Because I Feel Blind

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Deep reading — the kind that you engage in when you get lost in the syntax and imagery and the long, convoluted sentences of a really meaty book — is a special sort of exercise that creates a new part of the brain that did not exist at birth.

“It’s semi-miraculous, really,” said Dr. Wolf, the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University. “We don’t have genes for reading. It’s an activity we invented, and by doing it, we show that our brain has the capacity to go beyond itself, to take all these circuits that were created for oral language or vision, and do something entirely different with them — deduction, critical analysis, imagination, contemplation.”

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Night fell, and the guests began to arrive: artists, politicians, actresses, the old, rich, concerned citizens of Los Angeles, and Wladimir Klitschko, the Ukrainian heavyweight champion…. Teacups of borscht and tiny devilled quails’ eggs went around on trays. Tavi Gevinson, a thirteen-year-old fashion blogger with a small, pale face and Mia Farrow hair, had flown in from Chicago and was dressed in Rodarte. (The Rodarte sisters were her babysitters for the night.) “God—Hamish!” she said, swooning a little when she saw Hamish Bowles, an editor at Vogue. “He’s the coolest.” At the dinner hour, Gevinson took her place, along with Gwen Stefani and Brad Grey, at the table of Dasha Zhukova, a twenty-eight-year-old Russian contemporary-art lover and oligarch’s daughter who was an honorary co-chair of the event. (Roman Abramovich, another art-loving oligarch, is her partner and soon to be the father of her child.)

Performance art was on everybody’s mind.

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