Spritz

So there’s a new app, Spritz, that facilitates speed reading, empowering readers to? consume 450 page novels in 90 minutes.? Time-deprived obsessive compulsives with night tables buckling under the weight of the last decade’s Bookers may rejoice.? And students behind in their syllabi, too.? But if you’re a lover of the special happy place that reading takes you that is decidedly neither completely here nor there, that intellectual savasana you attain before you fall asleep with your face smooshed into a kindle or proper volume, the words s-l-o-w-i-n-g? down as you go, this trip is not for you, my friend.

Basically rather than wasting your time moving your eyes from one word to another, Spritz gives you text one word at a time, at exactly the same point on your screen, with a little red dot to help you focus on the letter which sends the most information to your brain about what you’re looking at. You control how fast the words come. (Caveat: it’s hard to resist having them come faster and faster.) Fasten your seatbelt and try it here.

A friend says it feels like this:

Then like this.

Laura George @lgeorge353?