On the Loss of Attention
A short essay on the way reading has begun to feel different, written before there was a word for it.
I have begun to notice, recently, that I cannot finish a long article in a single sitting the way I once did. This is neither a complaint nor a diagnosis. It is a report.
The something that has changed is not, I think, the article. I have gone back to the pieces I read in college and found them the same length and no less patient than I remember. What has changed is my capacity to sit with them, and what has changed my capacity is, so far as I can tell, the ordinary rhythms of a working day at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
This is an archival excerpt. The full essay runs to roughly two thousand words in the September 2002 print edition. — The Editors, 2026.
