Moment 53 - Why Doing This Is More Important Than Ever Before: Johann Hari

Uh Why is reading so important? What role does reading play? We all consume information digitally now. Why do we need to Go back to reading stuff. There's a few reasons. Um And it's not again not a snooty

Yeah. Um so you're absolutely right that reading is mass reading books has massively declined. Um fifty seven percent of Americans now never read a book in any given year. It's the first time in the history of the American Republic that's the case where We're still a bit better than that in Britain, but not not by much. And there's several people who really help me to Understand this.

And what that what that's doing to us. That's partly a symptom. of our declining attention and partly a cause of it. And I'll talk a bit about how. So I interviewed a woman called Professor Anne Mangan, who's at Stavanger University in Norway, who's a professor of literacy and probably the leading expert in the world on on these questions. I should explain lots of things, but there's one very simple one. You can do studies, there've been loads of studies showing this now. So you get Group people, you split them randomly into two.

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