Every Monday on Global Comment, we share Something Special you don’t want to miss. To fit with the six core pillars of the magazine, these will alternate between the themes of watch / listen / read / see / taste / place.
It will be something different every week, but it will always be about something worth seeing, hearing or watching, or a place worth visiting or a food worth tasting.
This week, a long read about… reading. It’s very meta, but What Happens If No One Reads by Spencer Klavan for The Free Press explores how, “With AI able to quickly summarize everything from self-help books to great novels, we need to remind ourselves why we read in the first place.”.
“As a college teacher, I’ve noticed this trend too. My students are perfectly earnest, interested in the world, and even willing to take it on faith when I tell them it’s important to do the assigned reading. They’ve heard throughout their lives that reading is an important component of their future success. But many of them have never gotten much personal enjoyment out of it or seen for themselves what a book can give them that a Wikipedia entry can’t deliver more quickly. Covid school closures probably accelerated the problem. AI chatbots threw it into hyperdrive by offering on-demand, made-to-order, correct-enough summaries of (and essays about) any book you can google. But all ChatGPT really did was intensify our growing need to ask the question: Why read? What is it about sitting with a book, a quintessential experience of civilized life until very recently, that can’t be automated or replaced?”
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