To be fair, the question that we started with poses a false dichotomy. Both of us, and probably you, read all kinds of texts over the course of any month. It is hard to imagine navigating the modern ...

You’re reading Open Questions, Joshua Rothman’s weekly column exploring what it means to be human. What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren’t urgent questions. Reading was an ...

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become ...

Think about what you’ve read recently. Do you generally read to learn about something or to be entertained? What kind of reading materials do you have on your electronic reader? What paperbacks do you ...