Award-winning magazine The American Scholar has been publishing interesting essays on a wide range of topics since 1932. Now with an accessible web site that helps even more people discover information on subjects they may never have even thought of, The American Scholar provides essays, book reviews, fiction and non-fiction writing that encourage people to think, to explore, and to read. 7 Speed Reading talked to editor Robert Wilson recently about the magazine and the articles he chooses for publication.

7SR: When The American Scholar was first published, there was no such thing as a “10-second sound byte” or a 140-character limit on communication. What keeps people coming back to longer, in-depth articles and discussions in today’s amped-up, abbreviated world?

RW: My experience as a journalist goes back long before Twitter and indeed before the web, and for as long as I can remember this question of the reader’s attention span has been argued. The answer is that there will always be some readers who don’t want to read longer pieces and some who do. Look at the best-seller lists: many people clearly read long books in all formats. My sense is that the jumble of the web and of other modern media make certain readers hunger for pieces that can make a sustained argument, or that try to make sense of things. Not all readers, clearly, but enough.

7SR: Recent issues of the magazine have covered topics ranging from apartment hunting in modern Manhattan to a 19th-century British explorer to how laughter might help us understand the brain – that’s quite different from the specialized magazines that focus on one thing (cats, cooking, cars). How do you choose the articles for each issue?

RW: I’ve often told the editors with whom I’ve worked that my goal is to never be useful to the reader. If you want to know how to groom your cat, please go elsewhere. We seek merely to engage, to entertain, and perhaps occasionally to enlighten our readers. What a general-interest magazine such as ours can do, I hope, is fight RSS thinking. That is, we hope to make our readers interested in or think about subjects that they didn’t know they wanted to read about. We simply choose articles that interest us, that feel fresh, and that are well argued and well written.

7SR: You became the magazine’s editor in 2004, and two new features have been added since then: fiction writing in each issue, and a web site to go along with the printed publication. Were these your ideas?

RW: We started publishing fiction when a friend suggested that we ought to do it because The Atlantic had stopped publishing fiction in its regular issues. (They’ve since started again.) By the time I became editor, it was embarrassing for a publication not to have a web site. So yes, I got ours rolling.

7SR: Book reviews are a regular feature of the magazine, and they’re a good way to get ideas about what books to read next. Do you generally read the books that are reviewed in your magazine?

RW: I often read in a number of books as we decide what to review or as we look for possible excerpts. And someone on the staff—usually our book-review editor, Bruce Falconer—has read at least part of each book we assign. But no, I don’t generally read all the books we review.

7SR: If readers find they’re particularly interested in one topic, can they request more information or more articles in future issues?

RW: We’re eager to hear from readers, but once we cover a particular subject we are not likely to go back to it again anytime soon. Search engines have pretty much eliminated the need for readers to come to us for more information, but when they do we are happy to accommodate them.