The Long Read in an Age of Scrolling
I am going to make an argument for long reading, and I am going to make it at length, because the argument cannot be made otherwise without contradicting itself.
The premise is straightforward: understanding complex ideas requires sustained attention, and sustained attention requires time, and the current information environment is systematically hostile to both. The consequence is not merely a decline in reading habits. It is a decline in the capacity for the kind of thought that reading enables – the slow, cumulative, self-revising engagement with an argument that is too complex to be apprehended in a summary.