Several decades have passed since the media critic Neil Postman penned his influential Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he laments the intrusion of the television and the rise of a visually stimulating but superficial entertainment culture. The image would be championed over the word, with appearance superceding substance. The American masses were sitting stupefied in front of a screens, and with it came diminished cognitive activity, laziness, and trading the active pursuit of meaning for a passive consumption of pleasure. But what if, despite Postman’s prescience, we have now taken a step beyond the problem of “too much entertainment”? Suppose entertainment itself can’t keep up with the new forces at play? That’s the question the music and cultural critic Ted Gioia asked recently in a Substack post. Here, he investigates the impact of the “dopamine culture,” our modern tendency to flit among tabs and scroll endlessly through fifteen-second-long video clips. He writes, The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you …