“If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a vide

“If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists.” Hence universal public education. The author, though, is talking about making additional effort, as though schooling alone didn’t achieve these basic ends. Glad I didn’t go to his high school. Given a finite amount of time (albeit a near-infinite amount of easily accessible material to read), there must be a trade off between deep reading and broad reading. No explicit mention of “broad reading” as the alternative in the text, assumedly because having a broad reading experience is viewed as a fine thing. And for good reason. Consider the most deeply read (non religious) texts in the 20th C....Little Red Book, Communist Manifesto, Ayn Rand, Mein Kampf. Throw in religious cult classics of your choosing. One could argue less deep reading of those texts would have been a very good thing, and millions of lives could have been saved. Silent sustained reading of political and economics texts, if you don’t swallow the arguments made book, line and thinker, can be a good thing. Cliff Notes and simply reading summaries/critiques of those classic works instead are better, and allow a breadth of reading in limited time that provides context and perspective. Losing one’s self in a deep read is an act of trust and faith, an act that too often in the 20th Century led to betrayal, abuse and death via the distorted view of reality that resulted. Even in non-political texts, the assumptions underlying popular novels, from Bellows and Mailer to bodice rippers, can have profound renormalizing consequences in the lives of these who lost themselves in these alternative realities. Sometimes having the attention span of an over-caffeinated golden retriever puppy is a good thing.