"The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever recorded."

"found that between 2004 and 2017 the proportion of men reading for pleasure had fallen by 40 percent, while for women, it was down by 29 percent."

"Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has discovered in his research that one of the simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book—and, like other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture of constant distraction."

"This is the medium through which most of the deepest advances in human thought over the past four hundred years have been figured out and explained."

"“We’re more likely to scan and skim” when we read on screens, her studies have found—we run our eyes rapidly over the information to extract what we need."

"It also starts to color or influence how we read on paper. . ."

"When this flip takes place—when our screenreading contaminates our book-reading—we lose some of the pleasures of reading books themselves, and they become less appealing."

"Anne has conducted studies that split people into two groups, where one is given information in a printed book, and the other is given the same information on a screen. Everyone is then asked questions about what they just read. When you do this, you find that people understand and remember less of what they absorb on screens."

"It’s a spiral—as we began to move from books to screens, we started to lose some of the capacity for the deeper reading that comes from books, and that, in turn, made us less likely to read books."

"Every time a new medium comes along—whether it’s the invention of the printed book, or TV, or Twitter—and you start to use it, it’s like you are putting on a new kind of goggles, with their own special colors and lenses. Each set of goggles you put on makes you see things differently."

"you start to watch television, before you absorb the message of any particular TV show—whether it’s Wheel of Fortune or The Wire—you start to see the world as being shaped like television itself."

"That’s why McLuhan said that every time a new medium comes along—a new way for humans to communicate—it has buried in it a message."

"I think all of these ideas—the messages implicit in these mediums—are wrong. In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters."

"Whether people immediately agree with you is no marker of whether what you are saying is true or right—you have to think for yourself."

"I realized that the times in my own life when I’ve been most successful on Twitter—in terms of followers and retweets—are the times when I have been least useful as a human being:"

"Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it."

"Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page."

"Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work."

"I think they encourage the best parts of human nature—that a life with lots of episodes of deep focus is a good life."

"I think they primarily feed the uglier and shallower parts of my nature."

"It is why spending time on these sites—even when, by the rules of the game, I am doing well, gaining likes and followers—leaves me feeling drained and unhappy."