We See from the Periphery, Not the Center: Reflections on Literature in an Age of Crisis, Alfred Kazin:
"How in 1977 can any great book help me to live better, I who am a creature of anxiety, involved against my will in all twentieth-century injustices and cruelties? How can Kafka relieve me of guilt, he who knew as a Jew even before the Nazis murdered his sisters, since powerlessness is a crime that invites exploitation, that "not the murderer but the victim is considered guilty"? How can Proust, who died to the world in order to live again through his great book retracing the past-how can he relieve me of my dread of death, when I can no longer accept the next world, the world of imagination, promised to me by his last-minute discovery of art in the volume Time Recaptured? But these are rhetorical questions whose emptiness I do not wish to conceal.
Because no book has enabled anyone to live better. The influence of any book on my consciousness is necessarily intermittent, a flash, a hope, an illusion, a picture. No more than any other external agent can a book effect a transformation that lasts.
What a great literary work does do for me is to clear my mind, to rearrange the order of my thinking, to show me, in the immortal words of Porgy and Bess, that "it ain't necessarily so." The real power of a literary work consists in presenting us with alternatives. If the work is emotionally effective enough, it can be an antidote to our usual mental confinement. It is the vision of another mind, another way of thinking, not a lasting way out."
I don't have a standard definition, I just spend time browsing for articles and essays that are aligned with whatever is top of mind at the moment. I might the weird one here, but I think my JSTOR subscription is worth every penny. The variety of content, along with the quality of publications is generally excellent. I stumbled on ETC: A Review of General Semantics recently and I've printed a bunch of articles and essays from their publications, dating back to the 60's. It's good stuff!
I am very much a fan of the printed word. I've been thinking about it like this: Online, text delivers itself to you, almost always in short-form streams, everything is ephemeral. With a physical book, you have to bring yourself to the text. Language, dialog, form, typography all come together on the page in a way that is highly satisfying. The act of reading printed pages is an "event" of sorts.
I don't read much of anything online these days. Most "reading" environments treat you as a user, not a reader. Poor typography, endless scrolling, and an endless supply of content that isn't worth reading in the first place. So I mostly consume text on screen only so that I can accomplish tasks. In other words, "reading" online is a means to an end.
All that said, if I stumble on a long form piece of writing that looks interesting, I'll print it!
"How in 1977 can any great book help me to live better, I who am a creature of anxiety, involved against my will in all twentieth-century injustices and cruelties? How can Kafka relieve me of guilt, he who knew as a Jew even before the Nazis murdered his sisters, since powerlessness is a crime that invites exploitation, that "not the murderer but the victim is considered guilty"? How can Proust, who died to the world in order to live again through his great book retracing the past-how can he relieve me of my dread of death, when I can no longer accept the next world, the world of imagination, promised to me by his last-minute discovery of art in the volume Time Recaptured? But these are rhetorical questions whose emptiness I do not wish to conceal.
Because no book has enabled anyone to live better. The influence of any book on my consciousness is necessarily intermittent, a flash, a hope, an illusion, a picture. No more than any other external agent can a book effect a transformation that lasts.
What a great literary work does do for me is to clear my mind, to rearrange the order of my thinking, to show me, in the immortal words of Porgy and Bess, that "it ain't necessarily so." The real power of a literary work consists in presenting us with alternatives. If the work is emotionally effective enough, it can be an antidote to our usual mental confinement. It is the vision of another mind, another way of thinking, not a lasting way out."
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40133281