I tend to be a relatively cheery fellow, but some important things have very much not been going our way. To wit:

10.  All that intolerant religious stuff: folks not known for turning cheeks or loving enemies imposing their own views of abortion or morality on the rest of us.

9.  Alcohol has really—and this sure looks like one they are not going to change their minds about—turned out to be bad for you, even that one modest glass of wine you were thinking of sipping this evening.

8.  Rock ‘n’ roll has finally and conclusively proven not to have been here to stay. It grew. It peaked as an explosive force in the culture with soul music, the Beatles, Dylan, the Stones and, maybe, punk. But by the standard to which so many 20th-century artists in all genres subscribed—those not busy doing something new are busy dying—rock began rolling over and playing dead well before the turn of the century. Tell Bruce Springsteen the news. . . .

      James Marriott has composed a particularly eloquent elegy for reading, now that humanity seems to be turning in another direction: toward screening—toward the smartphone. Marriott’s elegy is also particularly frightening, for he sees “the post-literate world [as] characterized by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation.” This website excerpted a chunk of Marriott’s depressing argument the day before the essay you are now reading is being published.

      And how can any of us whose thoughts have been formed in large part by newspapers, magazines and books—by descriptions and propositions, by sentences—not feel some sadness watching them being made redundant. How can we avoid some disquiet about the ongoing triumph of that flickering, know-it-all, video-jukebox-busybody, smart-alecky phone—to whose siren song even we often enough succumb?  

      . . . But I wanted to hear Marriott out not because he is right but because his argument—which is showing up in many forms lately, forms not often as literate and eloquent—is, I believe, profoundly and importantly and demonstrably wrong. . . .