Attentional Stewardship

Attentional stewardship is what Wendy Lesser has been doing for forty years without calling it that: the active, costly, counter-cultural maintenance of the social conditions—a quarterly publication rhythm, personal editorial reading, resistance to engagement metrics—under which the slow, temporally generous attention that genuine literary encounter requires can still happen. Stewardship implies something worth protecting and a threat to it; attentional stewardship recognizes that attention of the right kind is a fragile ecological resource, not a cognitive default, and that an environment saturated with AI-generated content constitutes the most serious threat that capacity has ever faced. The threat is not that AI destroys reading. It is that AI makes a certain kind of reading seem unnecessary: the slow, temporally submissive, potentially boring kind that waits for quality to emerge rather than extracting information from the text's surface. When a machine can summarize any text in seconds, the act of reading it from beginning to end seems not slow but wasteful—and the experience that reading