Comment by Bourbon Apocalypse,

 after "Play Where You Are":

Long-time listener, first-time caller from Mississippi. (By the way, your piece on Jackson from years back captured the troubled soul of the Capital City in a way that the magnolias-and-moonshine mushiness that drips from far too much Southern writing cannot.) With stocks tumbling, US presidents disappearing, civil war in the UK looming, and Israel leading the world into more Purim-themed chaos, I thought I should finally pay for a subscription while there is still time.

“The death of reading is also the death of attention. Without that moral prerequisite, there’s no knowledge, respect or love for anything.” This hits hard for those still (begrudgingly) laboring in public higher ed. Administration presents education as a product, so students demand their degree/product, which requires passing--if not superior--grades. However, in students’ way of thinking, making them work for good grades is like making them cook a meal they have purchased in a restaurant. Why read even a seven-page short story when you can skim a few paragraphs from SparkNotes? Why skim when you can have ChatGPT spit it out for you? Heaven forbid an instructor recommend anything because of the beauty or insight expressed in that reading alone. Throw in widespread functional cynicism, and all research as a means of discovering the truth becomes another hoop one has to jump through in the career circus of higher ed.

However, if students (or most people, so as not to pick only on students) can no longer pay sustained attention to anything, what's the use? Using tech has shrunk our attention spans—luckily, I was nearly an adult before I first “signed on,” but after decades of use and abuse, I can't sit down with a novel as I could when I was 19. Don’t want to imagine how those who have never known anything but a high-speed-Internet world approach life. Trying my damnedest to ensure my children don’t grow up thinking that “find me on Instagram” is another way to say “goodbye.”

We need more play, but even that requires the ability first to allow ourselves to become profoundly bored in a way that doesn’t seem possible anymore. “Don’t want to open yourself to your thoughts or connect with others in a way that may possibly change you? There’s an app for that.”