“The study isn’t able to determine if the empathy gained through reading is ever applied. “Which means that a reader might shove an elderly woman in the gutter and walk on her back to avoid getting his shoes wet, and the only difference between him and a non-reader would be that he’d better understand what that elderly meat bridge was feeling while she burbled away in torrent of melted bus runoff. “Is unused empathy stored up in the Think Bank worth writing articles about? Probably not.” Today at @litreactor, a column about why reading science is mostly nonsense, and also a message about why reading doesn’t have to make you a good person.