Awarding the number 3 spot on its best restaurant list to Komi, Washingtonian wrote

We say this is the restaurant that has taught Washingtonians that a meal is a chance to stash the phone and slow down. A night at this rowhouse is a leisurely affair, moving from a series of small plates that consumes a good hour and all but encourages conversation.

It's a good trick if the restaurant can persuade Washintonians to set their devices aside. Too bad that leisure comes with a price tag: Komi gets a very expensive rating, too. Still...

Conversely, there was talk this year about the benefits of an activity that’s in some ways the antithesis of texting and tweeting with their rat-tat-tat rhythm. That activity is the reading of fiction. According to some researchers, people who settle into it are more empathetic — more attuned to what those around them think and feel — than people who don’t...

But I’d bet big on real reading, fiction or nonfiction, as a prompt for empathy and a whole lot more: coolheadedness, maybe even open-mindedness, definitely deliberation. It doesn’t just yank you outside of yourself, making you consider other viewpoints without allowing for the incessant interjection and exaltation of your own. It slackens the pace. Forces a pause.

Via Literary Jukebox, a quote from George Eliot at the end of the year.

While the heart beats, bruise it — it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition — make haste — oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.

George Eliot in The Lifted Veil .

You wouldn't expect to discover a resin to unplug while you were on a return trip from the South Pole, but that's exactly what happened to Ben and Tarka: we rely on technology too much.

We seem to have passed through a weird Bermuda Triangle up here near the Pole; our satellite tracking beacon is on the blink and has turned itself off twice now, with a battery indicator that goes from full to flat in a few minutes, and our spare GPS (a little Garmin Gecko) conked out a few days ago and needed a hard reset that deleted all its waypoints. In addition, our main GPS was giving us some very wonky magnetic bearings to follow as we approached the Pole, but it seems to have sorted its act out now. It's quite alarming to realise how much faith we have in these tiny gadgets, and how utterly reliant we are on them to find our depots on the way home.

I kept a vigil for the mail. I would sit in the bay window of our living room, reading a book and keeping an ear out for the engine of the mail carrier’s jeep. Or I would hurry home from school, eager to see if any blue missives waited for me at command central, our dining room table.

But I worry about the loss of the physical manifestation of this correspondence. I know I could print my favorites, but printed typescript simply does not convey the sense of a person the way my decades-old letters did: coffee stains, for instance, or the small curve of my grandmother’s script. And e-mails are just too easy to pop off and can be so abrupt. I remember the rambling letters I once exchanged with friends; sometimes it took several drafts to get something just right. The ritual of collecting the mail meant something, too, as did my sense that, in holding a letter, I was holding the letter writer.