Briefly

What is not lost, worries Alan Jacobs, may never be found.  "...[I]t has to be admitted that much of the anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations to a lesser degree, arises from frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of "the reading class" beyond what may be its natural limits." Jacobs on the future of long-format reading in the Chronicle of Higher Education, here.

Meanwhile, Stephen Greenblatt unearths "a strikingly modern understanding of the world" in Roman poet Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things." His essay, Answer Man, is a beautiful read. It was published in last week's New Yorker. "..[E]very page reflected a core scientific vision—a vision of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe—imbued with a poet’s sense of wonder. Wonder did not depend on the dream of an afterlife; in Lucretius, it welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live—not in fear of the gods but in pursuit of pleasure, in avoidance of pain. As it turned out, there was a line from this work to modernity, though not a direct one..." Excerpted from Answer Man. Read more (for cost), here.