There’s a student publication at the University of Chicago that gets delivered to the Flamingo every Thursday, so I read it. The past two years, it looked like a newspaper — masthead, several stories on the front page. I liked it. Now it has gone the way of everything designed to appeal to youth — a big, pointless, out-of-context photo on the front, with the contents at the bottom in as few words as possible. Words! No one can stand words any more! Someone in a meeting with me said the biggest turnoff for him on a Web site is “too many words.” He’s in his mid-40s. Is it my generation that’s decided reverting to communicating through the equivalent of cave paintings is chic?

What other animal writes?

How have we come to hate words?

Especially when there are billions of them online?