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The death of reading is a longstanding fear of futurists.
Maybe we’re all wrong and there’s going to be a huge comeback in 10 years where all the kids are going to drop their iKindles and start reading like crazy. “Dude, did you read the latest Turgenev? It’s so sick. This dude is like all over the subject of love and serfdom.”

That would be nice.
I don’t know how to read anymore. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.

Silence is so over.
Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it’s important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions. —“The Russian Immigrant’s Handbook,” Gary Shteyngart, interviewed by Deborah Solomon, New York Times

It is this element of dehumanization that has produced what I am calling “the servile mind.” The charge of servility or slavishness is a serious one. It emerges from the Classical view that slaves lacked the capacity for self-movement and had to be animated by the superior class of masters. They were creatures of impulse and passion rather than of reason. Aristotle thought that some people were “natural slaves.” In our democratic world, by contrast, we recognize at least some element of the “master” (which means, of course, self-managing autonomy) in everyone. Indeed, in our entirely justified hatred of slavery, we sometimes think that the passion for freedom is a constitutive drive of all human beings. Such a judgment can hardly survive the most elementary inspection of history. The experience of both traditional societies and totalitarian states in the twentieth century suggests that many people are, in most circumstances, happy to sink themselves in some collective enterprise that guides their lives and guarantees them security. It is the emergence of freedom rather than the extent of servility that needs explanation. —“Morality and the Servile Mind,” Kenneth Minogue, New Criterion

My rump will be as marbled as the arse of a prize wagyu, my rib eyes shot through with glistening alabaster nuggets of something animal and saturated. And the only thing that would separate my belly from deliciousness would be a few good hours – what, eight? Nine? – of serious rendering in a hot oven, so that the fibrous meat was fully bathed in the hard-earned grease of a life lived far too well. Oh my! This is narcissism gone mad. I am at risk of dribbling into my keyboard at the very thought of eating myself, properly roasted. —“Jay Rayner on the joys of fat and lard,” Jay Rayner, The Observer