For her, the electronic books were an insurance policy of sorts. The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.
Neal Stephenson: Seveneves
What do philosophy and statistics have in common?
People like them the least.
There was a study done in 2019 in the United States of how people feel about humanities and arts. There's us! Philosophy! Statistics! People like us the least. Science, history, even math got in there higher than us. What is going on? I'll tell you what's going on: People aren't reading. When people, general public, are out there engaging with humanities and arts, they're not reading. They're watching videos. They're doing online searches. Sometimes they pick up a book, but that's classified as engaging with literature, and it doesn't happen nearly as much as you think. Usually it's shows with historical content or researching something online. People like documentaries. So "writing stuff" is not public philosophy. That's just writing stuff - you're like every other blogger out there.
“I know my father only by having read the books that he read.”
Neal Stephenson: Quicksilver
Turns out reading is (even) more fun when you talk about it.
I had ceased to be curious about other people’s lives, much less other worlds.
