A New Way to Read

Montaigne's library still stands in southwestern France. If you visit, you can see the beams where he inscribed his favorite quotations: lines from Lucretius, Horace, the Stoics. His books were filled with notes in the margins, arguments with authors long dead, conversations that never ended.

He understood something essential: reading isn't passive. It's a dialogue. And the best things are built together.

Not in isolation. But through conversation, by listening to what you need, what frustrates you, what sparks your imagination.

The ancient Library of Alexandria was a living network of scholars, scribes, and seekers, all shaping knowledge together. We believe the digital Alexandria should be no different.

This week, we're excited to share two changes that came directly from you. Both are about making reading and learning feel the way they should: seamless, beautiful, and worthy of the great books themselves.

These changes came from you. Your feedback. Your "what ifs." Your vision of what this library could become. So thank you. For reading. For thinking. For telling us what matters. The next brick may be yours. Have thoughts on what we've built? We'd love to hear from you.

1. Reading Reimagined

Reading is at the core of everything we do. It's why we're here. Why we believe in libraries and lifelong learning. Why we inspire us all to read more, think deeply, and have better conversations.

For too long, our "standard reading mode" felt like a relic: like reading scans from a university library's fax machine.

Functional, yes. But not beautiful. Not worthy of the experience we imagined.

We've completely reimagined it.

Taking inspiration from Lightning mode, Standard reading is now a continuous, seamless experience. The text flows naturally. The pages turn smoothly. And of course, Virgil is always there beside you, ready to explore whatever catches your attention.

Reading should feel like a conversation with the author, not a battle with the interface.

2. A Home for Conversations

You told us you wanted an easy way to return to your chats with Virgil. A place where the questions that mattered, the insights that surprised you, the moments worth revisiting—all lived together. A place to easily pick up where you left off.

We created a new section in the Study for your conversations with Virgil.

It's a dedicated space in your library where all your conversations with Virgil are preserved. No more searching. No more lost threads. Just your dialogues, ready when you need them.

Because the best conversations don't end when you close the page. They echo. They grow. They become part of how you think.

Lightning Mode

Dear Readers,

From Nietzsche's Daybreak: "It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist... one has to be slow, deep, careful. But precisely thereby the book invites its reader to the opposite of haste... For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow."

Our heroes wrote this way on purpose. They crafted sentences meant to be lingered over, considered, felt. They weren't writing for an age of hurry. They were writing for minds willing to slow down.

This is why we built Lightning Mode.

With every book in Alexandria, you can read sentence by sentence. One line at a time. No rushing ahead, no scrolling past what matters. Just you and the words, at your own pace.

It's a small feature, but it changes everything. When you're reading Seneca or Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, each sentence is already complete—a thought you can hold, turn over, test against your own experience. Lightning Mode honors that. It lets you focus. It removes the pressure to consume and replaces it with permission to absorb.

In an age of haste, slow reading becomes a radical act. Not a retreat, but a choice. A way of saying: this matters enough to take my time.

Our heroes wrote slowly, carefully, with delicate fingers and eyes. Lightning Mode is our way of helping you read the same way—slowly, profoundly, attentively. One sentence at a time. At the speed of thought.

Share What Moves You

This week, we want to celebrate something we hear from you constantly: the desire to share what moves you.

The classics were crafted with care. Every line tells a story. And when a passage strikes you—when it crystallizes something you've been thinking or feeling—that moment deserves to be shared.

Now it can be.

You can share any quote that inspires you while you're reading and instantly start a group conversation. You, Virgil, and anyone you want to grow with—all in one space, exploring the ideas that matter most.

Sharing is caring. And since a picture is worth a thousand words, we've built beautiful share previews so your favorite passages stand out. The words that moved you can now move others.

Virginia Woolf once wrote, "The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions."

But she also knew that the best conversations begin when we share what we've discovered.

Together, we're proving that wisdom doesn't have to live in solitude. It can spark conversations, build connections, and grow in the space between minds.

What will you share first?

Here's how it works

You're deep in the work of Jean Paul Sartre when a line stops you cold. "Man is condemned to be free." You highlight it, click share, and we generate a beautiful preview card with your quote. Send it to anyone. When they click, they land on a conversation page where you, Virgil, and anyone you've invited can dive into what that passage means—together.

The Republic of the Mind

America began with a wager. The founders believed democracy could endure only if citizens could think for themselves. They bet that the wisdom once reserved for aristocracies — the texts, traditions, and debates that shaped civilizations — could become a shared inheritance.

Jefferson built the Library of Congress to make that vision real. Franklin founded the first subscription library so tradesmen and apprentices could access the books shaping public life. Lincoln, born to illiterate parents, taught himself Euclid by firelight to sharpen his reasoning and prepare himself for history’s burdens.

This was the wager: that free institutions could rest on free minds.

For nearly two centuries, we rose to meet it. We built libraries and universities. We passed the Morrill Land-Grant Acts to fund public colleges. We created the GI Bill and sent millions to study literature, law, and philosophy. Knowledge became infrastructure. Learning became civic.

But something has broken.

Literacy is collapsing, even among elites. Students read less, write less, and comprehend less than any generation before them. Trust in universities has eroded. The American university, once the flagship of civic education, has become an institution many no longer trust.

Alex Karp describes it as technocracy without philosophy. Millennials grew up on “Don’t be evil,” but lacked the courage or conviction to articulate a moral vision. Across Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington, people master technique but avoid developing a point of view. Controversy is evaded.

Meanwhile, our attention has shattered. TikTok has compressed thought into seconds. Once-fringe relativism has migrated from seminar rooms into the bloodstream of institutions and media. Truth is treated as optional. Authority fractured. Philosophy, at its worst, has been hollowed into jargon or politicized spectacle. The hunger for meaning hasn’t gone away — it’s gone sideways. Prayer apps are booming. Astrology is viral. Pseudo-spiritual influencers command millions of followers. Twain’s quip cuts deeper than ever: a classic is a book everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read.

We have more access to knowledge than at any point in human history. But access without orientation fails. PDFs don’t make you a participant. Google search doesn’t make you a citizen. TikTok clips don’t give you wisdom. The past has become a foreign country, and most Americans have lost the passport.

Some fear AI will replace teachers, students, and thinkers. Others hope it will spoon-feed us culture until struggle disappears. Both are wrong: the struggle is the point. Meaning emerges in tension, in dialogue, in wrestling with difficulty. AI, used well, restores that struggle.

For centuries, the frameworks that shaped minds were gated or inherited. Today, we stand at the threshold of something new: tools that do more than deliver information, tools capable of reviving the very habits of inquiry and judgment that once defined civic life.

That is why my company, Lightning, digitally re-built The Great Library of Alexandria, a collection of 4,000 of the greatest books ever written. But access is only the beginning. So we created Virgil, a Socratic AI guide to help you think about what’s in those books. Virgil doesn’t give lectures from a podium or impose a single interpretation. A fourteen-year-old homeschooler and an eighty-year-old retiree can read the same passage of Augustine, and Virgil will guide each differently.

Universities may rise or fall, but the hunger for meaning endures. The canon, once aristocratic, is now accessible as living dialogue. Paradoxically, it is technology that will restore philosophy to its original place: not as an academic discipline, not as a credential, but as a practice and way of life.

The stakes extend far beyond education. A free society cannot survive without citizens capable of independent thought. Keeping it free requires more than access to information. It requires the capacity to wrestle with ideas, to form a point of view, to apply wisdom to life. For the first time, we can democratize depth without flattening it.

The founders’ wager is unfinished. And will require as much cultural fortitude as technological innovation. America was built on the belief that free institutions require free minds. That promise has frayed, but it can be renewed.

This is working intelligence for the American mind. And the work is only beginning.

Notifications

This week, we want to share something small but meaningful: notifications.

Think of them as gentle taps on the shoulder. A passage that speaks to your day. A question worth pondering. An idea that might spark the conversation you've been meaning to have.

Emerson once walked miles to Concord to discuss a single idea with Thoreau. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien met weekly at The Eagle and Child, letters flying between meetings. Seneca sent his friend Lucilius carefully timed letters, each one an invitation to think differently.

These weren't interruptions. They were instigations. Reminders that the best ideas live in dialogue. That's what we hope these notifications can be for you: a signal, a spark, a timely passage or chat. A thought-provoking question. An excuse to reach out to someone in your community.

We don't want to add to the noise. What we want is to create moments worth pausing for. The classics have always been about conversation. Now, they can remind you when it's time to start one.

We'd love to hear how these land for you. As always, we're building this with you, and we're grateful for the community.