Introducing The Living Dark Reader
A new quarterly companion for deep reading
Dear Living Dark readers,
For the past couple of months, I have been working on a new project to enhance this newsletter, or rather to serve as an adjunct or extension to it. The project is The Living Dark Reader, which, as you’ll notice, echoes the way I usually greet you.
The seed idea came from my ongoing love-hate relationship with the experience of reading online, which opens up so many new avenues for finding valuable things and making rich connections with people, but which constantly fights against its own deepest fulfillment because of the very nature of the online experience itself, which is not friendly to, and which is in fact antagonistic to, full absorption and deep reading. For reference, I direct you to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which is still hugely valuable sixteen years after its publication. So is the classic essay that preceded the book, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?
