On reading

A couple centuries ago in North Carolina:

A white person who taught an enslaved person to read faced a fine of one hundred to two hundred dollars or imprisonment. A free person of color faced a fine, imprisonment, or a whipping of up to thirty-nine lashes. An enslaved person who taught another enslaved person to read got thirty-nine lashes on the bare back, no discretion, no alternative.

Think about that for a minute. A legislature convened, debated, voted, and made it a crime to teach a child the alphabet. They did not do that because reading is a nice hobby.

They did it because they had done the math and understood exactly what a person becomes when they can read a pass, read a map, read a newspaper, read an argument for their own freedom, and write it down for somebody else."

— Dr. Janine Bouey, Medium, Aug 9, 2026

Dr. Bouey says ideally we should spend less time decoding words (the early mechanics of reading) and more time thinking. "Attention you are spending on decoding is attention you do not have available for comprehension."

Thinking and learning requires some friction, says Anne Helen Petersen. It can't be automatic. Processes that are made automatic — too fluent — are hostile to thinking.

"I want to break things when I see headlines about people — of all ages — not reading, with no acknowledgment of how we have an entire information infrastructure that makes it difficult for us to read. I'm not just talking about the attention economy and the infinite scroll, either.

* * *

Reading is technology that’s full of friction. Settling into somebody else’s words is magic—their voice…inside your head! But it takes focus and, even more importantly, it takes time. Reading, for many, requires quiet or at least concentration. You can’t read while walking the dog or doing the dishes or in the car. Text doesn’t autoplay when you log into a news site and when you finish a story, most sites don’t throw another one at you like YouTube does. This will sound precious as somebody who writes for a living, but it’s not exactly a fair fight. What makes reading so vital, so fulfilling, is friction. And the internet is trying to eliminate friction in every way possible.

I don't think reading is ever going to die. But I do think that every generation is trained on a set of norms for how they receive, spread, and produce information. And the norms have shifted."

— Anne Helen Petersen, They Don't Want You To Read, Culture Study, Aug 9, 2026

How exactly to fit these two ideas together?