Podcasts Aren’t as Smart as You Think

People are willing to do almost anything other than read at length. It requires patience: an atrophied muscle in the smartphone age. At the same time, no one relishes being ignorant or incurious. The desire for self-improvement out there is real. One way of squaring these opposing impulses — the bibliophobic, the aspirational — is to give things that aren’t books the intellectual status of books.