When I was a kid I read The Reader’s Digest. Reading – even when you’re reading a montage of moral panic and sensational survival stories – is all of these things. But reading fiction, well, that’s the rescue team which comes striding over the snow crust in tennis-racquet shoes to pull you, gasping and heaving, into light and air and the world. The definitive example of the psychology of evil, the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, wasn’t really a thing. In such a shouty and performative world for our kids, reading fiction is a form of moral silence.

Source: Stuff December 05, 2021 04:30 UTC