Textbook Sleep

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...

Imagine that, for some misguided reason you’ll later regret, you decide to take a course in Gothic art. Perhaps you had heard it was a “gut,” an easy A—look, it’s not Biochem. And then you are assigned a book about the subject by noted art historian Andrew Martindale. It’s not him that’s the problem, it’s you. You can’t get through a single paragraph without starting over. It ain’t TikTok. It’s le...

Welcome back to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid. In our first episode, I read from Chapter 1 of Samuelson and Nordhaus’s legendary and tedious Economics . Now we jump ahead to Chapter 24, into something called “The Multiplier Model.” Prepare for a deep, restorative sleep... Get full access to Pieces of Jim at jimnolan1.substack.com/subscribe

Hear me say the word “econometrics” for the first time in my life and mispronounce chez lounge . Let me know what other textbooks you’d like to fall asleep to. Get full access to Pieces of Jim at jimnolan1.substack.com/subscribe