[sycamoretrees]

Little more than an article for Atlantic readers to pat themselves on the back with. By the way, I get the sense the author isn’t as wise as he imagines himself, either. His catty obsession with Kanye West’s mental break and his seeming Twitter addiction makes me think he himself is certainly “wildly estranged from genuine wisdom or the humility with which erudition tempers facile notions of invincibility” (his words, not mine). (What an incomprehensible sentence - perhaps reading too much has turned him into a walking thesaurus?)

[JumpCrisscross]

> an article for Atlantic readers to pat themselves on the back with

Out of curiosity, what is your opinion on reading books?

The article is congratulatory. But I think it's proxying for intellectual curiosity and attention span.

> What an incomprehensible sentence

Is it the vocabulary? Because it's a grammatically-simple sentence.

[sycamoretrees]

I read quite a bit, actually. But I don’t go around making others feel bad for being supposedly intellectually inferior to me.

> is it the vocabulary? Because it’s a grammatically-simple sentence.

Yes, the vocabulary. Throwing a bunch of low-frequency words together doesn’t make a sentence more refined or its content more insightful. It’s just pomp, really.

As someone else mentioned, yes this is an ad hominem attack (although, maybe this is forgivable insofar as I’m calling out hypocrisy and claiming he’s in no place to put down other people - which I believe is the sole purpose of the article. If it’s just to say that reading is good, well, uh, duh. No need for a whole article about the benefits of education.)

[JumpCrisscross]

> I don’t go around making others feel bad for being supposedly intellectually inferior to me

The author balanced this by clarifying that it "is one thing in practice not to read books, or not to read them as much as one might wish. But it is something else entirely to despise the act in principle."

> it’s just to say that reading is good, well, uh, duh

Did we read the same article?

It's pointing out that folks who virtue signal about not reading are raising a red flag. It's not disparaging people who don't read, but who publicly praise themselves for not reading and go on to denigrate those who do.

[sycamoretrees]

If that’s what the article is about, then I just don’t really see the point. Literally who cares what SBF and his ilk have to think about literature.

If the article is simply an appeal to common sense, or an effort to convince others to educate themselves, maybe there are better ways to get the message across than regurgitating five hundred words on theAtlantic.com. They publish this stuff for their self-conscious “literati” audience to eat up.

[JumpCrisscross]

> who cares what SBF and his ilk have to think about literature

The millions of readers of his congratulatory profiles. (Like the one TFA cites.) Including still-influential figures like Marc Andreessen.

> maybe there are better ways to get the message across than regurgitating five hundred words on theAtlantic.com. They publish this stuff for their self-conscious “literati” audience to eat up.

It sounds like you would have had an axe to grind with the article irrespective of its contents. Maybe that's worth exploring on your own time.

[gregjor]

Ad hominem. Not incomprehensible to anyone who reads.