Joe Weisenthal, co-host of Bloomberg's Odd Lots Podcast, posted on his Twitter page - @TheStalwart - something that stopped me: "I suspect a lot of people have felt this. Like their attention spans are shot. Like it's increasingly rare to make it all the way to the bottom of a piece of text."
The difficulty isn't personal failure, it's structural.
Digital is a fire hydrant. Print is a water dropper.
And right now, the hydrant is open all the way.
We're living through the unwinding of 80 years of globalization and multilateral relations. Every day brings another headline that would have been the defining story of a decade. Layer on top of that a flood of AI-generated content, fast and frictionless but rarely good enough to earn your full focus, and you get a media environment that trains your brain to skim rather than settle.
When I pick up a book or a magazine, something shifts.
I can still focus. I can still go deep. The words don't move. The page doesn't refresh. Nobody is bidding for the next three seconds of my eyeballs.
The problem isn't that we've lost the capacity for attention. It's that we've built an information environment that actively punishes it. The people best positioned to notice this, and to do something about it, are the ones who design the platforms, fund the companies, and set the editorial standards that shape how the rest of us consume the world.
If the most informed, most connected people in business and civic life are struggling to read to the bottom of a page, what does that mean for the quality of the decisions being made at the top?
-Marc
You can always reach me @ marc@brigadoon.live.
+ Brigadoon organizes gatherings for founders, investors, journalists, doctors, designers, architects, and civic leaders. No PowerPoints, no panels, no name tags. Just a deliberately varied group in conversation, with radical curiosity as the only agenda, and an honest acknowledgment that the ROI is unknown, and that is exactly the point. More @ www.brigadoon.live.
April 1, 2026
