Why Can't the Kids Read?

It’s always a painful pleasure coming across a research paper that confirms one’s worst suspicions about reality. We all live in small worlds, and that’s how we like it. The agony lurking behind our day-to-day routines is intractable, and most people prefer to keep their eyes on the things they know. Philip Larkin has a grim couple of lines about a rabbit that’s dying in a rabbit pandemic: “You may have thought things would come right again / If you could only keep quite still and wait.” That rabbit is most of us, I’m afraid. Granted, the shrieking lunatics who populate the news cycle are more like demons than like rabbits, but a metaphor can only do so much.