I look around on the subway car, which is currently stalled. 80% of people are on their phones, scrolling. One woman looks straight ahead behind sunglasses. The teenager next to me watches someone twirking on TikTok. The mother and daughter across from me are each on their phones, not communicating. A toddler in a carriage watches a video on the iPad that’s been placed in the carriage for comfort.
As the number of people who Philip Roth called “serious readers” dwindles to almost nobody… the glamour of literature and starting literary ventures seems to have increased… necrophilia of the imagination…
The most common reason, according to Substack’s internal reporting system, that people unsubscribe from Novalis… is… “time”—not content.1
This week, I read the following oral history of life in the distant… early 2000s on Slate.com:
The point of the piece is simple: people didn’t have an easy way of contacting each