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This core idea is getting at something important, something that other commenters are covering and is covered in this previous HN thread [0] about information addiction for example, but I disagree the author's assertion that all passive consumption ought to be categorized as entertainment and all active creation ought to be categorized as effortful work. (I've seen too many video game damage calculation spreadsheets for that to be the case.)

I'll highlight the author's conjecture that "edutainment is not learning but preparation for learning". Relevant, digestible, and yes sometimes entertaining collections of information are preparation for understanding (which typically requires application), which is preparation for mastery (which typically requires ten more years of application). I would argue this entire process is what encompasses learning, of which well-sourced information is a critical component for. I suspect there is some conflation here of entertainment with the risk for distraction, which is a real mind killer that ought to be addressed, but instead gets tossed away by the author during his Cal Newport reference in favor of his love for Twitter and vested interest in newsletter subscriptions.

The concept I feel the author is getting at via his edutainment strawman is that information acquisition is not sufficient for the fluency of understanding required for conceptual mastery. This is a concept that I think most HN readers and textbook exercise writers would agree with.

The possibility that the author may be missing a working understanding of this concept feels to me like it would explain a certain awkwardness about the entire article, which seems to rely on shoehorning a plethora of loosely-connected, name-dropped quotes and ideas into italicized slots of questionable logical integrity to support the presumption that everything entertaining must be useless, and everything educational must be hard. I've met way too many lazy smart people to believe that to be the case.

For instance, when the reviewer references Wikipedia, they are not making a criticism of Wikipedia's usefulness -- they are criticizing Odell's summary of other writers' ideas as being as shallowly researched as summarizing their ideas off of Wikipedia. When the reviewer states "Problems with style and pacing are problems of thinking", the primary intent is not to make some sort of generalized insight applicable to you, but instead to criticize Odell in particular as putting poorly styled, poorly paced, and poorly thought-out lines on the page. If you read the review from the perspective of this adversarial framing, you could imagine the reviewer's answer to "Why We Never Have Enough Time" to be "Because we have to waste our lives on our jobs -- mine right now being to write a review of a book I think is a waste of everyone's time."

Catechesis is a term often associated with the the Catholic Church as a form of systematic instruction of a set of dogmatic ideological beliefs. This insruction is backed by a huge and famously boring book, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Denouncing Odell's book as "catechistic indexing" uses the connotation of a group of religious followers shallowly regurgitating the same dogmatically accepted facts (with or without adequate exposition or even any understanding in the first place), in the style that a religious leader might conduct a catechistic question and answer session. The abstract forces being referenced are essentially the attention economy's post-structuralist rehash of the same Marxist criticisms of capitalism that goes back centuries at this point, which the reviewer assumes that New Yorker readers (who generally self-select for a certain demographic of left-leaning and educated) would be overly familiar with. If you're looking for a basic introduction to those arguments, there's Richard Wolff's appearance on Lex Fridman's podcast last year [0] or you could try a more erudite overview like Vivek Chibber's talk, titled Consent, Coercion, and Resignation on the structural forces of capitalism [1].

    Vidrun, born of the sea-wind through the spruce
    Vidrun, green-tinged offshoot of my bough, joy and burden of my life
    Vidrun, fierce and clever, may our clan’s wisdom be yours:

    Never read Hacker News

On a practical level Davis focuses on accumulated mess as 5 things: (1) trash, (2) dishes, (3) laundry, (4) things that have a place and are not in their place, and (5) things that do not have a place.

The book adds some interesting psychological framing which I found helpful -- treating care tasks as morally neutral, for example. Her techniques target ADHD-types as well as people undergoing life changes (like Marie Kondo starting a family) or otherwise have strict time/energy constraints. Her Struggle Care website [0] has a pretty detailed primer on her philosophy.

The subject of the Quanta magazine article is a critical literature review which the article author describes as the "death knell for the serotonin hypothesis". The basis for your skepticism, "The fact that healthy people still get depression" could be addressed in the section of article where they explain how depression could be a catch-all umbrella term for the presentation of symptoms with a wide variety of causes, potentially including stress, genetic predisposition, tryptophan depletion, or chronic inflammation, among other possible causes like adverse childhood experiences or learned helplessness for example. Inflammation from periodontitis or gut dysbiosis can exist within the threshold of otherwise healthy people, as evidenced by the attenuation of symptoms in some sufferers of major depression by these interventions in the studies examined by the review I linked.

Maybe the reason a lot more people haven't beaten major depression through these interventions, as you suggest should have happened by now, is because when they go to the doctor, they get a script for an iatrogenic SSRI and a cognitive behavioral therapist and a kick out the door, instead of testing to see if they just need a root canal and some yogurt. And I protest your inclusion of magnesium orotate in the category of "x y supplements" as it is the target of specific studies which have examined its effectiveness in conjunction with probiotics in attenuating depression [1].