In This Issue

In a beautiful essay for Time magazine, Jen Benka, executive director of the Literary Arts Fund, mounts a timely "Defense of Reading Books" after a social event where a relative couldn't recall any they'd read. Last decade's infamous pivot to video has made personal devices and scrolling all the more addictive. It's tough for anything text-based to compete! But "learning each other's stories," she writes, "helps us be more compassionate, which, in turn, fosters our sense of connectedness and enables us to solve problems"--qualities more crucial than ever. I'm just as susceptible as anyone to overdoing it on screentime, so I often leave mine in another room when I sit down with a book. It's an effective strategy most of the time, and I find it helps keep me grounded long after I get out of my reading chair. Benka's essay offers some other strategies, and one of the best, in my opinion, is her suggestion to ask booksellers for reading recommendations.