The Human Element - April 2026
Reading in an Age of Summaries
The Human Element — April 2026
Misconception of the Month
“Nobody has time to read whole books anymore. We need to teach students to extract key points efficiently—that’s what the modern workplace demands.”
This view has gained currency not just because of AI but because of broader shifts in how we process information. We skim, scan, excerpt, summarize. We’ve developed elaborate techniques for getting the gist without the commitment. And now AI offers the ultimate extraction tool: feed it a book and receive the main points in seconds.
But something essential is lost when we treat reading as extraction. And what’s lost turns out to be precisely what makes reading valuable in the first place.
Reading in an Age of Summaries
I want to make an unfashionable argument: that slow, careful, cover-to-cover reading is not a luxury or an anachronism but a discipline that develops capacities available no other way. And that in an age when summaries are instantly available, the ability to read deeply becomes more valuable, not less.
This is not nostalgia. It is not a longing for a pre-digital past. It’s an observation about what actually happens to the mind when it engages in sustained reading—and what doesn’t happen when reading is replaced by extraction.
What Happens When We Read
Reading a difficult text slowly is a different cognitive act than extracting information from it.
When I taught Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost, I required students to read the entire poem—all twelve books, over ten thousand lines of blank verse. This was not popular at first. The poem is long. The syntax is demanding. Milton’s sentences unspool across multiple lines, delaying resolution, requiring the reader to hold grammatical structures in mind while moving forward. It’s work that takes focus.
But something happens in that work. The difficulty is not an obstacle to understanding; it’s the mechanism of understanding. Milton’s syntax enacts the experience of the Fall—the way we lose our footing, the way meaning emerges only through sustained attention, the way premature closure leads us astray. You cannot get this from a summary. The experience of reading is the meaning.
Students who persevered through Paradise Lost developed capacities they didn’t know they were developing. They became able to hold complexity in mind without rushing to resolution. They learned to tolerate ambiguity, to sit with difficulty, to trust that meaning would emerge if they stayed with the text. They practiced, in a concentrated form, the discipline of sustained attention that every complex endeavor requires.
This is not content that can be transferred. It’s a capacity that must be developed through practice. And the practice is the reading itself.
The Extraction Trap
The extraction mindset treats texts as containers of information. The goal is to get the information out as efficiently as possible. Once extracted, the container can be discarded.
This works tolerably well for certain kinds of texts—instructions, reports, straightforward arguments where the value really is in the propositional content. But it fails catastrophically for texts whose value lies elsewhere: in their form, their rhetoric, their way of modeling thinking, their capacity to change the reader.
Ask AI to summarize Paradise Lost and you’ll get something like: “Epic poem about the Fall of Man. Satan rebels against God, is cast into Hell, tempts Eve, humanity falls, but redemption is promised.” This is accurate. It is also useless for developing any of the capacities the poem develops in those who actually read it.
The same is true of Donne’s poetry. I could tell you that the poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” compares two lovers to a compass, with one as the fixed foot and one as the moving foot. You now have the information. But you haven’t experienced the conceit unfolding, the way the image earns its strangeness through the poem’s argument, the moment when the compass becomes not just a comparison but a revelation about what love can be. The experience of reading—the temporal unfolding, the resistance and then surrender to the image—is where the poem does its work.
We’ve become so focused on what texts contain—and the seeming inability of our current generation of students to read substantive texts—that we’ve forgotten what texts do and why they matter. And what the best texts do cannot be summarized.
Attention as a Discipline
There is a reason we use the word “discipline” for both academic fields and practices of self-regulation. The disciplines—history, literature, philosophy—are disciplines in both senses. They require and develop disciplined attention.
Sustained reading is increasingly countercultural. Our information environment is designed to fragment attention, to serve content in bite-sized pieces, to reward skimming and scrolling. The ability to focus on a single complex text for hours is no longer a default capacity; it’s an achievement, something that must be cultivated against the grain of our technological environment.
This is precisely why it’s valuable. In an economy of fragmented attention, the capacity for sustained focus becomes rare and therefore precious. The person who can read a complex report carefully, who can sit with a difficult problem without distraction, who can give deep attention to another person in conversation—this person has a capacity that most people are losing.
The humanities develop this capacity systematically, especially if we engage students in substantive reading. A student who has spent weeks with Paradise Lost, returning to it again and again, living inside its language, has practiced sustained attention in a way that transfers to every subsequent challenge. The content of Milton’s epic may or may not be directly relevant to their later work. The capacity for attention so rare in our current moment certainly will be.
Reading as Relationship
Here is something that sounds mystical but is actually quite practical: reading a great book carefully is a form of relationship.
You spend time with another mind. You learn its rhythms, its assumptions, its characteristic moves. You argue with it, are persuaded by it, resist it, return to it. Over time, you internalize something of how that mind works. It becomes part of your own cognitive repertoire.
I have spent so much time with Donne and Milton that their ways of thinking have become part of how I think. Donne’s habit of yoking unlikely things together—his metaphysical conceits—shaped how I see unexpected connections in my own work. Milton’s ability to hold the cosmic and the intimate in the same frame, to move between scales without losing coherence, influenced how I approach complex institutional problems. These aren’t things I learned from them in the sense of information transfer. They’re capacities I developed through long relationship with their minds.
This is what we mean when we talk about the humanities as formation, not just information. You don’t just learn about great thinkers; you learn to think with them, and in so doing, you become capable of thoughts you couldn’t have had before.
No summary provides this. No extraction captures it. It requires time, attention, and the willingness to let another mind work on yours.
The Paradox of Efficiency
The efficiency argument for extraction and summarization contains a hidden assumption: that the goal of reading is to acquire information, and that faster acquisition is therefore better.
But if the goal of reading is development—of attention, judgment, interpretive capacity, the ability to think with complexity—then efficiency is the wrong metric. You cannot efficiently develop these capacities any more than you can efficiently build physical strength. The time is part of the process. The difficulty is part of the point.
I think of it like the difference between taking a helicopter to a mountain summit and climbing it. Both get you to the top. Only one makes you a climber. The person who took the helicopter has the view; the person who climbed has the capacity.
Students who extract key points from texts they never actually read are taking the helicopter. They can report the view. They cannot do what climbers can do. And in a world where AI can take anyone to any summit instantly, the capacity to climb becomes the differentiating factor.
What We Lose
Let me be concrete about what’s lost when slow reading disappears.
We lose the ability to follow complex arguments. Arguments that unfold over many pages, that require holding premises in mind while working through implications, that build to conclusions that can’t be grasped in isolation—these become inaccessible to readers who can only extract.
We lose sensitivity to rhetoric. The ability to notice how a text is working on you, what techniques of persuasion it’s deploying, where it’s being careful and where it’s eliding—this comes from close attention to language, not from summaries that strip the rhetoric away.
We lose the experience of being changed by a text. The books that matter most are the ones that rearrange something in us, that we come out of differently than we went in. This requires submission to the text’s temporality, letting it work on us at its own pace. Extraction prevents this.
We lose the capacity for boredom, which is also the capacity for depth. The person who cannot tolerate the slow parts of a long book cannot tolerate the slow parts of a complex project, a long relationship, a difficult organizational transformation. The discipline of staying with something that isn’t immediately rewarding is transferable.
We lose, ultimately, the ability to read at all—in the deepest sense of that word. We become capable only of processing, scanning, extracting. The texts remain closed to us even when we’ve captured their key points.
The Case for Required Difficulty
In my years as a university president and now as a board chair, I’ve thought a lot about curricular requirements—what we ask students to do, and why.
There’s always pressure to make requirements less demanding, to accommodate students who are busy, who work, who have competing obligations. These pressures are real and often legitimate. But they can also erode exactly what makes education transformative.
Some things are valuable precisely because they are difficult and time-consuming. You cannot get the benefits of deep reading without doing deep reading. There’s no shortcut, no hack, no efficient alternative. The difficulty is not an obstacle to the benefit; it is the benefit.
I recognize that this is hard to defend in a culture that valorizes efficiency and questions anything that takes time. But it’s true, and we do students no favors by pretending otherwise. The capacity for sustained attention, developed through practice with difficult texts, will serve them for decades. The time saved by summarizing or giving in to their unwillingness or inability to engage with substantive texts will not.
Reading and Leadership
I want to make one more connection, because it matters for how we think about the practical value of deep reading.
Every leadership role I’ve held has required the ability to read complex situations carefully. Not to extract key points and move on, but to sit with ambiguity, notice what’s not being said, understand how different constituencies see the same situation, resist the pressure to resolve complexity prematurely.
This is reading in the broadest sense—the interpretive disposition that close reading develops. A leader who can only skim will skim their organization, their people, and their challenges. They’ll extract key points and miss everything that matters.
The leaders I’ve most admired are deep readers in this sense. They pay attention. They notice. They resist the simplification that loses essential complexity. They’re willing to stay with difficulty until understanding emerges.
These capacities were developed somewhere. For many of them, they were developed in exactly the kind of sustained engagement with difficult texts that we’re now told is a luxury we can’t afford. Those texts may not have been Donne or Milton, or even texts as traditionally understood. They may be complex problems that resist easy solutions. The experience is very similar to what I’ve described, and just as important.
Indeed, we can’t afford not to afford it.
An Invitation
I’ll end with an invitation rather than an argument.
Choose a book you’ve been meaning to read—something substantial, something that will take weeks rather than hours. Commit to reading it slowly, without skipping, without extracting. Give it your full attention for a period each day. Let it work on you.
Notice what happens. Notice the resistance, the boredom, the frustration, and then—if you stay with it—the breakthrough into something else. The sense of another mind becoming available to you. The capacity for attention strengthening like a muscle under load.
This is what deep reading offers. It cannot be summarized. It can only be experienced. And it remains, in an age of infinite summaries, more valuable than ever.
The Human Element is a monthly newsletter on humanities and durable skills in an age of artificial intelligence. Next month: “The Ethics Bottleneck”—why every AI deployment decision is fundamentally an ethical decision, and why we’re short on people equipped to make them.