Digital reading appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Astonishing numbers of people with years of schooling are in effect illiterate. This month’s Ljubljana Manifesto (宣言) explains: “The digital field may promote more reading than ever in history, but it also offers many temptations to read in a superficial and scattered (零散的) manner — or even not to read at all. This increasingly endangers higher-level reading.”

That’s frightening, because “higher-level reading” has been essential to civilization. It enabled the enlightenment and an international increase in empathy. Without it, we would suffer a lot. As the Ljubljana Manifesto notes, “as much as one-third of Europeans struggle even with lower-level reading skills.” More than one-fifth of adults in the US “fall into the illiterate/functionally illiterate category”. Separately, post-pandemic reading scores for American 13-year-olds are the lowest in decades. And the Washington-based Center for Global Development recently estimated that literacy in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa among those with five years of schooling has decreased by 10% this past half century.

Experts in the Ljubljana Manifesto record the demerits of digital reading: “Recent studies of various kinds indicate a decline of critical and conscious reading, slow reading, non-strategic reading and long-form reading.” When you read a book on paper, you can be entirely inside the experience, absorb hundreds of pages of details thoroughly and begin to capture the world’s complexity. Online, says Maryanne Wolf of UCLA, we are “skimming, scanning, scrolling”. The medium is the message: doing deep reading on your phone is as hard as playing tennis with your phone. Recently, a bright 11-year-old told me I was wasting time on books: he absorbed more information faster from Wikipedia. He had a point. But digital readers also absorb more misinformation and seldom absorb fine perspectives.

In short, as professors from Northwestern University foresaw in 2005, we are returning to the days when only an elite (精英) “reading class” consumes long texts, which is worrying.

More than half a century ago, there were 4, 000 drive-in movie theatres in the United States, and watching a movie from your car was a popular way to spend an evening. But with the number of drive-ins reduced to just a few hundred, outdoor movies have been popping up across the nation. Going to an open-air theatre has become a modern summer pastime for an increasing number of movie fans.

In recent years, outdoor movie screenings have come up in parks, vacant lots (空地) and shopping malls around the nation. On average, about 1, 000 people attend each movie night. It attracts a lot of young professionals, young workers and residents nearby. For some, the outdoor movies bring back the memories of the drive-in theatres of their youths. But for the majorities, they think it is comparable to the atmosphere (氛围) of drive-ins, as they can bring friends, food, good wine, and watch the movie together.

The returning of Americans’ love affair with outdoor movies makes Stephen Bastas ever busier. His seven-member crew sets up screens in various locations mostly in the Washington area every day throughout the summer. They are doing pretty well and they hope to continue the trend. And it looks like they are going to. That’s because many fans say there is nothing like watching a movie on a breezy summer evening under the stars.

We seem to find out someone broke into a big company’s databases and left with millions of credit card numbers, passwords or other valuable information. Now a new kind of worry: someone could seize control of your wireless home network and steal your information from under your nose.

That’s the possibility raised by a couple of cyber security researchers from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. The problem, they say, is a weakness in the very protocol meant to make wi-fi secure. That protocol is called Wi-Fi Protected Access II, WPA2. And WPA2’s weakness could allow an attacker within physical range of your wi-fi network to make a copy of that network that they could then control. The researchers call their approach a key reinstallation attack, or KRACK.

It’s important to know that a KRACK attack remains a possibility for now. The scientists realized the threat while investigating wireless security. They’ll present this research on November 1st at the Computer and Communications Security (CCS) conference in Dallas and in December at the Black Hat Europe conference in London.

In their KRACK assumption, wireless devices would be fooled into connecting to the false network. And the attacker would be able to access all of the information that devices send and receive while connected to that network — even if that information has been coded. Android and Linux would be especially easy to attack because of how their encryption keys (密钥) are set.

One measure of protection against such an attack would be to make sure they you’ve installed the most up-to-date versions of your apps, browsers and wireless router software. Updated software is most likely to include the security patches (补丁) needed to avoid falling victim to a KRACK attack, because chances are that KRACK won’t remain simply a proof-of-concept for long.