Taking trains and trams in Berlin, I noticed people reading. Books, I mean - not pocket-size devices that bleep as if censorious, on which even Shakespeare scans like a spreadsheet.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the contrast between traditional reading and modern digital distractions.
In this quote, Joshua Cohen reflects on his observations of people in Berlin engaging deeply with physical books while contrasting this with the distractions of modern technology, represented by small devices that dilute the experience of reading. The emphasis is on the value of reading literature in its traditional form, suggesting that depth and engagement are lost when literature is consumed through screens, akin to how Shakespeare seems reduced to mere data on a spreadsheet.
In practice
This quote can be used to promote literature and reading programs in schools.
Libraries are not just for reading in, but for sociable thinking, exploring, exchanging ideas and falling in love. They were never silent. Technology will not change that, for even in the starchiest heyday of Victorian self-improvement, libraries were intended to be meeting places of the mind, recreational as well as educational.
You have got to keep autistic children engaged with the world. You cannot let them tune out.
You don't teach morals and ethics and empathy and kindness in the schools. You teach that at home, and children learn by example.
When I was in architecture school, I became curious about the exact mathematics, physics, and construction of the great structures I had been studying. I wanted to know how these amazing things would work: the Pantheon, the dome of Michelangelo, the dome of Brunelleschi. So I decided to study civil engineering.
I always tell kids, you have two eyes and one mouth. Keep two open and one closed. You never learn anything if you're the one talking.
Usually kids who are talented have the brashness to think they can do anything, but they don't often get the chance to see how close they can come.
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