TagDistraction
Anna Karenina and How to Read Long Books
"One chapter at a time" is actually how books like Tolstoy's were intended to be read.
Jean Twenge: Gen Z Isn’t Reading
Zoomers were born into smartphones, not Shakespeare
Reading in the Digital Age
Writer Joseph Epstein argues compellingly on behalf of the novel.
Awash in a Sea of Digital Information
In the age of infinite online text, maybe less is moreSome days after I close my laptop, I’d like to pick up a novel and read or work on a short story project, but then feel like I just need to empty my mind of all the snippets and clips of textual information I’ve consumed that day. News blurbs, thought pieces, emails, provocative tweets, more emails, more news blurbs… Frequently I’ll turn to a TV show or a social media binge in place of the novel. My brain can’t take any more text. It’s burnt out. It’s no secret contemporary Americans live in a sea of images and videos. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook all vie for human attention through images and color schemes designed to catch the distracted eye. Read More ›
Do You Struggle to Focus? Medieval Monks Did Too
New book shows how ancient monks fought distraction and what they can teach us todayWhile the battle against constant distraction might seem like a new problem posed by our diffuse technologies, a new book from Jamie Kreiner argues that the struggle is perennial. The book is The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. Kreiner takes the problem of distraction and puts it into the hands of the religious recluses of late antiquity. It turns out they had a lot to say. Like us, they struggled to maintain vigorous work routines. They courted the opinions of other monks and writers on what a modern-day LinkedIn guru would call “workflow” or “hustle.” In short, they were not so different from us. In his review of the book for Wired, Matt Reynolds writes, Early Read More ›