The case for the muscular humanities takes the analogy to its limit. Reading and writing are like training muscles. It is strange that in the realm of physical achievement it’s understood that practice is essential—that there’s no shortcut to actually taking thousands of shots, hitting thousands of baseballs, and running thousands of laps—but the tech evangelists and general philistines of today do not think it’s crucial for the mind to exercise. The less reading and critical thinking a human does, the less capable a human becomes. It’s not much more complicated than that.