There’s a particular kind of quiet that falls over you when you’re truly reading. Not scanning, not skimming, but deep reading. It takes about ten minutes to get into this flow state, if you’re lucky enough to get there at all. Your breathing slows. The rest of the room vignettes so that only the words in front of you are in focus. The voice in your head settles down, or rather, it starts speaking in someone else’s cadence.
This state of deep reading is increasingly rare, and the reasons seem pretty obvious: smartphones, social media, notifications, and more generally, devices with screens. But rather than make this a purely technological battle, I want to frame this more
