Given that the attention-span of the average person these days seems to be less than that of a brain-damaged mayfly, it's unsurprising. Reading nuanced analysis requires concentration above all. My grandkids can't seem to play the same game on their tablets/phones for more than five minutes together before they're changing to another oone!

I put a lot of it at the door of a failing education system - on both sides of the pond. Here, they seem to have abandoned timetabling at Primary Schools and in too many schools the 'teacher' is more of a facilitator or moderator than an educator. All of this has put paid to the ability to sit still and listen, as well as the idea of doing ones' own work. The idea now is group o team working - what we used to call 'copying' and used to get whacked for! This, along with the refusal to make kids memorise things like poems and mutiplication tables has given us a generation or three with butterfly minds and left Universities and employers having to teach adults skills they should have learned before they were 11!