There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate

Cal Newport argues that just as diet and exercise became cultural common sense in a generation, we need a similar shift around “mental fitness” by treating sustained attention as something to train rather than concede. The framing is useful, though it covers ground Nicholas Carr mapped fifteen years ago in “The Shallows” (the net as “an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention”). I am unsure whether a fitness-style cultural shift can actually take hold when the incentives of every device in your pocket run the other way.