Education

Digital Literacy Is a Survival Skill

When I trained the people who would carry messages across the border, I did not teach them theology first. I taught them navigation. How to read terrain. How to identify patrol patterns. How to move quietly. How to react to the unexpected.

The theology was the reason. The navigation was the survival skill.

In the digital age, the equivalent survival skill is digital literacy. Not the ability to use a smartphone. The ability to use it without being monitored, tracked, or compromised by entities whose interests do not align with yours.

Why They Always Cut the Arts First

The pattern is so consistent that it barely qualifies as news anymore. A budget shortfall is announced. Cuts must be made. The first programs on the chopping block are the arts: music education, public galleries, theater grants, community arts funding.

The justification is always the same: these are “nonessential.” They are “nice to have” but not “need to have.” In a time of scarcity, resources must be directed toward things that are measurable, practical, and immediately necessary.

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.

On the Duty to Think Slowly

I would like to make a case for slowness. Not the slowness of indifference or the slowness of obstruction, but the deliberate, chosen slowness of a mind that refuses to be rushed past the point where understanding becomes possible.

This is, I am aware, an unfashionable position. The dominant culture rewards speed of response, certainty of opinion, and the appearance of having already thought through whatever has just happened. The person who says “I need to think about this” is perceived not as rigorous but as behind.