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I too have tussled with, a decade later, in contemplating the challenge of cultivating wisdom in the age of information, particularly in a media landscape driven by commercial interest whose very business model is predicated on conditioning us to confuse information with meaning. (Why think about what constitutes a great work of art — how it moves ... See more

Maria Popova • Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Good Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers

the internet not only had democratized information beyond people’s wildest imaginings but also was replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd,”

Michiko Kakutani • The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

We have, he believes, created in our culture “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation, as a result of distraction.”

Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again

To illustrate the morphophonemic principle in English, the linguists Noam Chomsky and Carol Chomsky use words like “muscle” to teach the way our words carry an entire history within them—not unlike the Sumerian roots inside Akkadian words. For example, the silent “c” in “muscle” may seem unnecessary, but in fact it visibly connects the word to its

Maryanne Wolf • Proust and the Squid

Foreman feared “an Internet-dependent population is being drained of its ‘inner repertory of dense cultural heritage’ by outsourcing all information and connection to a vast web that spreads us wide and thin and is accessed by the touch of a button.”

Algorithms and the Homogenization of Taste

When the point of reading is, as it was for Peter of Ravenna, remembering, you approach a text very differently than most of us do today.

Joshua Foer • Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i.e., the writer’s) across space and time.

George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities