Ross Barkan:

Reading is time well-spent and since time is a vanishing resource, getting the most of it must be a fundamental human goal. In this age of Big Tech and artificial encroachment, I view reading a book as a small act of rebellion. I can coexist fine with technological advancement but I won’t be subsumed by it. I won’t submit, day and night, to the supercomputer in my pocket. Ultimately, today’s tech must be viewed with a degree of healthy hostility because it is savagely addictive. It is not, despite the utilitarian bent of its creators, terribly utilitarian. Electricity, the automobile, the airplane—these were meant to provide, not enslave, even when they brought negative consequences like pollution and climate change. We are in a new world, one where we must assume the worst when it comes to the purveyors of our newest tech. We must, in our own ways, rebel, and not be amused to death. Reading is worthwhile for its own sake. It offers pleasure. I am not sure what it does for character—many insidious people throughout history have read books—and I do not know if someone lacking empathy can acquire it through a novel. What reading does do is make demands of the individual. It is active, not passive, and the act of reading wills an imagination into being. The imagination is the greatest muscle of all, one that must never be allowed to atrophy away.