Technology

What’s the equivalent of this cardio for our ailing brains? A good candidate is reading. Making sense of written text exercises our minds in important ways. We develop what the cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep reading processes” that rewire and retrain neuronal regions in ways that increase the complexity and nuance of what we’re able to understand. “Deep reading is our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought,” she writes. Perhaps consuming a few dozen book pages a day should become the new 10,000 daily steps — a basic foundation of activity to maintain cognitive fitness.

Honestly I think this read-more tactic has gone too far. Install a word counter and start paying attention to how many words are in news articles. I have been doing that, we have a large number of articles around the 5000 word length, with some significantly more. This opinion piece is over 3100 words, shorter than many articles posted. Assuming a 250 words-per-minute reading speed, this article takes 12 minutes to read. We can easily spend the entire day reading the top news stories in their entireties. In the old days, news items almost always had a lede summarizing the article. Today, many stories keep you reading by not having a lede. When we are reading, we do not have time for activities such as going out and holding up a First Amendment grievance sign, or writing a grievance letter to our legislators. We can all too easily get caught up in stories about Ms. Leavitts supposedly-unflattering double-chin photo, a manufactured controversy, simply as a method of wasting our reading time to stories of little importance to our civics-assigned task of being informed citizens.