| Phone apps now offer to boil down entire books into micro-synopses. What they leave out is revealing.  Illustration by Vivek Thakker If you’re inclined to treat the phrase “knowledge management” as roughly synonymous with the word “reading,” then you might be drawn to Blinkist, an app based out of Berlin that distills full-length books into “Blinks”: digestible summaries in the form of written or audio content. As Anthony Lane writes in his deep dive into this world of truncation, the greatest enemy to book reading these days is the smartphone, so “why not collaborate with our captors and see what comes of it?” Plus, abridgment is a time-worn practice, and can teach us something about the moment in which we live. “Literary eras show their true selves when they decide what is worthy of encapsulation,” Lane writes, “and also in the prejudices that prevail, by no means consciously, when the blade is applied to the meat of a given text.” And there are practical realities to consider as well. “Since I’m fated to doomscroll anyway,” he writes, “I might as well channel that itchy-thumbed habit into browsing a Blink of Eric Schlosser’s ‘Command and Control.’ Or ‘Chernobyl,’ by Serhii Plokhy. Or something on Fukushima. Get me some real doom.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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