Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Does this sound unfamiliar to you? All my professor friends say that the kids have read a whole lot less than they had 15 or 20 years ago. I think that’s true, but what I do find is there are certain superstar figures — Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Tolkien — who are probably read more. Overall, reading is probably down. Diversity of reading past the superstars is definitely down. That’s my impression. Well, I think that you see this with a lot of things all over the place. The big brand does really well. CVS is doing really well, but maybe all the shops that used to make up the rest of the city have been decimated. They’re not there anymore. They’re all replaced by chains so you have a few chain brands. I think that’s true in clothing, it’s true in media, it’s true in literature. But that’s not to say . . . I don’t love reading Susan Sontag. It’s not what I want to read if I have an hour to kill and I’m sitting on my couch. She’s not the writer that I would want to pick up. That said, I’ve learned more from Susan Sontag than just about anybody else I’ve ever read. I think if you’re the kind of bootcamp reader that I always was — I always really liked difficult books. I liked studying things that were hard because I felt that there was something in there that I could maybe learn from them. There’s a masochism to it, but at the same time, I would hate to think of my life without Sontag. I think I would be stupider. I think I would be less able to cope with the reality of the world. I have huge gratitude for having read all that stuff. When you read it all together, it’s not all so great. She’s quite prolific, actually. She writes a lot. People read a couple of books or a couple of essays, but there’s a whole lot of Sontag to read. I think if you look in the Library of America, they have a lot of it in those two volumes now. It’s just majestic altogether. It’s beautiful.…

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