We live in a transparent age,

The line between writing and talking has also been blurred, and we can imagine that the line between talking and thinking will be, too, at some point. From my mind to yours when I blink my eyes.

This is one of the central paradoxes of our culture—everything is swallowed into oblivion but nothing goes away

I sometimes wonder if I might ever be accused of stealing my own idea.

But is it like a conversation or is it “talking it out?”

considered publication?

Is tweeting talking it out before you write it, or part of a process?

A year or so later I composed another piece in the same manner. The first one took up about fifteen tweets. This new piece was longer. It was like being a juggler or a three-card-monte dealer: I drew a little crowd. The few assembled people clapped, via their tweets, and I bowed and hurried off with my fifty-three-tweet piece.

Except there is now a record of it.

O.K., let’s try it out, and then discover that it’s kind of fun. And, as long as it’s done in moderation, it is kind of interesting.

art of me thinks that having these scraps, these false starts, these isolated phrases, find their way into the public domain at the time they were written would have diminished the impetus

I have many more voices in my head than I ever had before.

His writing seems to be to be spoken in confidence directly to the reader, singular.

A tweet is, by definition, a violation of one’s privacy

Is tweeting the same as publishing?

ut does the fact that it is public diminish the chances that it will grow into something sturdy and lasting?

What happens to the stray thought that drifts into view, is pondered, and then drifts away?

Not everyone is primed to be a modern-day Heraclitus, like Alain de Botton, who starts each day, it seems, by cranking up his inner fortune-cookie machine

Would they ignore it or engage and go down the rabbit hole?

but misses an even larger truth: more and more, we think in public.

everything from the quill to the word processor and the early forms of the P.C.

A sentence was a strafing machine gun.

I had written, or tried to write, my first stories while sitting before this ominously humming machine.

This spring, I visited the British Museum with my family. We stopped by their display of cuneiform tablets, and I pulled out my phone. I opened up War and Peace, held it up, and damned if Campbell wasn’t right.

It felt like he’d been midway through a guitar solo when someone stepped on his cord and accidentally unplugged him from his amp. I was baffled

They’re available at a moment’s notice.

The irony is that I still don’t own a paper copy of the War and Peace itself.

The phone offered other delights that paper couldn’t. Midway through the book, voice dictation on the iPhone started to get really, really good. I’d been doing a lot of highlighting while reading Tolstoy, saving my favorite sentences and passages.

But what happens if we treat digital screens with the same romance, the same intensity of focus? Studies suggest that the cognitive distinctions go away: We learn just as much, and retain just as much, as we do on paper. As the journalist Ferris Jabr reported in Scientific American, the intellectual differences between paper and bytes may lie in our attitude towards them. When we believe that reading on a phone is equally “serious” as reading on paper, we internalize that reading just as deeply.

Print is serious, screens aren’t.

What’s more, there turned out to be surprising cultural benefits of reading not just a book, but a work that’s regarded as — harrumph, harrumph — “important literature.” Reading War and Peace on my phone began to feel different from anything else I did on the device. When I click on Twitter or, say, the Asphalt 6 driving game, I have a mental orientation that says “Hey! Let me entertain myself, enliven my brain, take a break, and maybe find something funny.” But when I clicked on War and Peace, I felt myself assume a kabuki seriousness: I shall now immerse myself in a Work of Art.

Books that size (or even smaller, in “duodecimo”) could be easily pocketed or held in one hand; it was for people on the go, tucking reading into their day. Their ultraportable ergonomics were part of their appeal.

Ebooks are still in the “weird and unusable” phase

Phones are an awfully ugly place to experience books. T

In war, nobody is in control, though everyone likes to pretend they are

why his descriptions of conflict — his precise sketches of battlefield chaos, his pingponging from

Paying deep, sustained attention is a grind if you’re not getting any payoff for your effort

Staying immersed in a book is a much easier if the book is, well, immersive

had to be much more “mindful.” I had to start paying attention to my attention, to notice my own urges to peek at Twitter or email, so that I could decide to actively ignore them

used to enjoy alerts; but with War and Peace, I shut them all down.

In this case, though, my back-and-forth flipping between browser and phone wasn’t eroding my ability to understand the book. On the contrary, it was reinforcing it, helping me stitch Tolstoy together.

Alas, the first few chapters were not exactly page-turners. War and Peace is an awfully complex book.

But when I first flicked open the Kindle app and gazed at the cover of War and Peace, it was still pretty intimidating.

lugging around that brick of Russian thought would become such as hassle

studied English at the University of Toronto back in the 80s and early 90s, where I discovered I really loved the compression of poems —

The truth is, for years I read very few big novels

Are the great works of literature doomed to fade away like ghosts?

migrate more and more to screens — screens that more suited to skimming and tweet-authoring than intensive reading

think they’ve given us delightful new ways to make sense of the world and talk to each other.

book readers read paper much more often than digital,

“I don’t absorb as much,”

Why? No one entirely knows. Some of it may simply be due to eyestrain ergonomics: Laptops require you to lean in for a long time to read a book, mobile-phone are shiny mirrors, and even a high-rez Kindle Paperwhite — which I own — feels somehow squintier that the stark contrast of dark ink on paper. It may also be, as the scholar Anne Mangen has found in her work, that our minds are slightly befuddled by navigating ebooks. When you can’t as easily flip through a text, you feel more at sea.

pretty lousy environments for deep, immersive reading.

Paper books, in contrast, calm us and slow us down.