Can You Read a Book in a Quarter of an Hour? | The New Yorker

Phone apps now offer to boil down entire books into micro-synopses. What they leave out is revealing.

Blinkist’s library runs the gamut from “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” to “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”Illustration by Vivek Thakker

There are many reasons not to read a book. One, because you don’t want to. Two, because you started reading, crawled to page 17, and gave up. Three, because the idea of reading never crosses your mind. (If so, lucky you. That way contentment lies.) Four, because it’s Friday, which means that “W.W.E. SmackDown” is on Fox, which in turn means that Marilynne Robinson’s beatific new exegetical study of the Book of Genesis must, for now, be gently laid aside. Five, because reading a book is, you know, so lame. Only losers do it. And, six, because you simply don’t have the time.

But what if the need to read won’t go away? In a spasm of initiative and a sudden flush of guilt, you buy a Kindle and download “The House of the Seven Gables,” fully intending to complete, on the subway, what you left unfinished in college. Three weeks in, though, and you still haven’t got as far as Gable No. 1. You toy with joining a local book club, on the principle that having to read something, to keep pace with your fellow-clubbers, will be a fruitful challenge; what holds you back is a fear that the conversation will swiftly turn to campus protests. Before you know it, people will be throwing glasses of Chardonnay and slapping one another on the base of the skull with copies of “Getting to Yes.”

The most potent enemy of reading, it goes without saying, is the small, flat box that you carry in your pocket. In terms of addictive properties, it might as well be stuffed with meth. There’s no point in grinding through a whole book—a chewy bunch of words arranged into a narrative or, heaven preserve us, an argument—when you can pick up your iPhone, touch the Times app, skip the news and commentary, head straight to Wordle, and give yourself an instant hit of euphoria and pride by taking just three guesses to reach a triumphant guano. Imagine, however, that your foe were to become your literate friend. Imagine getting hooked on a book, or on something recognizably book-esque, without averting your eyes from the screen. This is where Blinkist comes in.

Blinkist is an app. If I had to summarize what it does, I would say that it summarizes like crazy. It takes an existing book and crunches it down to a series of what are called Blinks. On average, these amount to around two thousand words. Some of the books that get Blinked are gleamingly new, such as “Leading with Light,” by Jennifer Mulholland and Jeff Shuck, which was published in March; other books are so old that they were written by people whose idea of a short-haul flight involved feathers and wax. In the realm of nonfiction alone, more than six and a half thousand works have been subjected to the Blinkist treatment. Across all platforms, there have been thirty-one million downloads on the app. Right now, there will be somebody musing over Blinks of “Biohack Your Brain,” “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” or “The Power of Going All-In,” which is, I am sorry to report, yet another study of successful leadership. Given the title, I was hoping that it might be about breakfast buffets, or the best way to behave yourself at an orgy.

When joining Blinkist, you are asked to nominate the categories that attract you most: “Mindfulness & Happiness,” for instance, or “Motivation & Inspiration,” or “Productivity.” Each section is marked by a defining logo: “History” by a vase with handles, “Psychology” by a head with the top of its cranium removed, and “Society & Culture,” somewhat nervously, by a tepee. Greedy for the Blinkist experience, I ticked every box, and was at once rewarded with tips for books “based on your past preferences.” By now, my past had lasted seven minutes—algorithmically speaking, a lifetime. And what was the upshot? Four items, all of them designed, I was told, to help me “Overcome Layoff Survivor Syndrome.” Thanks.

Once you are Blinked in, your days will follow a new pattern. Instead of being woken by an alarm, or by a bored spaniel licking your face, you will find yourself greeted by a Daily Blink. This will arrive, with a ping, on your phone, alerting you to a book that, suitably pruned, is ready to be served up for your personal edification. Thus, “Tired of losing arguments? Get the upper hand with today’s pick, Win Every Argument, and learn how to effectively communicate.” Or, “Discover the fundamental principles of economics with The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money!” In other words, there is a proper time to acquaint yourself with the work of John Maynard Keynes, and that time is now. If that scares you, get a load of this, my favorite Daily Blink to date: “Dive deep into the philosophical masterpiece, Being and Time, as Martin Heidegger explores the nature of existence.” And you thought your almond granola would be heavy going.

In practice, there are two options for absorbing a Blink. Either you read it onscreen or you listen to it being recited. Seventy per cent of Blink fans prefer the latter mode, and you can see why; it allows them to combine their mental exercise with other activities. At the gym, say, they can ingest the gist of “Salt Sugar Fat,” by Michael Moss, until their AirPods pop out under the strain of the squats. Alternatively, on the drive to the office, they can treat themselves to a quick scoot through Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens,” while trying to stop the Homo neanderthalensis in the red Bronco from cutting into their lane.

We all remember our first Blink. Mine was a way of catching up. Having failed to peruse Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” when it was published, in 2018, perhaps because I was too busy studying the helicopter chase in “Mission: Impossible—Fallout,” I decided, late in the day, to give it a whirl. But in what form? The Penguin paperback, comprising around four hundred and fifty pages of text, plus another hundred pages of notes, references, and an index? The full whack, on Audible, nicely narrated by Arthur Morey and lasting nineteen hours and forty-nine minutes? Or the same thing, reduced to a sequence of nine Blinks—ready to consume, on audio, in twenty-four minutes flat? No contest.

The version of Pinker’s argument through which I was hustled by the Blinks could charitably be described as broad brush. Broad enough, indeed, to paint entire swaths of cultural experience with one swipe: “If you’re familiar with European history, you’ve probably heard of the period known as the Enlightenment.” The brushstrokes are assertive enough to cover huge conceptual shifts: “Humanism also led to what’s known as cosmopolitanism, which can be seen in today’s modern values.” Cue the happy ending: “If we look at any number of graphs and hard factual data about the state of the world over the past hundred or more years, we can see that we’re still in the process of adding energy and greatly improving.”

But that’s the trick. We can’t look. On the page, Pinker’s thesis is amply supported by a host of graphs. None of them are reproduced by Blinkist, the purpose of which is to save us the bother of poring over finicky things like graphics and charts, and to steer us away from the confounding weeds of minutiae. As with Pinker, so with William James. His noble work of 1902, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” is crammed with what he calls “the palpitating documents” that have arisen, in the course of centuries, from individual crises and ecstasies of the spirit. Many such palpitations are quoted verbatim. (“I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smiling and so full, go out like a fire.”) Very few of them, however, survive in the calmer confines of the Blink, which concludes its abstract of James with a finger-wagging directive: “We should adopt a more critical study of religion.”

It’s easy to decry this stripping down of complex reasoning, as if the app were bent solely on decluttering books of everything that lends them vitality. Yet you have to admit: if you’d never read Pinker or James, Blinkist would furnish you with a basic grasp of their intent—sufficient, perhaps, to do more than merely drop their names. If the topics that Pinker addresses happened to crop up in conversation (“Everything is so crappy nowadays, worse than it’s ever been”), you could just about hold your own, at least over a cup of coffee. (“Well, there’s this guy, Pink-somebody, who says that infant mortality is way down.”) Is that what books are coming to, a handy social lubricant? Should you care if literature gets Blinked away, like an eyelash? To find out more, you need to go to Germany.

Blinkist is based in Berlin. The headquarters are halfway along Sonnenallee, an unlovely strip in the southeast quarter of the city. When I visit, the C.E.O. of the company, Holger Seim, tells me, “It was an up-and-coming area, but it never really came.” Pass beneath a gloomy railway bridge, glance in awe at the poster for “Die Show der Megastars” at a nearby hotel, trot up to the second floor of a modern office block, and enter. Once inside, you can immediately tell that you’ve arrived at a booming tech firm, because there’s a swing in the middle of the room. Other giveaways: the slogan “We Exist to Spark Understanding” writ large on a wall; a workplace photograph from 2020, with Tim Cook, of Apple, sitting cross-legged at the front of the crowd; and a number of small dogs that skitter and skid along the floor, going nowhere in a hurry and getting there fast.

Seim is trim, keen, approachable, and, most important of all, armed with banana bread. “Somebody brought it in today,” he says, offering a slice. The lack of detectable flaws in his spoken English should be no surprise. “English is not just specific to Blinkist but to the whole tech scene in Berlin,” he tells me. Some forty nationalities, he reckons, are represented in his busy hive of a hundred and sixty fellow-workers. It’s like a miniature U.N. without the suits.

Seim first thought of becoming an entrepreneur when he was in high school, in the way that other people want to be rock stars or astronauts. The difference is that he brought his plan to fruition. At the University of Marburg, an hour north of Frankfurt, he studied business administration and hatched the concept of Blinkist with three friends, Niklas Jansen, Tobias Balling, and Sebastian Klein. After graduating, they all found gainful employment—Seim worked at Deutsche Telekom—and bided their time. When they felt the moment was right, they quit their jobs and moved to Berlin. “This is it. If we don’t do this now, we never will” is how Seim recalls the mood. “Rents were still very cheap here. It was already an international magnet for talent.” Blinkist went live in 2013. Luck was on their side in the form of the iPhone, which was being updated—or, if you prefer, was cajoling the human brain ever deeper into a hostage situation—pretty much on an annual basis. “A lot of our ideas gravitated around knowledge management: how we can teach people something quickly,” Seim says. “We thought, What can we do with that new device? We naturally came to the idea: Wouldn’t it be good to have something that helps you learn on a smartphone, and spend those downtimes more meaningfully than playing Angry Birds?”

This takes us to the very nub of Blinkist. Apart from the vexed ontological question of whether blowing up little green pigs with crates of cartoon TNT does or does not have any meaning, in a universe already rich in absurdity, two features are worth noting. One, the mild shade of pedagogy in Seim’s gentle insistence on teaching and being taught. (German educators of an older and sterner school might well frown with approval.) Two, the way in which, far from denying that phones have assumed possession of our lives, Seim leans into that stubborn fact. Why struggle? Why not collaborate with our captors and see what comes of it? “The social-media apps—they made us addicted to checking our screens all the time,” Seim tells me. “That is happening. That is a trend, whether we like it or not.” Since I’m fated to doomscroll anyway, I might as well channel that itchy-thumbed habit into browsing a Blink of Eric Schlosser’s “Command and Control.” Or “Chernobyl,” by Serhii Plokhy. Or something on Fukushima. Get me some real doom.

Whenever you explain, to the uninitiated, what Blinkist is, they tend to ask, “Who does the summarizing? And is it a who, or is it more of a what?” The answer is that it’s a bit of both. “Real people do it. We have a pool of subject-matter experts. They work for us as freelancers. Some of them are Ph.D. candidates, coaches, consultants,” Seim says. “They read the books for us, they take notes, they organize those notes. In the past, we had writers who would take those notes and write the texts.” Then came the narrators—an endangered species, it turns out. “These days, a lot of that is enhanced by A.I. When it comes to recording, the front-list titles we record still with people.” And the less popular Blinks, on the backlist? “We let A.I. narrate it,” Seim says. “We have voices that we trained. We cloned voices, basically.” Could the whole process be handled by A.I., with no flesh and blood, and no scrutinizing eyes? “Technically, we’re almost there,” Seim replies. “Legally, it’s not allowed,” he adds. “As soon as we just take a book, feed it into A.I., let A.I. produce a summary, and then sell that summary, it would no longer be fair use.”

Teasing out the various strands in this tangle of copyright law, artificial intelligence, and real, honest-to-God wordage is a tender task. Yet it can, I am pleased to report, yield delicious results. Some nameless soul must have agreed to whittle down Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” into Blinkable form—a heroic undertaking, given that it’s hardly baggy with superfluities in the first place—because there it is, thinned to six slices, plus an introduction and a final summary. All yours in sixteen and a half minutes. I listened to it, savoring the faintly metallic tone of the narration, and was rewarded, at the climax, with this:

True meaning reverberates in the unspoken chasm between what we can show and what we can tell about it. O.K., that’s it for this Blink. But before we let you go, we wanted to let you know that this Blink was narrated by an A.I.-generated voice model. That’s me.

Imagine Wittgenstein, never less than agonized at the best of times, hearing those words. His head would explode like a grenade.

It should be stressed that Blinkist is not the only abbreviator on the block. There is also Sumizeit, a lesser animal, whose audio condensations last some ten to fifteen minutes. Nor, as any historian of the print trade will confirm, is Blinkist without precedent in its underlying desire. To cut a long story short, abridging has always been in vogue. Eighteenth-century parents, wishing to school their offspring in piety without the use of the whip, could turn to John Newbery’s edition of the Bible, “adorned with Cuts for the Use of Children,” published in 1764, or, only a year later, to a larger and fancier product—“An Abridgement of Scripture History designed for the Amusement and improvement of Children: wherein the most Striking actions in the Old Testament are made plain to the youngest Capacities: adorned with head Peices expressive of the Subject of Each Narrative.” (Is that not Blinkism avant la lettre?) If the goal was to shield the young from unsuitable material—for God’s sake, don’t let them read the stuff about honeycombs and lips in the Song of Solomon!—the title pages did not say so. Instead, their common emphasis was on adornment, the implication being that in whittling down a text you were not selling it short but buffing it up and adding to its appeal.

You could argue that the paring of prose for children is a specific discipline, and there is, indeed, a long tradition of classics being made palatable for youthful tastes. At bedtime in the early nineteen-hundreds, you could read out “Gulliver’s Travels, Retold for Little Folk,” by Agnes Grozier Herbertson, in the comforting certainty that any Swiftian unseemliness had been erased. (The subtitle, for a tale that is partly about little folk, is wonderfully tin-eared.) Rather more inspiring is the notion that the art of synopsis itself is, or was, considered a subject fit for the classroom. Samuel Thurber’s “Précis Writing for American Schools: Methods of Abridging, Summarising, Condensing, with Copious Exercises” (1936) abounds with startling examples of what was once demanded. We are invited to inspect summaries of a Wordsworth sonnet, “The World Is Too Much with Us,” which were, according to Thurber, “written in ten minutes by pupils of the senior year in high-school.” He has harsh words for those students taking the fall paper of the College Entrance Examination Board in 1919, who had to précis Keats’s “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” and stumbled in the attempt. “Their knowledge of mythology was meagre,” Thurber says with a sniff. Dumbass kids.

It is that generation, reared on the verbal need to squeeze, which grew up to become the target audience for the most comprehensive campaign of textual compression ever mounted. The Reader’s Digest condensed-books club came into being in 1950, and within a year it had garnered more than half a million members. Four years later, that number had risen to two and a half million. In his 1958 study of the Reader’s Digest, bearing the presumptuous—and, in the event, erroneous—title “Of Lasting Interest,” James Playsted Wood describes the mechanics of condensation. “The editors read about 2800 books a year in the United States and 1000 in England,” Wood writes. Once a lucky book is plucked from the throng, an editor makes the initial rough cut. Then:

Three more editors go over this first condensation, making further cuts, perhaps restoring some already made, making sure that the contents, the spirit, and the style of the author are retained in the shortened version. Nothing essential is changed.

In the light of that hard labor, it is a cruel irony that the condensed books should, over time, have dwindled into a byword for the redundant middlebrow. Unloved and unclaimed, they lurk on the shelves of thrift stores, the gleam all but faded from their embossed spines. (Some were clad in leatherette. Luxury!) Should you wish to take the pulse of postwar hankerings, however, you could do worse than run your finger down those spines and chart the contents. In the summer of 1952, for instance, subscribers could enjoy, in a single convenient volume, “The Hidden Flower,” by Pearl S. Buck; “The Dam Busters,” by Paul Brickhill; “The City Boy,” by Herman Wouk; and “My Cousin Rachel,” by Daphne du Maurier. Wouk it was who, after a work of his went under the knife, congratulated the Digest, claiming to be “astonished at the way the main plot was preserved, in about one-fifth the compass of the novel.” To judge by the elephantine bulk of the average Wouk, this skillful lesson in economy is not one that he took to heart.

Wood’s survey quotes Ralph Henderson, a long-standing Digest employee, in charge of the condensing squad, who was laudably clear in his intentions: to do “an honest job of representing good current books.” He added, “It is insincere editing to give the customers something you don’t like yourself.” Such plainspoken confidence, especially in the contested field of reading, smacks of a vanished age, yet a direct line can be drawn, I would say, from Henderson to Holger Seim. Literary eras show their true selves when they decide what is worthy of encapsulation, and also in the prejudices that prevail, by no means consciously, when the blade is applied to the meat of a given text.

A case in point: when Blinkist entered the fray, in 2013, its list of abbreviated books ran to a hundred titles. Two more would be added every week. “Initially, we built a product for ourselves,” Seim tells me. “So we said, like, ‘Where do we start? What’s our early-adopter audience?’ Well, we thought, it’s probably not the readers of politics and history books. It’s more a young, tech-savvy audience, young professionals like us. What do they read? They read all the self-help books. ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.’ ‘Getting Things Done.’ ‘Atomic Habits.’ All that.”

It’s true that James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” wasn’t published until 2018, but Seim’s proposition stands, and Blinkist is still overwhelmingly weighted toward that peculiar twenty-first-century zone where the sensitive upkeep of the self merges, without friction, into running a company and stroking the bulge in your bank account. What the app provides, to that extent, is a synoptic gospel. As I write, my Daily Blink has just landed, nudging me toward “How to Make a Few Billion Dollars,” by Brad Jacobs, which is described on my screen as “an insightful road map to assembling a team that’s equipped to catapult a company to staggering heights of success.” From Pearl S. Buck to dollar billionaires. It’s quite a trip.

The ideal Blinkist devotee, in other words, is the kind of person who would invent Blinkist. In an age defined by its grim-jawed polarization, is there not a risk in abetting so narrow a view of the world, and so militant a scheme to milk it? “On the one hand, we do not want to be missionary. We do not have a political agenda,” Seim says. “We try to be neutral. Switzerland. On the other hand, we believe the concept of short-form content—Blinks—lends itself very well to moving out of a bubble.” There was an attempt to try randomization (that is, recommending a book unaligned with the Blinks that a reader had previously selected), but, as Seim admits, it proved unpopular: “If leaving people in their echo chambers drives more engagement, more renewals, more business value, then it’s hard to say we do the other things. We need to pay the salaries and make a living.”

Yet that is not the whole story. Far behind the walls of the front list, there are other stories, bedded deep in Blinkist, awaiting their turn. Say you’re a mid-level executive stuck in an airport lounge, staring wanly at your muffin. What if you don’t feel like catapulting your company to staggering heights? How about a gutsy thriller? You open Blinkist, swat aside the imprecations of Brad Jacobs, and search under “Crime.” Up comes a book you’ve dimly heard of but never read. Scrolling down, you hit the following sentence: “Raskolnikov bashes her again and again as blood gushes from her skull.” That’s the stuff. Headphones on. Half an hour later, as your flight is called, you sit there motionless, hearing only this:

The novel ends with Raskolnikov heading to a Siberian prison and experiencing a moment of divine grace—the beginning of his redemption. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like, leave us a rating or a comment. We always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.

Canon to right of us, canon to left of us: what belongs in the ranks of lasting literature, whether it deserves to last, and why we ought to pay heed, let alone homage, to such weary classifications are all part of a debate that will never (and should never) draw to a close. It may also be beside the point. Furnished with compelling ethical objections to “Huckleberry Finn,” we can in good conscience skip it altogether and avoid the toil and trouble of wrestling with its merits, or its alleged want of them, for ourselves. What with all the competing cultural forces raining down upon us, we need no second invitation not to read. So one has to ask: If Twain’s book, or Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” can be scrunched down to a near-minimum, for speed-reading and easy listening, is that a travesty or a useful prop? Do little bits of literature retain the power to provoke us, and even spur us on to grander things, or are they, in fact, worse than no literature at all?

Seldom has this mystery been so cogently dramatized as it was on British TV in 1972. A voice-over, urgently suave, welcomed us to the finals of the All-England Summarize Proust Competition, explaining that “each contestant has to give a brief summary of Proust’s ‘À la Recherche du Temps Perdu,’ once in a swimsuit and once in evening dress.” Needless to say, we were in the land of Monty Python. The m.c., resplendent in a ruffled shirt, asked one finalist, Harry Baggott, “What made you first want to try and start summarizing Proust?”—or, as he stoutly pronounced it, “Prowst.” When his turn came, Harry, racing through the allotted fifteen seconds, gamely waffled on about “extratemporal values” but failed to make it past the opening page of “Swann’s Way.” As ever, Python had sought out a ridiculous problem and nailed it. The key to summarizing was to forget bland appraisals and cling to the concrete detail. Involuntary memory? Piece of cake.

Anyone who turns to “Crime and Punishment” rendered in Blinks will soon encounter a similar struggle between the overarching and the tactile. We learn about the murder weapon, of course, and about the stone under which Raskolnikov buries his loot. But a sentence from the novel such as “His face looked as if it had been smeared all over with grease, like an iron lock”—Dostoyevsky at his most memorably Dickensian—has no chance of creeping into the Blinks, whereas, thanks to the summarizer, we are granted a bizarre excursus into the philosophy of nihilism and a comparison of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche (who is never referred to in the book, and was only twenty-two when it was published). What shortening seems to encourage is the temptation to edit as one cuts and, weirder still, to smuggle in additions to the original where one’s avowed duty is to subtract.

Jump from St. Petersburg to Regency England, and you will see Blinkist caving completely to this urge. Among the pleasures that I have derived from the app, few are more satisfying than the realization that Jane Austen, of all people, can be distilled into a babbling stream of consciousness:

Darcy’s feelings for Lizzie have turned unequivocally romantic One afternoon, Darcy bursts in on her and bluntly proposes You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you, he says Lizzie is shocked and rejects him harshly, telling him, I have never desired your good opinion and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly

What is prompted by this unusual passage, if not the delightful sensation that “Pride and Prejudice” is in the midst of being rewritten by Lydia Bennet? The near-total lack of punctuation would cause Henderson, the edit king of Reader’s Digest, to have a fit of the vapors, and, should it emerge that artificial intelligence is responsible for the lapse, we would be right to fret. If this is how A.I. handles proofreading, just think how it would screw up the release of a nuclear warhead.

What is most informative about the babble is the revelation that Mr. Darcy is now “unequivocally romantic.” Only once does the word “romantic” appear in the novel, when Charlotte Lucas, announcing her engagement to the insufferable Mr. Collins, confesses, “I am not romantic, you know. I never was.” Austen’s attitude to the Romantic movement was, to say the least, fraught with skepticism. (“Common sense, common care, common prudence, were all sunk in Mrs. Dashwood’s romantic delicacy,” we are told in “Sense and Sensibility.”) But as modern readers—and, evidently, as modern summarizers—we can’t help wanting to warm Austen up, as it were, and to loosen her classical and Christian stays. “A Timeless Tale Where Love Conquers Societal Norms” is the tagline that tops the Blinks of “Pride and Prejudice,” and, over and over, in wandering through Blinkist, we keep bumping into this vision of literature as a blueprint for breaking out. The belief that the plight of fictional characters can and should be improved is, dare one say, almost Pinkerish in its optimism:

In the end, the novel charts the poignant journey of a young man struggling to find his place in a world constrained by rigid societal norms and offers a beautifully stirring affirmation of the power of self-expression.

That is how “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” in its Blinked-down guise, signs off. None of that nonsense, familiar to lovers of Joyce, about wanting to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Just another dose of norm-busting (should the word “societal” not be banned on the ground of sheer ugliness?) and, beneath it, a faint suggestion that Stephen Dedalus, the young man of the title, needed help with his self-help. If only he’d read “The Power of Going All-In,” he could have saved himself a heap of pain.

Here’s the strangest thing of all. To reach peak Blinkist, you must pass beyond Jane Austen and James Joyce and head not upward but downward, into the fiery pit. There it is, in the Blink-friendly précis of “Paradise Lost” (yes, it genuinely exists) that we find the fallen angels: “They’ve just lost their first big battle against God and plummeted to hell. But despite their defeat, Satan wants to continue the struggle against God.” Brave fellow. And there’s more: “He assembles his demons to talk strategy.” Talk about the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People! Boy, have they overcome Layoff Survivor Syndrome. Such, to my dazzled eyes, is the crowning glory of Blinkist. Its high-tech alchemy, transmuting literature into business, turns the inhabitants of literature, even the ones with tattered wings, into businessmen. Listen, rapt, as the devils crunch the numbers and kick around ideas for going forward:

Moloch suggests open warfare against heaven. Belial advocates for doing nothing. Mammon argues for making hell a little nicer so they can all live a happy life of sin.

I’m with Mammon, all day long. Life is short, and so, if you look at your phone, is literature. Blink and you’ll miss it. ♦