Reading. What is it? Why does anyone do it? Can anyone at Axios do it? No. Maybe that is why they write like that.

When you read a book, the stuff in the book goes into your mind, and your mind assembles all of the stuff into imagery and thoughts and feelings, and alchemizes meaning from it. A person reasonably could consider this "what's good about reading," or "the point of reading," or "buddy that's actually just ... what reading is," but that all assumes that your reason for reading anything is that you want to learn something from it, even if it's only at the level of, like, what ultimately happens to the Whos down in Whoville.

Before today I had taken for granted that this, the desire to put into one's head something that wasn't already in there, was the only reason anyone would want to read anything, ever. Even the reading people do in furtherance of the most dismal goals—even when somebody reads some miserable how-to-get-ahead-in-business book, or a sociopathic pickup-artist manual—they do because they hope to extract from the text something useful, which will reside in their brain long enough to be exploited. The compulsory reading students do for school, likewise: They hope to retain enough of this dry 19th-century novel about variability in the relative politeness of indistinguishable British persons to score a decent grade on the upcoming test. In all cases, the goal is best understood as putting something into your mind that wasn't there before.

Now I am forced to consider the possibility that there may exist an entire other reason why a person might choose to read a book. I can't imagine what it would be, but I infer its existence indirectly, like how you detect a black hole by the gravitational weirdness it imposes around itself. How else to explain the following revelation, from Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston:

AI has become my reading buddyas I've plowed through my summer book list, helping me keep track of plots and characters, unpack themes, and make sense of wordy, old prose.

Johnston elaborates:

I really got intousing AI while reading James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans." The text was far too dense for casual vacation reading. My first prompt asked:

"I'd like a guideas I read The Last of the Mohicans who can help me understand what I've read and where the story is, without giving spoilers or getting ahead of my progress. Can you do this, chapter by chapter?"
The robot agreed:"Cooper's sentences are long and his diction is archaic."
It promisedto give me "a recap of what's happened so far and clarify anything confusing. ... I'll stick strictly to what you've read. No hints about what's coming."

That's now become partof my reading routine: Tell AI where you stopped and ask for a spoiler-free recap so far, which often surfaces details I'd missed or forgotten.

Tracking story elements, unpacking themes, parsing and extracting meaning from difficult prose. Retaining a big-picture idea of what you'd read up to your last stopping point so that what you read next will make sense. Taking note of certain minor but revealing details. Compiling the essential elements of each successive chapter and adding them to that big picture as you go. You might consider these pretty much all of the tasks a brain does during reading, and thus the substance of reading itself. From there you might wonder, icy dread crawling up your spine, what manner of interaction Johnston's mind is having with The Last of the Mohicans, if he is having an AI do all of that for him.

Is he appreciating the visual beauty of the, uh, Latin alphabet? Admiring the tidiness of the print job in his copy of the book? Luxuriating in the appealing off-white tone of the paper? Maybe he is huffing the pleasant smell of bookbinding materials. I could go for that.

The baffling thing about this, or anyway one of the many baffling things about it, is that the reading ("reading") Johnston is doing is totally voluntary. No one assigned him The Last of the Mohicans. But he also plainly does not want to read The Last of the Mohicans (I can't blame him, that book stinks), and is in fact not reading The Last of the Mohicans. What he's doing is much more like what a kid does who is determined at all costs not to read the assigned text for English class. Except that, for reasons surpassing all understanding, he evidently still feels it necessary to hold the book in front of his face for some number of hours, resolutely getting nothing out of it. The assignment-shirking pupil will not include this step, unless a teacher is watching.

Nicholas, buddy ... you're an adult! If you do not want to read a given book, and are not willing to read that book, and are happy to consume a Cliff's Notes version of the book instead of engaging with it on any meaningful level ... simply do not hold the book in front of your face for any period of time. You can put any number of other things in front of your face in the time you will save by not holding a book you are not reading in front of your face for hours and hours. Possibly you can even have interactions with those things that will not cause anyone who learns of them to immediately ask you about a tortoise on its back with its belly baking in the hot sun.

Now that I think about it, this usage of AI strikes me as the clearest possible distillation of the entire Axios concept:

• Readingis bad.

• Thinkingis worse.

• Go deeper: There must be some kind of alternative for a person who wants to contain some amount of disaggregated data in their brain, shorn of any of the connections or meaning that would transform any of that data into anything that could be called "knowledge" or "thought" or "values."

• The takeaway: Shy of providing a pill you can swallow once a week that simply installs a new set of context-free proper nouns in your brain, this is the best anyone can do.

• Reality check: Do not ask yourself why anyone would ever want that.