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W : Dr. Green, congratulations on the success of your new book ! We learn-ed that it has been translated into 30 languages--English, of course,French, German, Japanese, Chinese, and so on.
M: Thanks, Helen.
W: Well, could you tell us what this popular book is about?
M: It' s called In Praise of Slow : It' s about how the world got stuck in fast-forward, and how more and more people everywhere are slowing down. In other words, it' s about the rise of the Slow Movement.
W: What is the Slow Movement?
M: It is a revolution against the idea that faster is always better. When I say "slow", I don' t mean doing everything slowly. It' s about doing eve-rything as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible. It' s about quality in everything we do.
W: When and where was this "slow" idea born?
M: It was born in the early 1990s in Italy. It began as the Slow Food Move-ment, which centered on food. More recently, “slow ” has become popular worldwide.
W: Have we reached the point of trying to speed up something that cannot really be sped up?
M: Of course. The Internet connects us in wonderful ways, but it also leads us into trying to hurry up relationships. So you find people online say-ing they have more than 4,000 friends. The very idea of friendship is not considered important. And we may be losing the ability to make friends. In Britain, a study found that in the past ten years, the number of children who say they have no best friend rose from under one in eight to nearly one in five!