On Reading...

There is an on-going debate on whether the our increasingly plugged-in click-the-screen world is somehow changing our brains.  And whether, for instance, we as a species are losing the ability to read Big Books.  Here's a great comment on the question from an article by Jim Holt in the London Review of Books :

‘No one reads War and Peace,’ responds Clay Shirky, a digital-media scholar at New York University. ‘The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it.’ (Woody Allen solved that problem by taking a speed-reading course and then reading War and Peace in one sitting. ‘It was about Russia,’ he said afterwards.)