It occurred to me that when  you write a normal piece of writing with more than one part, readers read in the same order the writer wrote. But when readers read a blog, they do so in the opposite direction, from newest back to oldest.  This means, among other things, that any references made in older writing get carried along in normal writing, but do on in blogs. What this means, maybe, worth pondering. 

But what does this have to do with the Obama Administration? Only that, maybe, at a time when our society is imbecilizing itself with technical marvels that segment our time into increasingly smaller and more useless segments, fewer people seem able to actually read or understand issues in any kind of context. I thought of this the other day for two reasons. First, Sven Birkerts has agreed to write an autoretroview of his 1995 book The Gutenberg Elegies. He is perhaps the first person to see some of the implications of the Internet and related matters. Second was an offhanded remark in an email from Leslie Gelb, an associate of some dozen years plus, who mentioned in passing how hard it is to succeed at editing a magazine these days when so few people read anything. By anything, he meant actual books and essays, not blog posts. So excuse me, I have to go read and work on actual books and essays.