The Daily Lark

From the NYTimes Magazine this weekend.

“What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading. I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.” — Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

“Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode.” — Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale