Almost every piece of media people consume, every purchase they make, every design they confront lives on a continuum between fluency and disfluency—ease of thinking and difficulty of thinking. Most people lead lives of quiet fluency. They listen to music that sounds like the music they’ve already heard. They look forward to movies with characters, actors, and plots that they recognize. They don’t heed political ideas from opposing parties, particularly if these ideas also seem painfully complicated. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this is a shame, because the greatest joys often come from
...more
