The Editorial Page

I don’t remember when I started reading seriously.
But I remember who made me start.

Growing up in India, we subscribed to The Hindu. In our house, it wasn’t just a newspaper. It arrived every morning like something that had to be respected.

My grandfather would call me to sit next to him and read the headlines aloud. At first, it was about pronunciation. Difficult words. Long sentences. I would stumble. He would correct me patiently. Then he would turn to the editorial page.

“Read this,” he would say.

At that age, I didn’t know what an editorial meant. I assumed it was just another article. But I noticed something about the way he approached it. He listened differently. He would stop me midway and ask, “What do you think they are trying to say?”

Not what happened.
Not who said what.
But what they were trying to say.

I didn’t always have an answer.

Only later did I understand that he wasn’t just asking me to read. He was asking me to think.

An editorial forces you to follow an argument. It asks you to stay with a line of reasoning. To consider it fully before deciding whether you agree or disagree.

That habit, of staying with a thought long enough to understand it, stayed with me.

Over time, reading became something I associated with patience. Not effort. Not productivity. Just patience.

An article wasn’t something to get through. It was something to sit with.

Today, I still read. In fact, I probably read more than I did back then. But now, most of it happens on my phone.

News apps. Long-form essays. Analysis pieces. Links shared by friends. Headlines appearing between messages. The entire world fits in the palm of my hand.

And somewhere along the way, I began noticing a difference.

I finish an article and almost immediately move to the next one. A notification interrupts. Another headline pulls me in. A suggested link appears. Before I’ve fully formed a view, I’m already somewhere else.

It isn’t that I’ve stopped reading.

It’s that I don’t always linger.

And I sometimes wonder whether that lingering, that quiet pause after reading, was where most of the thinking actually happened.

Thinking, in other words, is not automatic. It is effortful.

And that effort matters. Research on deep reading suggests that when we follow complex arguments and wrestle with ambiguity, the brain strengthens the very networks responsible for comprehension, empathy, and reasoning. The struggle is not a side effect of thinking, it is part of how thinking develops.

Deliberate reasoning, holding competing ideas in mind, resisting quick judgment, staying with ambiguity, requires mental energy. But that energy builds capacity.

There is also research showing that frequent task-switching reduces depth of processing. When attention keeps shifting, information is encoded more shallowly. We recognize it, but we don’t always integrate it.

Maybe the shift isn’t that we’ve stopped reading.

Maybe we’ve just reduced the space between what we read and what we think.

When that space shrinks, I notice something subtle in myself. I react faster. I move on quicker. I form impressions before I’ve fully formed opinions. I skim arguments instead of sitting with them.

I don’t think this is about blaming phones. Phones are tools. They’ve made information more accessible than ever.

But they’ve also made switching effortless.

And when switching becomes effortless, lingering becomes intentional.

I find myself wondering what this means not just for us, but for children growing up in this environment.

If deep thinking requires effort, and effort is increasingly optional, what habits are forming?

If they mostly see adults swipe, scroll, and move on, are we modeling reflection or reaction?

The editorial page taught me that forming an opinion required patience. It required sitting with someone else’s reasoning before offering my own.

I’m not sure we’ve lost that ability.

But I do wonder whether we practice it less.

And increasingly, I think about another layer, the role of AI.

If reading shapes how we think, writing shapes it even more. Writing forces structure. It forces clarity. It forces you to wrestle with your own uncertainty. When tools begin assisting not just our search but our sentences, what happens to that cognitive effort?

I don’t have answers yet.

For now, I’m simply noticing the difference between how I learned to read and how I read today.

Maybe that quiet space after the editorial, the pause before speaking, mattered more than I realized.

I hope to explore more about what this means for children, and for how we write and think in an age where technology is becoming a collaborator in our words.

For now, I’m just trying to linger a little longer.