This is written for someone with a higher reading level than me. I skimmed the first few paragraphs and have no idea what it is about beyond the title.
One way to approach this work is to understand the genre of the work you are reading! We can determine genre in a few ways, but in this case, we see that the publication is the New Yorker, which tells us to expect magazine-style writing, specifically longer form feature pieces.
Another important clue is that this is published in the New Yorker's "Books" section, suggesting that this is a book review. And, if you know much about the New Yorker's book reviews, they often include things such as history of the field the book addresses, compares the book to other related books, and what the book's thesis might imply about our world today.
This longer form book review can introduce important context and enrich your understanding of the world! I encourage you to keep an open mind and continue to read pieces that are outside of your usual genre.
That said, like some college level reading, it definitely meanders a bit, is a little self-important and feels padded with unnecessary filler, and is just only somewhat but ultimately not deeply interesting unless you are already pretty interested in how tales of the devil featured in medieval Europe. It's ok. I didn't finish it. If you misspoke and meant you didn't feel like reading it, but certainly could have comprehended it, then never mind I guess
But again, this isn't personal-- but if you are a successful educated software engineer who genuinely finds this beyond your reading level, your reading level is low for your station in life. It will limit your rise. Take it as an insult if you like though I don't mean it that way or else a wake up call.
The reason I dare stick my fingers into this fire and possibly offend you is, there is a trend of "educated" people who know science but completely skipped humanities, and thus have huge blind spots. My real audience for this comment is other people who will be encouraged to value the ability to read obtuse things and write clearly, to understand history and literature. And if you are picking a college for your kids, check out the readings for some classes. If they are not expected to easily be able to read something at this level, then it's a waste of money unless it's very cheap.
The deskilling continues. "What can be expected of a man who has spent 20 years putting heads on pins?"
PS: I am not that old. I was in the college class '11 at an average small liberal arts college with an over 60% acceptance rate. I was not exceptional. I think the deskilling has accelerated very greatly and very recently.
You make a very good point. I am starting to hear things along the lines of "But it's normal that some people learn better from videos" and "Why are you gatekeeping this knowledge" and even here you increasingly see references to videos that are much lower detail but higher time commitment summaries of writing that has much more detail available yet could be consumed, skimmed, etc more quickly than sitting through a video that your eyes have no ability to skip around, rushing past the irrelevant and dwelling on the relevant, without ever having to click a button.
They already invented telepathic interfaces -- books.
A succinct encapsulation of the problem is that the total "signal" of civilization is now being eclipsed exponentially, in all sorts of ways, by "noise". Some people say we're heading towards singularity, and others towards collapse; either way I'm confident we'll live to see some sort of great Reckoning, because I don't see how the generations after Millennial can sustain the current setup and weight of civilization.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-...
2: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s....
Or, lately, pasting into ChatGPT, I suppose. There's a thought: I wonder if I could develop a style that's consistent with the rules of English grammar and reads naturally to the fluent, but is also too complex for LLMs to reliably summarize. It'd be a pure gimmick, of course, but it still might be fun to play around with...
(You also suggest my use of "fluent" begs the wrong question. How so? Not every thought is trivial of expression, or we'd need no words but the commonest ten hundred.)
(NP-hard so.) Two words, answering directly yet explaining nothing. Shibboleths and CAPTCHAs are illusionary protection (and really exclusionary).
It's not that I don't understand the temptation otherwise. But those are sent to be mastered, I heard.
Scarlet Letter was important among the limited works that could afford to be published. It touches on important idea. But it's stilted language of a different society isn't better than modern language. Just as we don't consider Nathaniel Hawthorne stupid because he wouldn't easily understand a modern sentence like "An open source platform for building a writing space on the web."
Except it's much much easier because it's almost the same language, only a very, very, very slightly different dialect, that uses words that are still used, just a slightly different distribution of which are popular. Read a book or two from the 19th century and you'll find the rest easy.
When you admit that this is impenetrable to you you are admitting you've never tried for very long.
Not a single word in that sentence is uncommon today other than "edifice" (though any romance language speaker would understand it), as well as the fact that the average urbanite today does not know the names of many common weeds (but context makes that irrelevant)
Nathanial Hawthorne had no ability to converse with the future, but we have the ability, if we choose it, and a responsibility, to understand the past, so we can learn from it and make good choices in the future.
> No longer open to the pressing torque of divinities and djinns, we moderns are closed off and shut down, buffered and buttressed, marching efficiently through our merely material world, grim-faced assassins of mystery.
You could say instead: "Since the Enlightenment people believe in magic less."
Come on, "buffered and buttressed", really?!
This article is one close to my heart but the pompous writing put me off.