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.

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.

There’s been a flood of handwringing op-eds lately about how glassy-eyed mobile-phone zombies are ignoring each other at the restaurant instead of talking to another another. I think these pundits are somewhat overblowing the frequency of this behavior, frankly. Very similar alarms were raised about the wave of supposedly society-ending isolation that would wreaked by previous newfangled media — like the telephone in the late 19th century, and the Walkman in the 80s. We didn’t suffer a social apocalypse then, and I don’t think we’re going to suffer one now.

That said, I actually think the op-ed handwringing is useful in its own way. It’s part of how a society creates social codes around new technologies. When mobile phones inched into the mainstream in the 90s, people who bought them used to answer them, every single time they rang, whenever and wherever they rang: At the dinner table, at the funeral, while having sex. It took about a decade of this behavior peaking before society collectively began to realize this was kind of terrible behavior, and we starting poking fun at it — you saw lots of jokes about it, like that “inconsiderate cell phone man” ad that used to run before movies. And eventually we moved away from the behavior. We’re probably in the middle of this curve with social media.

Peter Lloyd writes When anyone bemoans the death of letter writing, perhaps I should direct the conversation to letter reading. Who reads them?, gives a shocking example, and suggests several sources to follow up.

I sent hand-written letters to several colleagues at a digital marketing agency. None of them read my missives. The letters arrived but languished in mailroom pigeon holes. “I don't ever go get my snail-mail,” one of my addressees explained, when I asked him if he had received my traditional letter. I meant for it to stand out from all the electronic messages I know he receives.

Another statement, Letters may prove more thoughtful and intimate, but it's stimulation variety we seem to crave today, sees to echo Sherry Turkle's op-ed earlier this week.