Columns

WEISSMANN | You Won’t Read This Either

By |

Or rather, I bet you won’t read this in its entirety. People don’t really read anymore — we hardly have the patience for it. It’s a clickbait culture, and we only have time for the headline. I’m not talking about purely literary reading, which is at a three-decade low according to the Washington Post, but also journalist efforts — news articles, op-eds, blogs. Recently, a friend sent me a somewhat comical article that connected psychopathic personality traits to the drinking of a common beverage, one she knew I enjoyed.

Arts & Culture

ALUR | Pick A Book, Any Book!

By |

There’s nothing that compares to the sensation of opening a beautiful novel, of occupying an alternate world for 240 pages, of feeling depressingly connected to people who don’t even exist, of spending entire nights reading because you can’t bear to leave your characters in the night. This week, fellow columnist and former editor, Sean Doolittle ’16 wrote about the limited scope of the Arts section, citing music as our go-to topic. As this is my final column of the semester, I wanted nothing more than to speak about something else, to reflect my personal love of literature, and re-assert Sean’s opinion that art, in all forms, conventional or not, easy or demanding, should be appreciated. After an exhausting and mentally tasking day, most people just want to de-stress. This is where shitty TV comes in — it’s engaging enough to keep you watching, but it kind of feels like eating a bag of Doritos: simultaneously satisfying and sickening.