Twenty-three hundred years ago, King Ptolemy I Soter set out to gather every scroll in the known world at the Library of Alexandria. The same library walls that witnessed Zenodotus editing the verses of Homer would later see Eratosthenes calculate the true scale of the Earth.
A fire and a ransacking mob both took their toll, but the library ultimately fell to neglect: humidity, mice, and scribes who eventually stopped recopying scrolls before they crumbled.
An article in the Atlantic uses that history to frame what's happening to long-form reading now.
Fewer than half of American adults read a book in 2022, and best-seller sentences have shrunk by a third over the last century.
The classicist Roger Bagnall argues that the library's disappearance did not cause a dark age. What happened was quieter: the scrolls crumbled slightly faster than anyone copied them.
Reading slowly is one of the few things left that forces the kind of thinking Daniel Kahneman called System 2. Deliberate, effortful, sequential. The opposite of a doomscroll. And a muscle, like any other, that shrinks without use.
If reading is how a mind recopies itself, what's crumbling in us right now? And would we even notice?
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