Textbook Sleep

Hello and welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid. Our goal is simple—to bore you to sleep by reading aloud textbooks of little or, frankly, zero interest to anyone. Tonight I’ll continue reading The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. It’s uncommonly dull. Sensationally dull, even. If the sensation generated is sleep. It is, however, a textbook central to our understanding...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was published in 1881 and has been making law students nod off ever since. It turns out that tort law has nothing to do with tortes, a dessert Wikipedia describes as “a rich, usually multilayered cake that is filled with...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. And what could be more boring than statistics? Willford I. King, Instructor in Statistics at the University of Wisconsin, might take issue with that. He is the author of tonight’s snore-o-rama, The Elements of Statistical Method , published in 1924. It’s so dull,...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. When we released our first two episodes of Hegel’s History of Philosophy, sleep scientists around the world noted a steep spike in the hours and quality of sleep people were getting. They were baffled by its cause, but of course Textbook Sleep listeners will know...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. But you know who can’t fall asleep? Lighthouse keepers. Too many lives at stake. Still, they were forced to read Instructions to Light-Keepers , published by Authority of the Light-House Board in July, 1881. It’s so exquisitely boring, it’s amazing that shipwrecks...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. Unfortunately, we return to Hegel’s History of Philosophy. Last week’s episode was described by some as deeply, even bottomlessly boring. I would be remiss by not going there again. A west coast listener writes: “How do you not fall asleep while reading these thin...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. We have a doozy for you tonight—it’s going to be an especial challenge to stay awake as I read it. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s History of Philosophy is impenetrable. And it includes his opinions on all the most boring philosophers who ever picked up a quill. D...

The H-ion concentration method of standardization! The selective action of anilin dyes! The mechanism of entrance of pathogenic organisms into the body! These and more, MUCH MORE, await you in this episode of Textbook Sleep , where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. In this case, it’s The Fundamentals of Bacteriology by Charles Bradfield Morrey, published in 1921...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. Or, should we say Handbook Sleep ? For tonight, we will read: The Handbook of Railroad Construction; for the Use of American Engineers, Containing the Necessary Rules, Tables, and Formulae, for the Location, Construction, Equipment and Management of Railroads, as...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. We continue with another sleep-inducing essay by Emerson. By listening to it, you will join the hundreds of thousands of students who have struggled heroically to make their way through it, thinking there might be a quiz. But there is no quiz here at Textbook Slee...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast, where we read aloud boring, public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. A listener recently informed us that she “used to read Ralph Waldo Emerson as a sleep aid, while in college.” It happened that the Textbook Sleep library contained a collection of his essays. One glance made it clear that Emerson’s writing was indeed perf...

Here’s a question posed by The Book of Wonders , published in 1915: “How many have ever given a thought to the question of where rope comes from and how it is made, or realize what a variety of uses it is put to, and how dependent we are upon it in many of the everyday affairs of life?” The answer is easy. No one. And that makes it the perfect story to fall asleep to. Not gently. But hard, instant...

Watching paint dry—a famously boring exercise. Tonight, we will surpass that level of tedium, by hearing how paint is made. Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast. We read extremely boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. Get full access to Pieces of Jim at jimnolan1.substack.com/subscribe

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...