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- Why do we read opinion, or essays, or nonfiction of any kind? Sometimes, we’re in search of a discrete, practical piece of information. But the range of useful nonfiction is much smaller than the range of nonfiction that competes for our attention by pretending to be useful — by creating a veneer of urgency. We’re encouraged to read a piece on Leonardo on the occasion of a new museum exhibit, even if tickets are sold out; a retrospective on U2’s Achtung Baby on the album’s 25th anniversary, but not its 24th or 26th [...]. The timeliness of those pieces does nothing for us, except provide an illusion of usefulness.
Yet an interesting person can be interested in Leonardo or U2 or the politics of children’s books at any time — and can read about things that are inherently interesting, not accidentally interesting for 15 minutes. When we reward timeliness with the limited currency of our attention, we put ourselves in a tightly circumscribed place in which our intake of information is left up to the whims of the news cycle. And abdicating decisions about what we know to an abstraction like “the news cycle” is a lot like abdicating political decisions to an abstraction like “the market.”