Reading and Resistance

Over at The Curator, Brett Beasley reflects on reading and resistance – on our text-soaked world and the difficulty of reading well:

When billionaire hedge fund manager Steven Cohen came under scrutiny in an insider trading scandal this summer, his lawyers provided a novel defense: they claimed that although he received an email that contained the incriminating information he never actually read it.

I laughed out loud when I heard that. And then I thought about my own inbox teeming with unread messages. And I remembered my ever-growing archive of half-read ones conveniently banished to “the cloud.” I’m relatively sure that there’s nothing potentially incriminating up there, but as the cloud expands to include more and more gigabytes, I have a mounting anxiety that something essential might have slipped past me unnoticed.

Here’s the whole article.