collection
How We Read Now
Essays on attention, screens, and what reading is for.
- 01
Creative Reading: Scaffolding Reading for Transformation
However, recent work on augmenting reading largely focuses on making reading more efficient, especially in knowledge-intensive contexts where people must rapidly make sense of research papers and other complex documents (Lo et al., 2024). These systems often aim to help readers skim, summarize, and synthesize large volumes of information in order to reduce cognitive effort and accelerate document- and corpus-level sensemaking at scale (Gu et al., 2025; Lo et al., 2024; Fok et al., 2023). At one extreme, the form of reading implicitly envisioned by these systems may resemble what we call “reading to discard”: extracting the essential, actionable informational core of a document as quickly and efficiently as possible, so that the rest can be swiftly tossed aside—much like we often process inbound mail. This motivates us to ask what scaffolding approaches might resist “reading to discard,” what alternative forms of reading we might scaffold, and what alternative views and values of reading might guide the conversation.
- 02
The Website Obesity Crisis
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2015, at the Web Directions conference in Sydney. [53 minute video].
- 03
An app can be a home-cooked meal
I made a messaging app for my family and my family only.
- 04
Solitude and Leadership - The American Scholar
If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts
- 05
Post Artifact Books and Publishing
How does digital affect publishing spaces? How do we talk about these effects?
- 06
Let’s Talk About Margins
We're making a book. The margins are important. Do you know how important? An essay on the importance of details felt, if not always noticed.
- 07
Reading Ourselves to Death — The New Atlantis
This essay is not real.