We like to hope that this blog might change what you think, but Nicholas Carr has a theory that it might change how you think too. In the cover article of the Atlantic Monthly, of which Arts & Letters Daily reminded me, he asks whether our style of reading has changed our style of thinking, and if so, how. Once upon a time Carr read books, and he read them slowly and carefully. Now he quickly skims more material on the internet. And he’s noticed that more than his reading habits have changed:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. . . .

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Since coming to First Things, I’ve spent my days reading many more articles and blogs than I did in college. But I don’t sense any change in my thought patterns, although that may be because I learned how to think with the internet already in play. Instead, I’ve noticed that reading lots of articles online and in print every day has honed my ability to skim. It’s also taught me to save deep reading for what really interests me. But when a piece comes along that does grip me, I don’t perceive any greater difficulty in my ability to soak it in and mull it over.

It makes me wonder if this is a generational thing. Have any of our professor contributors noticed differences in the reading and thinking habits of their students over time?

There are times when you want to watch your metaphors, regardless of how stock they have become. Speaking of the press pool’s access to an event next week, the official White House schedule reads:

Tuesday, June 17. 9:45 am EDT. THE PRESIDENT is briefed on Midwest Flooding. Roosevelt Room, The White House. POOL AT BOTTOM.

Well, yes, that’s what happens in a flood.

Our friend and FT contributor Sally Thomas has a nice meditation on confession on her blog today. A portion:

My confessor raised the question of whether I needed to confess them at all, but when I said I thought I needed to, he heard me out. And then he absolved me. In that moment, I experienced a flash of understanding about the office of the priest, how he stands in, in his dealings with us, for Christ Himself. What the priest said to me, verbatim, was, “Your sin is gone. You are not that person any more.” And it was Father’s voice, but I heard the voice of Jesus, saying what He said to the woman at the well, to the woman caught in adultery, to the lepers, to the paralytic who rose from his mat. “You are not that person any more.” Whatever I was, whatever boring selection of the infinite and dazzling variety of sins belonged to me, I am not that person any more.

Jon Meacham has a nice obituary on Tim Russert that focuses particularly on Russert’s faith. If Jody Bottum’s Swallows thesis is correct, I fear that the American Catholic Church won’t be producing another Russert for a long time.

We will be instituting a new policy today based on these guidelines.