The Journal
What the research
actually says.
Essays on attention, phone use, sleep, mood, and disconnecting. Each piece grounded in peer-reviewed research and written in plain English.
Blue light is the least of it
A considered reading of the research on phones and sleep — the twelve-person study the blue-light story was built on, the expert panel that could not agree light matters at all, and why the effects keep shrinking whenever sleep is measured rather than remembered
The dopamine you've been sold
A considered reading of three decades of research on dopamine, reward, and the smartphone — what the popular hit-and-detox story gets backwards, what no human study has ever measured during a scroll, and the one direction of cause and effect that nobody is selling
The teen phone debate
A considered reading of fifteen years of research on smartphones, social media, and adolescent mental health — the Twenge–Haidt vs Orben–Przybylski disagreement, the natural experiments, the 2024 reckoning around The Anxious Generation, and the convergence the disaggregated literature has produced.
The case for going outside
Forty years of research on what nature does to a depleted mind. The directed-attention theory, the stress-recovery theory, the imaging work, the dose–response curve, and what the evidence actually supports — including the part most popular writing skips, which is what the phone has done to the conditions under which any of it occurs.
Why this exists
An independent, non-commercial project to read the research on attention, screens, and disconnecting, and say in plain English what it finds.
The evidence on disconnecting
A considered reading of fifteen years of research on phones, attention, sleep, mood, and what actually happens when you use a screen less. Where the evidence is strong, it is said so. Where it is weak, it is said so.
Your brain on boredom
The neuroscience of doing nothing. How the Default Mode Network works, what it does when you let it, and why a certain amount of boredom is not a failure state but a neurological necessity.
Vol. 01 · One email a month
The monthly essay.
One long-form piece of writing, one short summary of the research it draws on, on the first of the month. No commentary in between. Unsubscribe in one click.