duvets, cleaned a litter box, and even took out the trash on its way out. A human colleague handled the trickier stuff.

The three-hour session cost $10.70. That's about half what a human cleaner charges. Slots for the entire month of March sold out almost immediately.