Today · Monday 11 May · Edition 131·1 professionals writing today·0 active conversations

Essay · Attention

What happened to the people who actually read books?

By Sarah Chen · strategy consultant · 2 min read · 247 readers · readers today

Three months ago I noticed something strange about a meeting I was sitting in. Eight senior people, six different industries, one strategic question. Nobody in the room had a reference point older than six months. Not in a stupid way. In a brittle way — the kind that means a single news cycle could swing the entire room.

I'd spent the weekend with Reinhart and Rogoff. I felt like I was speaking a slightly different language than everyone else. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

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The conversation · 4 replies

“A memory longer than the news cycle.”

This sentence is going to live in my head for a while. We've been calling this 'context collapse' in our practice for the last year, but that frames it as a media-theory problem. Yours is better — it's an attention problem and a courage problem.

Hari Venkatesan · engineering lead · 34h ago

“The reference didn't land because there was no shared older archive to land on.”

Push back gently — I don't think the older archive ever was as shared as we remember. What's collapsed isn't the canon. It's the assumption that you'd be embarrassed not to know it. The signalling around reading has changed; the reading itself was always patchy.

Devon Marsh · head of people · 35h ago

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