The screen glowed. Another night, another half-dozen articles skimmed, their insights swirling down the drain. The information age. The irony was not lost. Somewhere, Nicholas Carr was likely sharpening his blade, ready to carve another inscription on the tombstone of our dwindling attention spans.

Efficiency, distillation—these are the watchwords of our time. Executive summaries for the boardroom, but what about the soul? Can Proust be haiku-ed? Foucault shrunk to a shot glass? Heresy, perhaps. Or progress.

From this digital deluge, Read For Me emerged. A scalpel, not a bludgeon. Feed it an article, an essay, even a YouTube lecture—the denser the better. It strips away the scaffolding, the rhetorical flourishes, leaving the bare bones of argument. A list of key ideas. Pithy quotes. Further reading, if you’re so inclined.

Most books should be blog posts, went the old adage. Most blog posts, mere tweets. This is the logic of Read For Me, distilled. A shot of espresso before the banquet, a clearing in the digital jungle. I built it, and I use it, daily.

Skeptics abound, of course. What about nuance? Bias? The algorithms, those invisible hands on the scales of thought? Valid concerns. But we already consume news through filters, our social media feeds curated by ghosts in the machine. “Read For Me” is merely making the implicit explicit.

The real question: Can we retain a capacity for critical thought when information is pre-digested? Or will we, weaned on this diet of intellectual fast food, forget the taste of a real meal?

The tide of information, like the ocean, cares nothing for our anxieties. We are left to navigate, to find our own meaning in the flood. Read For Me is one tool, among many. A tool I use to stay afloat.