I wonder sometimes if reading is going to be one of those phenomena like the middle class, a brief flowering that dies out.

Before the printing press books were copied by hand, wasting thousands of lives in the priesthood copying texts by candlelight. Then came printing, and newspapers and magazines and glorious books. Literacy went from almost unknown to common.

Now it seems to be fading. A brief care about grammar is giving way to pidgin speech and emoji, sentence structure is seen as effete. Your and you're are interchangeable.

In my industry most workers and much smarter than average and now most of them don't read. In the late 19th century writing was much more sophisticated than it is now. That we are losing ground in literacy is something I don't need to detail.

That most people read about this mass shooting and never read past the headline is no longer surprising. I confess that I thought it a racist crime for a few seconds but then I read the actual story and the rest and knew that presumption to be artifactual.

I'm a reader. I feel like a dying breed.