Textbook Sleep

In the beginning was the word. But we couldn’t remember the word, because we couldn’t write it down. Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast that reads aloud boring, public-domain textbooks to put you to sleep. Tonight’s textbook examines the mysteries of how things work, and how they came to be. Including writing. In fact, it leads with writing as the invention that mad...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast that reads aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. What a treat we have for you tonight. While in Textbook Sleep #11 we delved into the theory of accounting, now we get even more specific, more dull, more brain numbing. Who knows what the “voucher system” is? I don’t, and I doubt you do, either. Fortunately, y...

Have you ever eaten the king of nuts, the budded or grafted paper shell pecan? That’s the grabber introductory sentence of a sales letter in Business English by Rose Buhlig of Tilden High School in Chicago, published in 1914. You will not hear me read it, as you will be already sawing logs. But I wanted to give you a little sample of the supreme soporificness of tonight’s lesson on writing. Welcom...

Business English is just like English English, only more twisted and tortured and obfuscatory. If you’re good at it. Fortunately for our purposes, it is also—almost without exception—incredibly boring. Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast that reads aloud boring public domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. Tonight’s textbook, from 1914, is Business English by Rose...

Have you ever had a hankering to learn about the Codling Moth? The Cankerworm? The Hessian Fly? Of course not. They are not only deadly to crops, they are deadly boring. In other words, perfect subjects for Textbook Sleep , the podcast that reads aloud boring public domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. It has come to my attention that some listeners play Textbook Sleep while doing chores, as...

Welcome to another episode of Textbook Sleep , the podcast that reads aloud boring public domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. My voice is also boring. When I speak to people on the phone, it’s not unusual that I hear snoring and have to hang up. Tonight we read again from Agriculture for Beginners , by Burkett, Stevens and Hill, first published in 1903. We’ll be hearing about hotbeds, Cold-F...

Welcome to another episode of Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid. We read aloud boring public domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. This time we’ll be exploring Agriculture for Beginners , by Burkett, Stevens and Hill, first published in 1903. Today, few of us work in agriculture, the profession that keeps us alive and yet we take for granted. The information contained herein may...

Textbook Sleep, the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast, combs the planet to find the most boring public domain textbooks to read aloud to help you fall asleep. Tonight we continue with one of our greatest discoveries: A History of Experimental Psychology by Professor Edwin Boring. In 1950, it sold 16,765 copies, an indication to me that 16,765 people were trying to self-medicate their sleeplessnes...

Well, we have hit the mother load of boring textbooks to read from: A History of Experimental Psychology by—wait for it—Edwin G. Boring, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. You would have thought that this poor man would have tried to overcompensate for his family name with lively writing on a subject others might find interesting. But no. Boring is boring, at least to me, and I hope yo...

The Machinery of the Universe . Hang on, that actually sounds interesting! Not to worry—it’s not. It’s physics, but with an interesting title—academic bait and switch. But for the purposes of Textbook Sleep, the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast, this 1915 public-domain book by A. E. Dolbear, A.B., A.M., M.E., Ph. D., Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Tufts College, is just right for settling...

Welcome back to Textbook Sleep, the Maximum Strength, aural sleep aid, in which I read from soporific public domain textbooks. Subjects that once put you to sleep in the classroom or library, now putting you to sleep in bed. On tonight’s syllabus we’ll listen to another chapter of General Science by Dr. Bertha M. Clark, this time on fermentation. Like few subjects, fermentation foments sleep. It w...

Hello and welcome to another episode of Textbook Sleep , the non-prescription yet habit-forming Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid. Time-released every Wednesday night at 8:30 Eastern Time. Tonight we continue to read from General Science by Bertha M. Clark, Ph. D. Dr. Clark was the Head of the Science Department at the William Penn High School for Girls in Philadelphia. The school opened in 1909, went co...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep, the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where I read extremely boring public-domain textbooks to help people fall asleep. We continue with General Science by Bertha M. Clark, Ph. D. Specifically, we’ll hear what Dr. Clark has to say about photography, or I will anyway—you’ll be lulled to sleep, hearing me speak of movable convex lenses, sodium thiosulphite, and sensitive plates...

Water is important. Don’t take my word for it, take that of Bertha M. Clark, Ph. D., Head of the Science Department at the William Penn High School for Girls in Philadelphia. She made this claim in General Science in 1912, and I see no reason to question whether it is not just as true today. We are constantly being told to drink glass after glass of water and many carry a large container of water...

Most of us have probably not given much thought to the “mingling of molecules.” For good reason: It’s stunningly boring, no matter how important it may be to our daily lives. Fortunately for us, Carleton W. Washburne wrote an entire chapter on it in his Common Science textbook in 1921, and it’s been waiting 104 years to lull us to sleep. It was meant for high schoolers and yet I suspect you will n...

Textbook Sleep, the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast, asks, “what could possibly be duller than a Text-Book of Biology by H.G. Wells? Specifically, the chapter on the biology of a rabbit? Yes, that H.G. Wells—the guy who wrote The War of the Worlds , The Time Machine , and The Island of Doctor Moreau . He was also a biologist. And wrote an entire textbook on the subject. To me, it’s a little les...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid. Tonight’s reading will rapidly render you unconscious. It’s Organic Chemistry , a textbook from 1894 by W.H. Perkin and F. Stanley Kipping. Some find “Orgo” to be a fascinating pathway to a rewarding career, but most of us consider it a subject to be avoided at all costs. There’s no reason to steer clear of it now—it’s incomprehensible co...

It’s difficult to imagine a subject more stupefyingly dull than accounting. It makes economics seem like a Michael Bay movie. Thus, you will soon experience a long, restful sleep. Because we’re going to read from Accounting, Theory and Practice , “a text-book for colleges and schools of business administration,” by Roy B. Kester, Ph. D. This particular edition, published in 1922, is dedicated to h...

There are certain chapters in great works of literature that must be skimmed, or better yet, skipped altogether. In Moby-Dick , that would be Chapter 32, “Cetology.” Cetology—the branch of biology that studies whales, dolphins, and porpoises—is not of much interest to the general reader. In fact, it causes many of them to put down the novel and never again pick it up, thus Moby-Dick is one of thos...

We’re going back in time tonight, searching for the dullest of dull writing to put you into a deep sleep. Soon after I begin to read from Principles of Geology by Sir Charles Lyell, M.A., F.R.S.—that is, Fellow of the Royal Society—you will experience something akin to that sensation immediately before your colonoscopy begins. If you count backwards to 10, you won’t make it to nine. Lights out. Sw...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid. Tonight, your cares will dissolve as I read from The Ethics of Aristotle . You will never find out exactly what those ethics were, you will be sound asleep, probably within minutes. In Athens, Aristotle was known for putting entire audiences to sleep with his lectures. It was all the same to him, he got his money upfront. When I read from...

Before I start to read this ancient Greek historian, who has dependably caused heads to nod for thousands of years, I’d like to remind you not to operate heavy machinery—or even light machinery—while listening to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast. It has come to my attention that some young people, as a dare, are listening to the podcast not from the safety of their bed, but...

He’s back and more boring than ever: Sleep therapist Immanuel Kant. Tonight on Textbook Sleep we’ll be continuing our nightly sleep-a-thon with another chapter of his Critique of Pure Reason , philosophical Sominex for generations of unfortunate students. It is reasonable to expect you won’t hear much of it, because you’ll be snoring so loudly. Fortunately, you won’t be expected to write a paper o...

Hello and welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, please do not listen while operating heavy machinery. Tonight I’ll be presenting another reading from one of the world’s dullest books. It’s a doozy— The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. It’s philosophy, but we are not brought together tonight for insight, for an epiphany, we just want to zonk out. Perhaps when you wake...

Welcome to this special edition of Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid—special because it will be incomprehensible to most of us, and certainly to me. Few of us have the stomach or brains to study electrical and computer engineering. Even for the mathematically gifted, it is a death march through one impossibly difficult course after another. Tonight I will read about electronic compon...