we are cultivating habits of skimming, scanning, and superficial intake. Modes better suited to consuming than to understanding

According to US federal data analysed by Sunil Iyengar of the National Endowment for the Arts, reading for pleasure is in steep decline across every age group in the United States. Most dramatically, the drop is concentrated among young adults, a generation being raised on infinite scroll and ambient distraction. This is not a gentle tapering, but ... See more

To lose this habit at a societal scale is not a small thing. It is to unmoor ourselves from the slow, accretive processes that form character, judgment, and self-knowledge. A culture that stops reading deeply does not merely lose its stories, it risks losing the very tools by which it interprets them. Reflection, nuance, ambiguity, these are not in... See more

reading is not simply a leisure activity, it is a foundational habit of mind, one that supports both inner coherence and outward understanding.

To read slowly, attentively, without agenda or distraction is to resist. Not with noise or spectacle, but with the quiet, deliberate force of contemplation. In an economy built on speed and stimulus, deep reading becomes an act of principled refusal. It defies the algorithm’s logic of efficiency, the newsfeed’s velocity, the platform’s hunger for e... See more

Wolf’s concept of cognitive patience helps name a phenomenon central to the decline of meaningful discourse. We are not merely losing our capacity for deep reading, we are losing our tolerance for the conditions under which deep thought becomes possible.

In its place, we are cultivating habits of skimming, scanning, and superficial intake. Modes better suited to consuming than to understanding. This is not merely a shift in preference; it is a rewiring of cognition. The reading brain, once forged by sustained attention and deep engagement, is now adapting to an environment built for speed, distract... See more

Maryanne Wolf introduces a subtle but urgent concept into the discourse on reading: cognitive patience. It is, at heart, the willingness to linger in difficulty. The capacity to stay with a complex sentence, a knotty idea, a layered argument long enough for meaning to emerge.

what I fear they’ll miss is not literature’s beauty but its resistance. The way it trains the mind to slow down, to reflect, to tolerate ambiguity. To reside in the discomfort of the interstitial and be ok with it. The way it sharpens perception by refusing to simplify. The world they are entering is freighted with superficiality and false certaint... See more