There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.
Most people's major life changes don't come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed.
This may sound a little West Texan to you, but I like it. When I'm talking about.. when I'm talking about myself, and when he's talking about myself, all of us are talking about me.
... Waiter! raw beef-steak for the gentleman's eye,-nothing like raw beef-steak for a bruise, sir; cold lamp-post very good, but lamp-post inconvenient-damned odd standing in the open street half-an-hour, with your eye against a lamp.
A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.