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At Edward Jones, we believe rich isn't about having life all figured out, it's opening yourself to all the possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial advisor provides long term planning built around you, meeting you where you are and helping you get closer to where you want to be. So no matter where you're starting from, you can move forward with confidence. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find you're rich. Edward Jones Member, SIPC this episode is
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brought to you by Lincoln Too Many Summer Plans End in maybe Next Year the Lincoln Summer Sales event is on now, making this the time to go watch the sunrise through the available Panoramic Vista roof in the Lincoln Navigator Picnic from the available Lincoln Split Gate. Then go somewhere new guided by the available 48 inch panoramic display. Visit your Lincoln retailer today with or learn more@lincoln.com Reading in America is shrinking. The share of Americans who read for pleasure declined by 43% in the last 20 years, while Americans today might see more words than ever. Between all those texts and posts and emails and captions, less than half of Americans read books anymore. The average sentence in New York times bestsellers are 1/3 shorter than they were 100 years ago. Americans can swallow words and sentences today, but they're losing the ability to think deeply about writing that's any longer than an Instagram post. Nearly 30% of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multi page text. In 2017, that number was less than 20%. This is all worst for the young 4th and 8th grade reading scores have slid in the past decade. Between 1984 and 2025, the percentage of 13 year olds who said they rarely or never read for Fun increased from 8 to 29%. That's a lot of numbers. And for those of us who are not reading this text because in fact you are listening to a podcast, you might need some kind of simple mnemonic, even kind of sing songy summary of everything that I just said. So consider this. Reading is in decline. Reading complexity is in decline. Reading comprehension is in decline. Now you're listening to a podcast here or you're watching a video of a podcast. So you are by definition not reading. Unless maybe you're like looking at the captions underneath the video that you're watching. So it's not as if I think that reading is the only good way to accumulate information. I would never make a podcast if I thought that. But reading and writing are very special to me. They are a distinct and powerful way to transmit information. There's no way I could possibly do my job if I couldn't read and write. I write something down and then that allows me to create distance from my ideas. It allows me to create more abstract and complex ideas because I can write something down and then walk away and then come back to it with a fresh set of eyes. Then compare it with this other thing that I wrote. Writing and reading are special. The problem today is not just that we read less. I think it would be simplistic and maybe even stupid to suggest that you can assess the intelligence of a person or their thoughts by just taking some survey of how much information they get from paragraphs versus podcasts versus documentaries. TikTok what interests me most is at the kind of thinking that is enmeshed in the act of reading and writing, complex thinking, deep understanding that is clearly in decline. The decline of reading is shaping our minds and it's shaping our politics. It's affecting not only today's students, but also our corporate and political elite as well. Today's guest is Rose Horowitz, the author of the Atlantic's latest cover story, the End of Reading is Here. We talk about the decline of reading, the rise and fall of literacy, and the consequences of our post literate world. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Rose Horowitz, welcome back to the show.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Rose, your story begins with this absolutely devastating cavalcade of statistics about the decline of reading in America. I want you to just start with two numbers. Like what are the two figures that you consider most consequential and most disturbing?
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So I think the first comes from the American Time Use Survey, which asks, you know, 236,000Americans how they spent the prior day and how they spent their time. And that found that the share of people who read a book or an article on any given day declined by 40% over the past 20 years. And then, you know, similarly, I think this National Endowment for the Arts, they conduct a survey where they ask Americans, you know, did you read a book in the past year? And, you know, in 2022, which is the last year that they've released that data, for fewer than half of all Americans had read a book in the prior year, and that was a book of any kind. And only 38% had read a novel or short story. And in my piece, I juxtaposed that against the share that had gambled in the past year. You know, last year, 57% of Americans placed a bet. And so gambling is now a more common and popular leisure activity than reading.
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And I want to be clear, the story is not just dry statistics. There's some quite morbidly funny anecdotes and examples of the decline of literacy. In one study, students were asked to explain what's happening at the beginning of the Charles Dickens book Bleak House, which opens with this description of London roads that are so muddy that Dickens can imagine a dinosaur walking down the roads. I'm just gonna read the opening sentences of Bleak House to you, and then I'd love you to tell me what students reaction to the opening of Charles Dickens Bleak House was and what this tells us about the state of reading. Here's how Bleak House begins. Quote, London, Michael Mast term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather, as much mud in the streets as if the water had but newly retired from the face of the earth. And it would not be wonderful to meet a megalosaurus 40ft long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. End quote. Basically, it seems like students had no freaking idea what's going on in these sentences. And I wonder, maybe just give us a little more texture on this study and what is it telling us about the state of reading in high school and college that students basically can't read Dickens anymore?
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Yeah, so this study was of students at some regional universities in Kansas. They were English and English education majors. And yeah, the researchers asked them to read, you know, the first seven paragraphs and talk about what happened in it. And, you know, one thing that was really interesting was that the students really struggled to differentiate between literal and figurative language. You know, in that passage that you cited, a lot of them thought, or some of them thought that, you know, there actually was a dinosaur in 19th century London. And, you know, similarly, they later describe, you know, this man addressed by an advocate with large whiskers. And students, one student thought that that was a cat. And so only 5% of the students, you know, who were studied had a sort of detailed, literal understanding of what they read. And what's so interesting about that is that they were given access to the entire Internet during this. So they didn't either didn't know or didn't understand or sort of didn't put the effort in to figure out, you know, what, what was happening because they could have looked up any of these unfamiliar references. And this really relates back to a story that I had written a couple years ago about students arriving at universities, even the top universities in the country, just Unprepared to read books. And, you know, I spoke with so many professors for that piece and again for this one, and they described, you know, a lot less students arriving with a lot less experience kind of persisting through texts, and also a changed relationship to text. You know, I spoke with a staff member who works at Harvard who was talking about how, you know, students come to her and they, you know, don't understand why they're being asked to read. They think that professors are kind of presenting information in this arbitrarily difficult medium when they're giving it to them in text instead of giving them like a ChatGPT or Claude Summary. And so it's just a really different attitude as well as kind of different skill and experience.
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And just a quote from your most recent cover story, this is Margaret Rennix, Harvard's assistant director for Humanities and Social Sciences support. You spoke to her and she said that some students at Harvard University now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way to acquire knowledge or quote, by asking them to read. She said professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium. End quote. Am I wrong or are these professors, including at Harvard University, essentially saying that some students at some of the best institutions in the country now view assigned books as something like the equivalent of forcing a person to learn about sociology by reading it in Latin or Ancient Greek or something. It's as if they consider full bodies of text, full books to be this, like foreign object with which they're not particularly familiar.
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Yes, and she was, you know, talking as well about how students were, you know, finding books. They would say it was like written in Old English or it just seemed so familiar, so unfamiliar and so kind of old fashioned to them to read kind of the text that people had written even a half century ago. And so it is real changed relationship to text and to reading.
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Some of this has to do clearly with technology, television, the smartphone, this enormous set of entertainment devices that compete for that compete for our attention and are sometimes, let's be honest, like a little bit more tasty in the short term than working your way through the first seven paragraphs of Dickens, Bleak House. But some of this is also policy. You know, you've spoken with people who talk about the fact that standardized tests now ask people to essentially do reading comprehension by book excerpts. And so if you're a teacher directly teaching to that text, why would you assign the whole book? What you would want to assign is book excerpts. So that students become proficient at only reading samples of text that are as long as they appear in standardized tests. And can you explain a little bit about the way that education policy might be amplifying accelerating this trend in the decline of reading?
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Yes. So, you know, we think of it school as kind of the place where young people are forced to read books. Like, you know, it's not crazy that kids wouldn't be going home from high school and cracking open Dickens, but you would expect that, you know, in school you would be required to read a lot of full books. And, you know, with the teachers and kind of education policy experts that I was speaking to, they were talking about how kind of successive waves of reforms, even very well meaning reforms, had just steadily over time, kind of eroded the number of books that were being assigned. You know, last year in a survey, middle and high school teachers said they assign usually between zero and four books a year, and instead they're really encouraged to focus on short excerpts of informational text that, you know, can kind of prepare students for standardized tests. And, you know, another big change that we see in education policy is, you know, just more and more kind of Chromebooks and laptops and tablets going into schools as books are leaving. You know, in a recent study survey, 80% of elementary school teachers said that students receive a digital device from school by the time they enter kindergarten. And so it was just a real change in what schools are kind of asking students to do. And, you know, I spoke with a lot of teachers who had really different views on it, but many of them were concerned about kind of just books leaving the classroom.
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There are some writers who have contested the figures in your story. David Wallace Wells, a writer in the New York Times, said the decline that you're describing, while it's sometimes attributed to young people, actually seems much sharpest among the elderly in the American time use survey. Essentially, if you like, decompose the overall decline in reading books by age. The decline isn't being driven by people in their teens and twenties. It's being driven by boomers who, you know, used to read these novels and now are just watching cable news all night long. What do you make of that critique that the decline in reading can sometimes be overrated?
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Yeah, well, you know, I tried to note in my piece that the decline, you know, does cut across demographics. And, you know, with these, these kind of groups that have previously read the most of, of older people and college graduates and women, you know, that they have seen really big drop offs. At the same time, you know, there's Obviously, so many data sources that you could look at. And in my reporting, I really tried to, you know, speak to the people who, who ran these data sources and ask them, you know, all these complicated questions about sample size and question wording and everything. And I think that when you do that, you know, you come away that it is just so clear across so many sources that this is happening. And, you know, it's just very difficult to kind of find, you know, these sources that are kind of asking the questions in like, a very clear way that are saying that, you know, we are reading more, that we aren't seeing a decline. And something that I think is really interesting is that often when people kind of push back against this idea, they talk about the fact that people have been warning about the decline of reading for a long time and that, you know, people have been making these arguments for the past 100 years and, you know, it hasn't happened, so how can it be true? But I think what we see and what I tried to note in my piece is that the people who've been making this argument for a long time, like, they've been right. This decline is happening, and it's been happening for a long time. And so what's happened is it's just been gradual and gradual. And so you can look at that as, oh, they've made these arguments that reading is going away and we haven't seen an apocalypse and so it's not true. Or you can see it as people have been making these arguments and they're just correct and kind of early, and it's been continually happening.
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Another pushback is that book sales themselves don't appear to be in freefall like last year. Print book sales were higher than they were a decade ago. Like Barnes and Noble opened more than 60 new stores in the last few years. Almost 400 independent bookstores sprang up just in 2025. How do you reconcile that? That on the one hand, reading according to surveys and according to professors and according to all sorts of anecdotal sources is in decline. But also book sales aren't falling off a cliff. And in fact, some bookstores seem to be, or some bookstore categories seem to be growing.
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No, I think this is such an interesting nuance and I include all of those statistics in my piece that, you know, we in, by some senses, like reading is, you know, in boom times and, you know, people are reading more than ever. But I think that when you look at the data, what's happening is that the people who read are more dedicated to reading. Than they've maybe ever been before. You know, last year, 20% of all Americans accounted for 80% of all the books that were read. They, you know, even spend more time reading than they used to. They seem to identify more closely as readers and kind of with, you know, printed matter than people used to. But they're becoming a smaller and smaller minority in society. You know, one historian who I spoke with, you know, compared reading to a niche hobby like stamp collecting or growing orchids. And so, yeah, so we see this group that's kind of more dedicated to text than ever, that's really keeping the tradition alive, but they're just becoming a smaller and smaller group and their influence in society is kind of waning. And that was the argument that I was trying to make there.
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Yeah, it's interesting because there was this wonderful or very interesting Wall Street Journal article earlier this year about the decline in dad books, that so called big history tomes about World War I and aviation and World War II, that those seem to be in decline because men, maybe boomer men, Gen X, men who used to buy those kind of books, now just listen to podcasts about history rather than buy the history books in the first case. And so it's interesting to think, you know, from the perspective of a publisher or an editor with some of these big publishing houses, that if what you're describing is true, then the industry becomes more and more reliant on the tastes of fewer and fewer people. So that whereas maybe 10, 30, 60 years ago, you had half the country, 70% of the country buying books, and so you could cater to a large share of subjects, a world that you're describing is more of a world where a small number of Americans are buying the overwhelming majority of books. Which means that diversity within book publishing or the strategy of book publishing has to be concentrated on just getting a smaller sample and narrower range of interest to buy all the books. I just wonder. This is not even a question. It gives me an idea for another episode about how this particular industry might be shifting essentially to get these reading power users, so to speak, to buy more and more and more copies. That's really interesting. I want to move on to history because so much of your piece and so much of my interest in this subject is about the history of orality. The many thousands of years before literacy was even a thing, the history of literacy, and then the history of whatever is going to come next. So listeners might remember our conversation with Joe Eisenthal on Walter Ong, who is a media theorist, who said that literacy shapes the modern world and even modern consciousness. Can you refresh our memory? What was Ong's strongest case here? That literacy shaped the modern world and even modern consciousness?
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Yes. So, you know, on looked at what happened when, you know, reading and writing first emerged 6,000 years ago and really how that changed society. And he kind of made this argument that, you know, reading and writing are fundamentally different forms than speaking and that those change in communication medium that really changes, you know, everything about our society. So Ong kind of noted that, you know, people write a lot slower than they speak. So it forces you to slow down and reflect. It separates, you know, the writer from what they're writing. So you can spread information much more dispassionately. You can also go back to a piece of writing in a way that you can't is something that you said, so you can kind of edit it or think about it again. And Ong really argued that this kind of ushered in this new mode of rational, linear and analytic thought that was necessary for a lot of the things that we kind of take for granted now for philosophy and modern science and a lot of academic disciplines. And. Yeah, so he was just making the argument that, you know, when reading and writing first appeared, it kind of fundamentally changed, you know, the way people thought and the way that structured that society was structured.
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Yeah, sometimes the way I think about it is comparing something like the Odyssey to something like calculus. The Odyssey is currently lives as either a three hour movie or a 500 page book, depending on how exactly you want to consume that media product. But this was an oral tradition that was passed down through centuries, centuries between performance poets. It was something that was memorized. It belonged to an oral tradition. And you see that in some of the epithets of swift footed Achilles or wine dark sea. And you compare that with something like calculus, where I think the Odyssey is an extraordinary accomplishment, but it could be memorized and it could be explained to people through memory and through speech. You can't explain all of calculus without a chalkboard or a piece of paper. You cannot. Rose, teach me how calculus works just by describing all of these figures and these equations. I need to develop what you said, a relationship with a piece of paper that contains information that I can go back to and memorize and compare with other pieces of paper. And so this age of literacy, I think, gives rise not just to rationalist ideas, but also to the modern technological world that we live in that is made possible by a new kind of abstract thinking unleashed by literacy. One of the most interesting case studies from Ong that I learned, or was reminded by from. Your piece is from the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzia, maybe modern or ancient kyrgyzstan, in the 1930s. Tell us about the Luria experiments and what they tell us about the distinction between oral and literate traditions.
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Yeah, so Luria took advantage of the fact that peasants were starting to receive, you know, reading and writing instruction. And so he was able to kind of run, you know, these natural experiments of looking at people who, you know, had started to learn how to read and those who had not. And, you know, he posed kind of a number of questions to them as he did this case study. And one of those was he imposed a number of syllogisms to them and asked them kind of these logic questions of, like, the most famous example is all the bears in the far north are white. This place is in the far north. What color are the bears there? And the literate peasants could all answer, but the ones who had never even started to learn how to read, they refused to answer. They said that they'd never been there because their knowledge was much more situational and much more kind of kept to what they know. And so, you know, Ong sort of argues from that Luria example that, you know, literacy conveyed this ability to kind of think abstractly and complete logic puzzles that is, you know, independent of speech. I do think it's important to note that, you know, later scholars have kind of called into question some of Luria's findings because, you know, you probably wouldn't run experimen the way that they did in the 1930s. But, you know, it seems that Ong's kind of larger argument from Luria does stand, that it's like print cultures and literate cultures do value this kind of sustained, linear, argumentative thinking that you just don't find in oral cultures.
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So Walter Ong was by no means the only media theorist who said that literacy shapes the world. The most famous media theorist of the 20th century was Marshall McLuhan, who was all over the significance of literacy. In fact, you quote him in your piece as saying, the liberal world is by definition literate, which implies some direct connection between literacy and the rise of liberalism, maybe liberal individualism. And one thing I thought when I read that, and I'd love you to tell me if you think this is headed in the right direction, is that again, the Odyssey. How was the Odyssey transmitted between people? There was no way to learn the Odyssey alone. Some performance poet had to give it to you by teaching you the Odyssey and then you rehearse the Odyssey. Maybe with these poets, it would have to be the same with scientific knowledge, with knowledge about where the berries are versus where the caribou are, knowledge about the history of the tribe and who is the son and the daughter of who. Information was necessarily social. But in a world of reading and writing, I mean, I'm a writer, you're a writer. Writing is inherently lonely. It's like literally impossible to write synchronously with someone else, like in a Google Doc. It's a freaking nightmare. It's also very difficult to read simultaneously with someone else. So reading and writing are almost definitionally individual. And I wonder if you buy this idea or if your reading of McLuhan leads you to this idea that there's something about reading and writing that is more individualistic than a world of orality where all information is by definition socially transmitted.
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Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And you know, if you think about it in, you know, these oral societies that you're talking about, it's like all knowledge is kind of inherently learned in relation to someone else. You know, it's. It's that the kind of, of, you know, elder, you know, would have that information and they're sharing it with you. You can certainly get much further in a conversation if you're conversing and talking to another person, as they sort of remind you and prompt you, versus, you know, if you were alone. And so I think that there definitely is something to this idea that, you know, oral societies are much more tribal and social and kind of collective than, you know, written ones where it, you know, you have to be alone, as you say, to kind of do, you know, reach that sort of state of interiority and understanding. And so I think that McLuhan would, I think, agree with you if I can say that, that, you know, the advent of reading and writing kind of allowed for more like individualism and interiority and kind of separation from other and
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separation from a certain hierarchy too. I mean, I was just reminded when you used the word elders that knowledge had to be passed down live from elders to their children. And in a way, a world where children can go off and read books of their own is incredibly destabilizing to those sort of communities, I would imagine. So McLuhan didn't just predict or didn't just observe that literacy shaped the world. He also predicted that we would enter a post literate world, which is just remarkable when you think about the fact that he made this prediction like what, 60, 70 years ago? What did McLuhan mean by post literate? What did that concept mean to him?
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Yeah, no, it's so interesting because, yeah, he observed this in 1962 in his book that, you know, Western world would become post literate. And what he meant by that was not that people would lose the ability to read or stop reading altogether, but really that electronic means media would kind of supplant the written word as the way that people primarily like, communicated and shared news and information and entertainment and derived cultural understanding from it. And so it was sort of seeing a shift in kind of the primary communications media, the primary way that people or the primary technologies that people kind of use to structure their life and their society, that that would go from being a text based one to video. And he's argued that that would produce a kind of different kind of man than literate societies had.
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And can you just tell us a little bit more about what kind of a person, people like Marsh McLuhan or Josh Meyerowitz, who wrote this great book, no Sense of Place, who you also spoke to, what exactly did they, in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, what did they see that electronic media would do to us?
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Yeah, so I think, I mean, they saw that it would be very destabilizing, as you said, that kind of it would scramble hierarchies and who had the power to spread information and who, you know, could kind of make a claim to expertise in a way. Like oral traditions are almost very conservative because you have to remember things, you have to pass them down, whereas when you write something, you can kind of temporarily forget it and, you know, create and come up with new thoughts. And so it really does privilege young people at the start. And so, you know, they definitely saw that. They also saw that, you know, we would be kind of connected to people who we had never met in a. In a weird different way than were connected to the people that we actually do encounter, but that would be sort of more broadly aware of everything that was happening in the world and that we could see it and that this would really kind of scramble, yeah, hierarchies and the way people related to one another. And, you know, McLuhan specifically thought that it would create a much more tribal world.
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I think it's really interesting to think about the inherent differences of a society based on memory versus a society based on facility with electronics. Because who has memory? Old people, who has facility with electronics? Young people? So simply, that transition from communication based on memory to communication based on electronic media predicts I think an incredibly destabilizing transference of cultural power from the old to the young. That's an interesting implication here. Speaking of implications, I want to spend most of our conversation, most of the rest of our conversation on what the end of reading is doing to us, to our brains, to our politics, to the world. You've got some neuroscience to back up this contention that reading has significant effects on us. What do the neuroscientists say about reading?
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Yeah, so I spoke with a dozen cognitive scientists in my reporting of this piece, and what they really describe is kind of a bedrock principle of neuroscience, that people's brains get good at what they spend time doing. You know, your brain adjusts to. To master what you spend, what you practice and what you ask it to practice. And so we know that if people are reading less, they're going to have less knowledge to aid in their comprehension. They're going to be less practiced at persisting through things. And we even start to see that in the past two decades, Americans have gotten worse at, you know, following logic chains, kind of analyzing logic puz, and doing some of that complex reasoning. It was interesting. I spoke with a neuroscientist who did brain imaging of children as they took in stories through different formats. So these were children who were between the ages of 3 and 5. And he watched their brains as they took in a story, first as an animation, and then looking at static photos while listening to the story being read to them. And what he found is that. That the stu. The children who watched the animation, they had much less activation in the areas of their brain associated with learning and with imagination. And his understanding of that was that because the video was already presenting everything to them, they didn't have to fill in anything. It was just a much more passive way. It demanded less kind of thinking and creativity. And if you think about it, you know, that actually makes a lot of sense for our lives. Like, the fact that you can read a book and then watch the movie and think that the movie is miscast means that you were, like, creating that movie in your head. But when you're watching the movie, it's there for you. You don't need to kind of think about, okay, what's the tone? You know, what. What does the actor look like? Everything. It's all there. And so your brain has to kind of, like, do less work in that way. So I think that that is a really interesting effect of just the cognitive differences between watching video and listening or watching video and reading. And I guess the last thing that I think is a really important point is, you know, how our attention spans are changing. So I spoke with a researcher who studied and you know, 20 years ago the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes, and five years ago it had fallen to 47 seconds. So what we find is that if we are constantly switching our attention, we become much more accustomed to doing so. It actually starts to become very uncomfortable and sort of feel difficult to pay attention to anything for an extended period of time because it's just not something that we've kind of practiced and selected
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for this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. Look, I have my dream job. I get to explain complicated ideas to folks who have better things to do than read white papers. But even dream jobs have not so dreamy parts. The stuff that gets in the way of the actual work. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do start to finish cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. That way you and your team can spend more time on what matters. Which for me is finding that one elusive stat that just makes everything click. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com this episode is brought to you by Workday Guessing is for game shows, not for your business, especially when your margin for error is 0. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR finance and it with a deep understanding of your organization's contexts and guardrails. So every AI action is permission aware, giving you accuracy 24. 7 and the ability to not just get work done, but get it done right. It's a new workday. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. Lincoln Too many summer plans end in maybe next year. The Lincoln Summer Sales event is on now, making this the time to go watch the sunrise through the available panoramic Vista roof in the Lincoln Navigator Picnic from the available Lincoln Split Gate, then go somewhere new guided by the available 48 inch panoramic display guide. Visit your Lincoln retailer today or learn more@lincoln.com so I'm inclined to believe all of this and to think that the decline of reading is pretty much exclusively a bad thing. But in attempting to play Steelman against my own instincts here, the same way that literacy changed our brains and made us better at abstract reasoning, it seems possible to me that the shift toward video, even short form video, will outfit us with different cognitive skills that were undeveloped among our ancestors. Like maybe there is maybe in 30 years we will value the skill of being able to switch quickly between ideas and not need to be stuck for a long time thinking about one and only one concept. Is there any research in this direction about how the end of the decline of literacy that we're describing might in some ways outfit us with like some cognitive benefits?
- [36:37]
A
Yes. So the same researcher who, you know, found that our abilities to kind of, you know, answer logic questions and analyze patterns, that those had declined over the past two decades, she actually found that, that people were getting better at some forms of spatial reasoning. So it wasn't like a kind of clear cut, we are just getting dumber and worse at everything. It was that, okay, there are some things that we're practicing and selecting for that we're actually improving at. And here I think it's sort of useful to revisit this story that I talk about in the piece of Plato's Phaedrus, and this is famous one of his work works where Socrates argues that the advent of writing will destroy people's memories. And that writing is like a terrible new technology because nobody will be able to remember anything. And a lot of people point to that story and kind of use it as evidence that people have always panicked about technology and so we don't need to worry about it. But I actually think it can be taken quite differently. You know, if we think back on it, it's like Socrates was right. Who could memorize the Odyssey? Now as you're talking about, we don't practice using our memories like that. And so it's just not something that we've selected for. At the same time, I don't think most of us would choose to go back to that world without writing. And so I think we will find that there might be some advantages of this new world, but that it certainly is a trade off. And so we should be very cognizant of what we are choosing to give up and what we might get in return.
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Let's talk about politics. You offer this really striking comparison between the literate tradition of our founding fathers and the post literate phenomenon that is Donald Trump. Let's start with the founding. What was the role that literacy and a culture of writing played in the founding of America?
- [38:38]
A
So literacy was hugely important in America's founding. You know, Benjamin Franklin was a newspaper publisher, the first lending library in America. And the founders thought that this system of self governance that they devised would work precisely because people would be informed and that would help them become civically engaged. And you know, we found that, you know, a Lot of Americans at, you know, the time of the revolution really saw being informed and reading as like a civic and moral imperative for being part of this new society. At the same time, you know, I don't want to give the impression that it was owing always rosy. Obviously, overall literacy rates were much lower, you know, particularly among black Americans who were not taught to read. And, you know, the founding fathers did use kind of newspapers and print to spread a lot of what I guess we would now refer to as misinformation or disinformation. But the overall idea is that like American democracy depended on people reading and learning things and understanding and therefore being able to, to choose who to govern them.
- [39:52]
B
And now you have Donald Trump, who's I think, sort of this archetypal creature of a post literate world. In your piece, you, you talk about this. I talked to Joe Weisenthal in our show a few months ago about the fact that Donald Trump seems to relish these epithets that would be perfectly in keeping with Homer's work. The same way that Homer would always describe Achilles, the swift footed Achilles. You know, Donald Trump has all of these like three, two or three word nicknames for his opponents, whether it's Sleepy Joe or Crooked Hillary. He's someone who also, I think, has this relationship to his own record of comments that is very post literate, which is that rather than have a record of comments that's written down. And so you can say, Mr. Trump, you said this, not that to him, the whiteboard is being erased every 24 hours. And he can say one thing one day and another thing another day, and he just rolls right along and feels no compunction about changing his mind or going right back on something that he's promised. There's also research that you did for this piece that talks about the ways in which modern electronic communications like smartphones, social media might inherently pull us toward a more populist politics. Can you fill out that connection? Because that's really interesting. How might smartphones, short form video, this post literate world that we're moving into, sometimes almost automatically lead to a more populist politics?
- [41:22]
A
Yeah. And I spoke with Josh Meyerowitz, who I know is, is someone who you've spoken about and you know, he wrote even 40 years ago, he kind of understood that, you know, social media or that electronic media and kind of seeing people's, seeing politicians in all these different contexts would kind of scramble hierarchies. And I spoke to him now about how, how he was, you know, looking at his work from 40 years ago. And, you know, he, he argued that, that social media, you know, was, was kind of shifting how people judge their politicians from resume criteria and a focus on, you know, experience to dating criteria and much more like, would I want to hang out with them? You know, do they seem like a fun, engaging person? And, you know, it's interesting because, because studies really back up what he kind of predicted and observed. We see in studies that social media kind of tends to platform and privilege populist governments and that short form videos and social media algorithms kind of privilege immediately engaging, emotionally resonant kind of populist content, and that those are the leaders that succeed.
- [42:40]
B
One irony here to me is that like in the late 1700s, you had leaders who were shaped by a literate tradition, but they led a country that was clearly less literate than ours today. You know, the literacy rate among women, I believe in the 1770s, 1780s wasn't higher than 30%. Black Americans were often forbidden from reading. And today you have a country that by comparison is like fully, technically, literally literate. Right? Like practically everybody can read a restaurant menu, but our leaders, our elite, are shaped by post literate communications technology and post literate norms. Right? That's what Donald Trump is. He is a post literate figure for a country that has, practically speaking, a literacy rate of 100%. Like, that's an interesting inversion to me because it suggests that the most important, important shift that we're seeing is not just that 17 year olds cannot read Charles Dickens. That's interesting. It's funny that they think Bleak House is a book about dinosaurs. But like, that's not the most interesting thing here. The most interesting thing here is that the most powerful people in the world are adopting the values of television, not the values of literacy. And you have, I think, this other maybe quoted in your piece or writing or writing in the New York Times, David Plouffe, an architect of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, saying, quote, if it cannot be communicated in an Instagram post or a 10 second TikTok, go back to the drawing board, end quote. That's David Plouffe essentially saying, yes, we have a nation of 100% literacy, but people don't want to read stuff. You need to tell it to them in like four seconds and then move on because our attention spans have shrunk to like tsetse fly size. To what extent is the big issue here not just the fact that 17 year olds can't read, but that our elites are guiding us into this post literate world?
- [44:43]
A
Yeah, I think that's exactly it. You know, as we know, people like can still read. And so the problem or the change is really kind of, I guess, the values that the people who are shaping our society hold. And, you know, I talked in the piece about how, you know, Donald Trump has spoken about how he likes, you know, bullet pointed briefings and his aides have said that he likes, you know, charts and pictures. And you know, we certainly see a lot of people, you know, tech leaders in Silicon Valley talking about how, you know, it's great to get their information from podcasts and, you know, or Twitter. Or Twitter and you know, sort of as one offs, these things don't really make that much of a difference. But it's when it's sort of over and over and that those are the technologies that are shaping society, chosen by the people who, you know, have power in society. That's when it makes a real shift in the way our world runs.
- [45:38]
B
I want to finish with artificial intelligence. How does the arrival of AI factor into this story?
- [45:44]
A
So, you know, we, we've talked so much about different technologies that have, you know, affected reading and, and, you know, led to people reading less. And you know, what I talk about in the piece is that AI is different because it's really the first technology to threaten writing. And, and this matters because writing is kind of a process by which we figure out what we think. I know a lot in my work. I think I know exactly what I'm going to say and then I try to write it down and I realize that what I was going to say makes no sense or has serious logical flaws. And so you kind of figure that out by doing the hard work of writing it down. And if AI kind of allows people to have the finished product without doing the work themselves, I think that it can sort of lead to this situation where people think that they've really understood something and they maybe have this kind of false fluency, but they don't, they didn't actually go through the process of like internalizing the idea, figuring out what they think and making it their own. And so in that way they don't really know what they're thinking and they're kind of eroding their own abilities of kind of, you know, discernment and comprehension.
- [46:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, just speaking to you now, it's making me realize that like, typically when we talk about this subject, when we worry about the end of reading, it's common for that worry to focus on kids, on high school, on college, and it's the Same with AI replacing writing. Like this is a conversation that is typically held in the domain of cheating. You know, students used to have to write essays, now they can prompt essays. They used to have to solve mathematical equations, now they can prompt the solution to those mathematical equations. But there's a way in which, like that conversation, that the decline of reading and the rise of AI writing is bad for students, while true, disguises the fact that there's a similar but under discussed danger about the fact that the people leading society are reading less, getting worse at reading, getting worse at what I've called time under tension. Thinking, thinking about one subject for a long, long time and really, really trying to understand it. And also with writing, as you said, writing is an act of thinking. It allows you to put something down, separate yourself from it, come back to it again, read it with a fresh mind, say, oh, that makes no sense, and then write over the writing. That's so different than just thinking without a piece of paper or a computer. And when I'm on LinkedIn, like when I'm on X, when I'm on Twitter, when you're on Twitter, There are absolutely CEOs and politicians and people who want to be politicians and people who seek enormous, enormous political and corporate power in this country who are clearly, clearly using artificial intelligence to do all of their writing. Right. They've taken this cognitively intense act of thinking through writing and they've wiped it out. They've replaced it with a prompt. And like that is concerning to me, beyond the question of did the kid who wrote an essay about the Punic wars using ChatGPT deserve an A on that, on that paper? Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Who cares if the leaders of the country can't think enough to read and write? That scares me more. And I wonder if you've had any thoughts about what this world looks like when a significant amount of the reading and writing that's done by our leaders is essentially replaced by short form video on the information consumption side and AI on the information production side.
- [49:22]
A
Yeah, so I think it's a world where people kind of think that they understand things but don't actually, or we have sort of no sense if they do. You know, I, I was speaking with Cal Newport, who, you know, who spent like his professional career kind of analyzing workplaces and what happens is as we add in new technologies, and he was talking about how it's really difficult to kind of, you know, know, just solve one problem. And it's like, and, and so if people think you know, oh, I can just, you know, use AI to write my tweets or my emails or something. Like, maybe there probably isn't a huge cognitive benefit to writing your own tweets or writing your own emails, but it's actually like very hard to really selectively kind of get rid of, of things that annoy you and not, you know, make new problems. And so I think the potential world that we live in is a world where, where people just haven't kind of developed their ability to form their own opinions or figure out what they really think. And I think that one of the real problems or one of the real ironies of this is that, at least for now, so much of AI's output is text, and so AI is just creating more text right now. We saw after ChatGPT was released in 2022, there's been like a threefold increase each month in the number of books released on Amazon. And so there's, there's been more scientific articles with hallucinated references. And so we need to kind of know what we think and be able to analyze and comprehend and discern between things maybe even more than we used to. And those are the very skills that we kind of threaten to lose if we become over reliant on AI.
- [51:07]
B
Just last night I was on my phone on X, ironically, and I saw the New Yorker just published an essay by the historian Jill Lepore. And this is their, their, their marketing of, of the essay. Before ChatGPT, more than 98% of all English language articles published on the Internet were written by humans. By the fall of 2024, machines were writing about half of all English language articles published on the Internet. There's this phenomenon that we're all familiar with, which is the ghostwriter. And there's been some funny examples on book tours where politicians who clearly did not write their book because they basically gave a ghost writer a handful of interviews and some personal notes and said, go away, make your $100,000 and come back to me with a book that I can put on whose title I can put my name. And there's been some instances where there's a question about a certain part of that book, and the politician doesn't really know what to say because they didn't write that chapter, they just gave someone else to write that chapter. It's weird, yet inevitable to think that that is the future of writing, writing writ large for everyone. I mean, for almost everyone. I don't plan on letting an AI ghostwrite all of my podcast opens and essays, and I hope that you don't for the Atlantic. But this idea that most human work will have been partially or entirely ghostwritten by artificial intelligence is a really strange and spooky one. And it's a world in which we can, cannot, will not be able to trust that a person's knowledge output actually reflects the knowledge they have. That is strange. And I cannot imagine it leads to anywhere particularly good. On that incredibly cheery note, Rose, the piece is wonderful. It's a topic that I'm completely obsessed with. And thank you for your sustained attention. Attention to this topic.
- [53:08]
A
Thank you for having me.