Is The Odyssey sustaining our attention?

Babylon Bee: Odysseus Finally Returns Home After 20 Years And Oh No! Penelope Is Out Of Baking Powder And Needs Him To Run Out Again Real Quick

Well, Christopher Nolan's screen take on the adventures of Odysseus is prompting a lot of commentary. Friends of mine went to the movie and had a hard time sitting through it. VDH, with his background in the history of this period, offered a great take on the hullabaloo surrounding the film before it even opened. And the Tablet magazine offered both pro and con takes on Christopher Nolan's 'Odyssey': Epic for Our Times or Epic Failure? with lots of detail and opportunity for comment.

And that's just the beginning of the arguments. But does the movie tell us anything else about our culture?

How many people have read the original?

I ran across a YouTube short which stated (without documentation) that our average screen focus has plummeted from 150 seconds to 47 seconds over 20 years. And it provides a reason for this.

But what about page focus?

Michael Smith: Reading vs. Visual Culture

I just finished an interesting book by a favorite author of mine, and I was thinking how mentally engaged I get when I read a book that interests me as contrasted to the passive nature of watching a movie in a theater or from a streaming source. It occurred to me that one of the quiet tragedies of our increasingly online and visually oriented culture is that we are slowly losing one of the greatest gifts reading has to offer: the opportunity to create an entire world inside our own minds.

That may sound like nostalgia talking, but I don’t think it is. It is one of the reasons great literature has survived for centuries while countless spectacular films are forgotten within a few years. Reading is not simply entertainment, it is a full- contact participation sport because when we watch a movie, virtually every creative decision has already been made for us. . .

He suggests that reading, especially great works, involves a collaboration between the author and the reader.

Though maybe some readers take the collaboration a bit too far, ignoring the intent of the author. Did Christopher Nolan take his "collaboration" with the author too far before he put in his version of the Odyssey on the screen?

I think this video by Bill Whittle was recommended in the comments on an earlier post:

Further thoughts from another Substack by Michael Smith: Our Own Odyssey

What if less reading is a symptom, not a cause?

I remember a time when I was in college when I was relating a story about the wisdom of my grandfather, a man who spent his entire life on his farm in rural Mississippi. During the conversation, I used expressions that were perfectly ordinary where I grew up because that was simply the way we communicated. As I talked, I noticed the young lady I was speaking with beginning to look puzzled. She had grown up in a large metropolitan area in the Northeast and, as far as she was concerned, I might as well have been speaking a lost language. . .

That memory came rushing back to me this past week after two seemingly unrelated things crossed my eyeballs. The first was an article in The Atlantic - - yes, The Atlantic, of all places - - titled The End of Reading Is Here by Rose Horowitch. The second was a video shared on "X" by one of my longtime favorites, Mary Katherine Ham.

Here's the video:

I have been saddened by this https://t.co/fVUcGbMpg7

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) July 10, 2026

And here's what the young woman is trying to understand:

Them: "America has no culture."

Ella Langley: "Hold my beer" pic.twitter.com/9Bxvwyms1l

— 🇺🇸 The American Culturist 🇺🇸 (@MericaCulture) July 25, 2026

Back to Michael Smith's Substack:

. . . I don’t think the young woman in Mary Katherine Ham’s video was stupid. I think she was missing tools. Understanding language requires much more than recognizing individual words. It requires background knowledge, sustained attention, abstraction, inference, and an intuitive sense of where another person’s thoughts are headed before they finish the sentence. Those abilities are not genetic gifts. They are cultivated over years of reading, conversation, observation, and participation in a culture where large numbers of people share the same stories, symbols, assumptions, and historical references. Lose enough of those common reference points and communication begins to resemble my college conversation all those years ago, except this time there is no opportunity to notice the confused expression, no chance to rephrase the thought, and no shared experience from which to build a bridge.

I suspect this is where the internet has changed something far more significant than we appreciate. For nearly all of human history, communication happened face to face. If someone misunderstood you, you knew it immediately. You changed your wording, pointed at an object, drew a picture, laughed, gestured, or approached the idea from another direction until understanding emerged. Communication was an ongoing negotiation between human beings. The internet stripped away much of that feedback while simultaneously allowing each of us to inhabit our own algorithmically curated world. Two people born the same year, living in the same city, and speaking the same language can now possess remarkably little shared cultural knowledge because they have spent years consuming entirely different information, entertainment, history, and assumptions. We usually call that political polarization. I think it is something much deeper than politics. We are gradually losing the shared context that makes communication itself possible.

If that is true, then perhaps we have mistaken cause and effect. We commonly assume people stopped reading books and therefore lost the ability to understand complex writing. I wonder if the relationship actually runs in the opposite direction. What if people are reading less because the cognitive environment that once made deep reading rewarding has begun to disappear? Long-form writing assumes readers can hold multiple ideas in their minds simultaneously, recognize historical references without stopping, infer meaning that is implied rather than stated, and connect one paragraph to the next without constant repetition. Those habits develop inside a culture rich with common stories and shared assumptions. As that common culture fragments, long-form reading becomes more difficult and less rewarding. Schools respond by assigning excerpts instead of books. Writers simplify their prose. Publishers shorten their articles. Readers receive even less practice handling complexity, making the next generation of serious reading more difficult still. That isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a feedback loop.

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel has always fascinated me for that reason. Whether you view it as literal history or enduring metaphor, its central lesson isn’t merely that people began speaking different languages, they suddenly lost the ability to coordinate because they no longer shared understanding.

I think this essay is worth reading and thinking about. Maybe even discussing.

Weekend

The Week in Pictures: Long Strange Trip Edition

The long strange trip is, of course, the Odyssey. The Christopher Nolan film dropped, to mixed reactions from conservative reviewers. Along with reviews, it gave rise to a number of entertaining memes. It was a rather slow week, so there were leftover memes–the World Cup, the buffalo, and so on. But the largest number of memes attacked socialism. Socialism has always been a target in meme-world, but with the Democratic Party going full commie, the memes are in overdrive.

Oh, one more thing: the phrase “explosive diarrhea” entered the lexicon.

pic.twitter.com/S4DrytytLE

— 3rdnlong Chiefs' Poet / Songwriter (@Writer3rdnlong) July 17, 2026

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, July 18, Saving the Shire

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway. And don't try to comment on Ace's follow-up yesterday: If you really want to destroy civilization in a hurry, go to the very heart of the human experience -- family and mating -- and destroy that.