April 2026
Ben Shragge
The Merriam-Webster dictionary’s 2025 word of the year was “slop.” It defines slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” You’ve probably already seen plenty of slop on your social media feed. Notable fans include the President of the United States, who has shared slop portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys and showing himself in a fighter jet dropping feces onto “No Kings” protesters.
But though AI is a slop accelerant, I’d argue that the phenomenon precedes and extends well beyond it. Much of the human-generated content on the internet is also low-effort, low-quality slop designed to feed your attention without providing nutritional value. By nutritional value, I mean educating, inspiring, challenging, and otherwise engaging you as a human being, instead of as a farm animal to be milked for views and likes. Certain evidence-free, emotion-baiting modes of discourse also inherently reek of slop, including conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, and partisan propaganda.
Hopefully, slop is only the word of the year for 2025, not the defining feature of the 21st century. Regardless, on a personal and familial level, one small but meaningful way to combat slop is to read books instead of watching screens. The quality of the books matters, of course. Books, too, can be slop (and some are now written by AI). But the very medium of the long-form written word runs counter to the slop ethos. Reading books requires sustained attention to a narrative or argument, not short-term enthrallment. At their best, books deliver enlightenment about the world, yourself, and other people. Slop simply distracts from reality or cruelly distorts it.
When I think of books, I think of my dad, whose personal library seemed to stretch into every room in our house: kitchen, bathrooms, and kids’ bedrooms excepted. He hadn’t actually read all of his books, but that was the point: you bought books to read in the future, and by the time you finished the ones you’d bought, you’d already accumulated even more. I remember him buying books when he was terminally ill, and I wondered why he bothered when he’d never have time to read them. His favourite holiday was Passover, so it seems fitting that I connect this with a story that we read from the Seder each year. Pharaoh orders the Israelites to drown their newborn boys. Yet despite this genocidal decree, the Israelites continue to bear children and circumcise their sons. They never surrendered to despair, or assumed that death was the end of the story, and neither did my father.
When my dad died in 2012, the sheer volume of his collection meant that we had to sell or give away many of his books. But I also chose a large number to inherit, even though most were lodged at my mom’s townhouse while I lived in an apartment here in the US. In 2020, my wife and I bought a house, and my mom then took the opportunity to ship 15 boxes of books to our new address. Now they line our shelves, mixed in with my own acquisitions. I’m not always sure which books my dad actually read, but I like to think that I’m finishing the ones he never got the chance to start. Because we share the same initials, I’ve taken to signing “BS” on the first page when I complete them. It’s our collection now. The story continues.
These days, as the father of two young children, my house is filled with kids’ books as well. Some were gifts, some were inherited, some were bought, and some arrive each month courtesy of PJ Library. My four-year-old daughter used to ask us to read her a seemingly infinite number of stories before bed, but we’ve cut her down to four. She also sleeps with a pile of books, because they’re much more fun — and, apparently, comforting — than dolls. My two-year-old son is less interested in stories than in pointing at their illustrations, particularly cars and anything with wheels. He’s not much of a talker yet, but he knows what things are called and loves to hear their names. I know that, eventually, my kids will have their own phones and be exposed to the world wide web of slop. But, in the meantime, we’re teaching them to love books: from generation to generation.
