I’m not entirely sure how we got on the subject, but I found myself talking to my 11-year-old about encyclopedias. I said the word, and she looked at me quizzically. To be clear, she’s whip smart. “Do you not know what an encyclopedia is?” I asked. She said she had heard of the word, but no, she wasn’t entirely clear as to what it was. I said it was basically the internet in the old days. “Let’s say you had to do a report on the Revolutionary War,” I started. “So you’d go to book R and -” “Book R?” “Yes, for ‘Revolutionary War,” I continued, “but sometimes, if it was a big encyclopedia, it might be book RA-RO or something and-” “What?” “Well, the bigger encyclopedias had more information, so, you know, a book — like a literal book — could only be so big and … anyway, you’d go to book R and look up Revolutionary War. And there’d be like two whole pages telling you everything about the war.” “That’s not a lot of pages,” she noted. “No, it’s not, but … well, other stuff might just be a sentence or two. Like … platypus. Maybe a sentence and a picture.” “So everyone had these books?” she asked. “Oh, no, absolutely not,” I said. “They were very expensive. Like, minimum $500 or so. Most people didn’t have an encyclopedia. Most people went to the library.” Then I remembered … “But people would knock on your door, nice men in suits, and try to sell them to you,” I added. That she just laughed at, completely thinking I was making it up. Honestly, as I was discussing the whole thing, I started to realize I was sounding like a lunatic. An actual crazy person. Like, escaped from Arkham Asylum crazy. Now, I’m well aware that I’m not the first person to note things have changed since we were kids, but, for some reason, this is the one that really knocked me off balance. The idea to an 11-year-old that, in the old days, if you wanted to know something you had to find in a book instead of looking it up online — well, “looking it up” is an anachronism itself, now you can just ask Siri or have ChatGPT write you out a 50,000 word thesis or you can YouTube it, my goodness — where was I, oh yes: The idea to an 11-year-old that it order to know something you had to go to the library to look in an expensive book is alien. It’s insane, is what it is. It’s insane that in our lifetime, the world has changed so dramatically. Seriously: If you were in school in the 1980s, and you got a glimpse of the technology to come while you were still Dewey Decimal-ing and microfilming, you’d plotz. It would’ve blown your mind. It would’ve seemed … well, insane. There were door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen, people. Encyclopedia salesman! We have a better chance of bringing back dinosaurs than we do bringing back encyclopedia door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. What a world. ...read more read less