Is the Age of Reading Over?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Radio Atlantic – "Is the Age of Reading Over?"

Date: July 23, 2026
Host: Hanna Rosin
Guest: Rose Horowitz (Atlantic staff writer, cover story author)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Radio Atlantic explores the provocative idea that we may be moving into a "post-literate" society—a time when deep, sustained reading becomes rare and less culturally central. Hanna Rosin interviews Rose Horowitz, author of The Atlantic’s cover story "The End of Reading," to discuss the decline in book reading, shifts in attention and literacy, the impact of technology, and what this means for individuals and civilization. They examine historical context, cognitive science, potential upsides, and emerging counter-movements.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Decline of Reading: By the Numbers

• Statistics on Decline:

  • "[T]he share of Americans that read a book or an article on any given day has declined by 40% in the past two decades." (Rose Horowitz, 03:48)
  • “As of 2022... fewer than half of all Americans read a book at all in the year, and only 38% read [a] novel or short story.” (03:48)
  • Declines even among stalwart groups: women, retirees, and college graduates.

• Shifts in What We Read:

  • Simpler, shorter books and sentences: “NYT bestsellers have sentences about one third shorter than they were a century ago.” (Rose Horowitz, 04:34)
  • Young adult fiction is popular “even among people who are not young adults.” (04:34)

The Causes: More Than Just Kids "These Days"

• Not Only a Youth Crisis:
  • “I don't think that it's just kids these days. This is a story of technologies crowding out the time that people would have once spent reading books.” (Rose, 06:20)
• Technology’s Role:
  • From TV to streaming to smartphones—and now short-form video—each technological wave competes for time and attention once spent reading. (06:28)
• Reading vs. Being Inundated with Text:
  • "We're probably reading more words than ever...[but] we're almost like swimming in so much text that we just don't actually have the time...to kind of focus on...a rich or complex work." (Rose, 07:10)
  • “That's why I called it really a post literate age instead of an illiterate age.” (07:49)

The Meaning of 'Post-Literate' (08:44)

• Societal Shift:
  • "Reading is not just one mode of communication or skill among many...I think we're living through a civilizational shift on that scale where we'll see changes in our consciousness, changes in the candidates we elect and what our culture values, and even how we tell the story of our civilization." (Rose, 07:55)
• Key Term:
  • "Post literate" means an age where “text is just not the kind of medium that we use to spread information or knowledge or culture or entertainment.” (07:55)

Why Reading Mattered: Cognitive & Cultural Perspective

• Walter Ong & Neil Postman:
  • "Writing text is just a very different process than speaking." (Rose, 09:51)
  • “It’s a more dispassionate spread of information…you can go back to it and get new understanding…. It sort of allows for this kind of logical way of thinking.” (10:06)
• The Brain on Reading:
  • Writing and reading enable “a rational, linear, analytical way of thinking…a precondition for a lot of modern types of study…philosophy and modern science.” (Rose, 10:43)
• Memorable Quote:
  • “Writing freezes speech.” (Neil Postman, highlighted at 11:22 by Hanna and discussed by Rose)
  • "We just speak a lot faster than we write. It forces you to slow down and think." (Rose, 11:55)

Characteristics of a Post-Literate Society

• Cognitive Shifts:
  • We become less analytical, more reactive, less able to sustain extended focus. (Rose, 13:03)
  • "Even two decades ago, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes. And five years ago it was 47 seconds." (Rose, 13:03)
• Are There Upsides?
  • "[I] wanted to leave open the possibility that there could be these, like, cognitive benefits...But what we get will end up being worth it. I think it's too soon to tell if that's possible." (14:10)

Post-Literate Politics: The Trump Example (16:20)

• Trump as 'Ideal' Post-Literate President:
  • “It’s difficult to imagine Trump being elected in a country where information is primarily spread through text, but he really understands how to grab attention and keep it in this post literate age.” (Rose, 16:40)
  • His style: contradiction, simplification, epithets, emotion—all recall oral traditions and are more memorable than textual argument. (17:14–18:15)
  • “[S]implistic and authentic—helped him get elected.” (Rose, 18:15)

Pushback and Nuance on the "Death of Reading"

• Counterpoints:
  • Print book sales higher last year than a decade ago.
  • Those still devoted to text “are perhaps even more devoted...but they're just becoming a smaller and smaller minority.” (Rose, 18:48)
• Democratization of Text:
  • Fewer gatekeepers—now people can read what they want, but maybe “democratized” doesn’t equal “deep reading.” (19:22)
• Audiobooks and Fan Fiction:
  • “I definitely do think it is a good thing if, you know, stories and information has been democratized and are accessible…The challenge is…we are still seeing a huge decline in reading.” (Rose, 19:57)

The Future of Reading in Education

• Declining Assignments:
  • "A survey from last year found that most middle and high school teachers assign between zero and four books a year." (Rose, 20:42)
  • Focus on excerpts and drills, less extensive book reading.
• The Worry:
  • “[Y]ou want everyone to kind of have the option to read any work that they would want to. And so just making sure that students are…equipped with the skills...to read whatever they want instead of having some of it be unavailable to them.” (Rose, 20:42)

Reading as an Identity and Analog Retreats

• Reading as Subculture:
  • “Before, you know, radio and television...there was no way to be a reader, because there was no way to not be a reader." (Rose, 21:38)
  • Now, “being a reader is optional [and] can be an identity marker.” (21:38)
  • Some young people seek out “analog retreats”—print books for their tangibility. (Rose, 21:38)

The Role and Irony of AI

• AI and Text Explosion:
  • AI writes in oddly formal prose—“like the letters you quoted from the average Civil War soldier.” (Hanna, 22:23)
  • Threefold increase in number of books released on Amazon; more scientific papers. (Rose, 23:12)
  • Superabundance of 'professional' text makes discernment more critical: “We need to be able to sift through it.” (Rose, 23:12)

Shifts to Video: The Next Phase?

• From Text to Video:
  • Even The New York Times is “shifting explicitly towards video.” (Hanna, 25:17)
  • “We do think of the New York Times as like, a bastion of...literary straight news gathering. So it's...significant.” (25:17)

Strategies and Resistance

• Tech Backlash in Schools:
  • “Texas banned cell phones during the school day...The year after, there were 200,000 more library books checked out at this Dallas school district than...the year before.” (Rose, 26:30)
  • “Did it inherently lead to better grades? Evidence is mixed. But it definitely forces people to...get a book.” (Rose, 27:01)
• The Library of Alexandria Metaphor:
  • “[T]he library died because people didn’t care that it lived...I think that is a...useful way to think about the present, that we just have to decide, because we're doing this to ourselves, that we want to choose differently.” (Rose, 27:01 – 28:23)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the changing act of reading:
  • “I had to start putting my phone in drawers or putting it in another room and so that I really could not check it.” (Rose, 03:04)
• On student attitudes:
  • “High school students described reading for pleasure as an alien practice.” (Rose, 05:22)
• On cognitive consequences:
  • “What you practice is what your brain gets good at.” (Rose, 13:03)
• On the appeal of video:
  • “You can have this feeling that you are, in fact reading a lot. But maybe pay attention to the ways in which whatever reading you're doing is eroding an ability to think critically, think deeply, think independently.” (Hanna, 23:59)
• On hope and self-repair:
  • “[W]hen I do have time, I always love reading and get back into it. But there's always...that little, like, first hump that I have to get over to kind of retrain my brain… then I start to get engrossed, and then I stop looking at my phone as much.” (Rose, 28:27)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:04–03:35 — The personal challenge of reading in the modern era
• 03:48–05:09 — Who and how reading is declining
• 07:10–07:49 — The difference between more words read and actual “reading”
• 08:44–11:22 — Walter Ong, Neil Postman, and the cognitive impact of writing
• 13:03–14:40 — Cognitive tradeoffs of a post-literate society
• 16:20–18:15 — Trump as a post-literate political figure
• 20:42–21:38 — Reading in schools and as subculture/identity
• 22:23–23:59 — AI and the ironic surge in formal text
• 25:17–27:01 — The future: Text-to-video shift and the effects of cell phone bans in schools
• 27:01–28:23 — The Library of Alexandria as a warning: neglect, not destruction, ends cultures of reading

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Tone & Style

The episode is both reflective and lightly irreverent, balancing a sense of loss with nuance and flashes of humor. The conversation is layered, referencing scholarship, history, and personal anecdote, while refusing to catastrophize or romanticize the past. Ultimately, it acknowledges decline but also points to cycles and possibilities for resistance and self-rescue.

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Takeaways for Non-Listeners

• Book reading is measurably in decline across age groups—even as people read more text overall due to technology.
• This decline isn’t simply about phones or young people; it’s a broader replacement of sustained, focused reading with fragmented, reactive attention.
• The cultural significance of extended reading has historical, cognitive, and even political ramifications—many current trends align with pre-literate or oral societies.
• At the same time, deep readers and analog book lovers are finding new identity and subculture status.
• The proliferation of AI-written and video content is changing the texture and meaning of what it means to “read.”
• There are some promising counter-movements (like library surges after phone bans in schools), but reviving reading culture would require a deliberate and collective effort.
• Ultimately, whether reading continues to define society hinges less on tech or policy than on widespread individual and collective value choices.

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Recommended Listening Segments:

• The cognitive power of writing and the 'post-literate' concept (07:49–11:22)
• Trump and orality in politics (16:20–18:15)
• The classroom experiment with cell phone bans (26:06–27:01)
• The analogy of the Library of Alexandria and its warning for our times (27:01–28:23)

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End of Summary.

Transcript

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[Hanna Rosen]

We're going to have a conversation about the end of reading today. This idea, proposed in the most recent Atlanta cover story, is that the age of reading is turning out to be a short anomaly in human history and that we are fast entering a post literate society. But before we do that, I want you to think about the arc of your own relationship with books. How did you read as a kid in school? When did that change? Did you notice a change? What's the last book that you read absorbed and enjoyed? I'm Hanna Rosen, this is Radio Atlantic. I'm guessing that you've heard someone lament about how students in middle school, high school, or even in college don't read books anymore. Maybe you have a teacher friend who complains about having to assign extra or increasingly simple texts. Maybe you are a young student and books seem annoying and time consuming to you. Or maybe you're an adult and just find yourself trying to read, but instead reaching for your phone every couple of pages. The argument we're discussing today is much broader than mere phone distraction and spans back to ancient Egypt. It's about how reading shaped the human mind and then human society and and how that's now veering in a different direction. Do you think more people actually read your full article or heard about the debate on TikTok?

[Rose Horowitz]

I hope that people read it, but I don't know.

[Hanna Rosen]

I'm talking today to the author of that cover story, Rose Horowitz, who is not the elderly professor type that you might normally assume wrote An Atlantic story called the End of Reading Us Here.

[Rose Horowitz]

So funny, because I initially had a joke in there, like, you probably think I'm retirement age reading this whole piece.

[Hanna Rosen]

Rose is actually in her 20s. Yes, she did grow up learning to love to read, but then as she got older, she found it harder.

[Rose Horowitz]

That's a story probably a lot of people can relate to, of reading much more than when you were young and then gradually noticing it disappear. I think I was noticing more. So when I would try to read a book that I was would just after every couple pages, kind of want to check my phone in case I missed a notification, or I would, like, take a look at my watch to make sure that I didn't have any notifications. So I had to start putting my phone in, like, drawers or putting it in another room and so that I really could not check it. So that was more what I noticed.

[Hanna Rosen]

Right, so that's your experience. And from your article, I'm saying that's the experience of lots of people. So just lay out the basics. In what ways and among whom has reading books declined?

[Rose Horowitz]

So reading books has declined very broadly. Even among the groups of people that, you know, have been the most stalwart readers of women and retirees and college graduates, they're seeing a decline. You know, we know that in the past two decades, the share of Americans that read a book or an article on any given day has declined by 40%. And that, you know, as of 2022, which is the last year that we have really great data for, fewer than half of all Americans read a book at all in the year, and only 38% read novel or short story. So we know that reading is just really in decline, kind of across demographic groups.

[Hanna Rosen]

And is it the types of books people now read? Has that changed as well? I'm feeling very superior now because I just finished my book last night. But anyway, keep going.

[Rose Horowitz]

Yeah. So the types of books we know that when people do read, the books that they're reading are shorter and simpler than they used to be. You know, New York Times bestsellers have sentences that are about one third shorter than they were a century ago. And I spoke with the head of the New York Post, and he was saying that young adult fiction has really become, you know, one of their most popular offerings, even among people who are not young adults. So we're definitely seeing that when people do pick up a book, kind of the book that they read is shorter and the sentences are simpler and the vocabulary is simpler. And that's a real change as well,

[Hanna Rosen]

you've written a lot about the decline of reading. I feel like it's your sub beat now.

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[Hanna Rosen]

When you were doing research for this particular story, was there a statistics or a comment from a teacher or something that really stuck with you or surprised you?

[Rose Horowitz]

I think some of the things that have been most chilling for me in reporting this out were the things that were really about children reading. And so we know that only 2% of American adults, you know, read to a child on any given day. You know, we do see that every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. I spoke with, you know, one researcher who did focus groups, and high school students described reading for pleasure as an alien practice. And so that really stuck out in my mind, just like, okay, how did we get to this point? When kids view reading this way, the

[Hanna Rosen]

way this argument is framed, and you just used the word chilling, is there's a problem. You know, who should we blame for the problem? Or a lot of people will read the article that way, and some will immediately go to kids today. They're always on their phones and sort of this generation of students, some will say schools just gave up. And, you know, it's this iteration of education that's the problem. Do you in your head have a clear answer for who to blame?

[Rose Horowitz]

Well, it's difficult to know exactly how much each factor plays into it. I definitely don't think that it's just kids these days.

[Hanna Rosen]

That's why I'm glad you wrote this story and not the retiring professor. Right?

[Rose Horowitz]

Yes. As a member of Gen Z, I'm like, if it's kids these days, it's me. But, you know, I think this is a story of technologies crowding out the time that people would have once spent reading books. You know, we know that when the television was first invented, American households were spending tons of time watching that. Then obviously, streaming, Internet, smartphones, social media, you know, it all just takes up so much of our time now that might have previously been devoted to reading a book.

[Hanna Rosen]

We are in some ways inundated with texts. Like, I feel on a daily basis, I read a much higher quantity of actual words than I used to. So what is the difference?

[Rose Horowitz]

Yes, exactly. So people often talk about this as a literacy crisis, and I don't think that that's right at all. Our literacy rate is historically very high. We are probably reading more words than ever with, like, social media and of emails you get for your job and text messages with friends and everything. And so the difference is that we're almost like Swimming in so much text that we just don't actually have the time or sort of attention to kind of focus on for an extended period on, you know, a rich or complex work. Because we are just. Our attention is turning to so many different things. And so that's why I called it really a post literate age instead of an illiterate age.

[Hanna Rosen]

Explain. Post literate. That's a really important word in your argument. What does post literate mean?

[Walter Ong (quoted)]

Right.

[Rose Horowitz]

So what I was trying to get across is that, you know, reading is not just one mode of communication or one skill among many. When reading and writing first appeared about 6,000 years ago, it transformed society and it changed the way people thought and politics and culture. And so I was trying to get across that. I think that we're living through a civilizational shift on that scale where we're gonna see changes in our consciousness, changes in the candidates we elect and what our culture values, and even how we tell the story of our civil. So that was sort of what I was trying to get across by post literate, that we can still read, but it's an age where text is just not the kind of medium that we use to spread information or knowledge or culture or entertainment. And that, that will have really far reaching effects.

[Hanna Rosen]

That was an excellent and fast summary. But I. But I also feel like one thing about this argument is it can seem like an elite argument that you and I and the people who read the Atlantic care about. Like, it's sort of ironic that you're. You're right. Sort of. I don't know how many words. It was a 7,000 word, very well written piece to explain how your generation doesn't really read or have an attention span anymore. So I actually want to dig in a little more slowly and deeply to why reading is important. Because we can summarize it quickly and just say to people, reading is important. But I think until you actually understand the shifts that happened in human evolution or a brain via reading, it doesn't seem that important. I'd be like, I read what I want. Leave me alone. So maybe we'll start with a work of Walter Ong.

[Walter Ong (quoted)]

So I'm very happy to be here with you. Now I understand that my task is to try to talk to you. Would you mind if I took my jacket off? It's a little bit warmer here than I was.

[Hanna Rosen]

I love his work because he's a priest, so everything he has, everything he writes about and thinks about has a spiritual dimension. He was also a teacher. So talk about how his Work around oral traditions versus written traditions and how they change the brain.

[Rose Horowitz]

Right. So I think that one thing that Ong really understood was that writing text is just a very different process than speaking.

[Walter Ong (quoted)]

The new medium, writing, has reinforced the old. It's made talkers talk more, but it's made them talk differently.

[Rose Horowitz]

We tend to use more complex sentence structures than vocabulary. You know, when you write something down, it kind of gives you distance because you can see it reflected back at you. So you can go back to it and get new understanding. You can kind of take on a more complex analytical task. You know, it's a more dispassionate spread of information because you don't immediately see the person who wrote it at the same time.

[Walter Ong (quoted)]

It was the first time it ever occurred to him that every one of those definitions in the dictionary was something that somebody said. This word means. The word didn't come equipped with it. Somebody had to figure that out and say, this is what it means.

[Rose Horowitz]

And so he was arguing that it's just. It's very different, and that this ushers in a sort of entirely new mode of thinking, a kind of rational, linear, analytical way of thinking. And that that is sort of a precondition for a lot of the modern types of study that we think about, you know, philosophy and modern science and kind of history as an academic discipline, that those things required reading and writing.

[Walter Ong (quoted)]

They can learn facts, but they cannot learn how to think in the way in which you have to think. The thought patterns that you have to be able to use cannot be mastered without writing.

[Hanna Rosen]

Yeah, there's this quote you referenced from Amusing Ourselves to Death, the 1985 Neil Postman book, Writing freezes speech. And I think what he meant by that is that speech happens fluidly, but writing inserts a pause. And that pause allows us to reflect, shape our thoughts. And all this metacognition is happening when you write. That doesn't necessarily happen in speech because speech is constantly moving. Is it something like that? Because I never actually thought in detail about what reading does to your brain versus writing.

[Rose Horowitz]

Yes. So I think there's two elements to it. I mean, one is that we just speak a lot faster than we write. And so, you know, it forces you to slow down and think a little bit more about what you're putting out there. And then at the same time, it's like when it is frozen before you, you can see it reflected back at you, this message. And so you can, you know, sort of return to it for new understanding. Think about how to reorder it edit it. All these things that we can't really do with speech. Cause it just disappears into the ether. And so it sort of allows for this kind of logical way of thinking. And that. Yeah, that quote from Postman really stuck out to me too.

[Hanna Rosen]

I'm just realizing that podcasting, therefore, is for Neanderthals because.

[Rose Horowitz]

No, because it's secondary orality. It's mediated through this kind of, you know, writing. Cause we're talking about writing.

[Hanna Rosen]

Okay, secondary orality. I'll take it. Okay, so that's the long period that we've been through now where we've evolved our brains, evolved a lot of human intellectual disciplines via reading, and now we're entering towards post literacy. What are the characteristics of a post literate society as opposed to the literate society you just explained?

[Rose Horowitz]

Yeah, so as part of my reporting for this piece, I interviewed a lot of cognitive scientists and was kind of trying to understand like, okay, what does happen to our consciousness. And you know, I think what we see is that we know from neuroscience that what you practice is what your brain gets good at. And so as we're reading less, you know, we're going to have less background knowledge to aid in comprehension. We're kind of going to have a less rational, analytical, you know, mode of thinking. You know, we're sort of more accustomed to switching our attention and less accustomed to a kind of like linear extended focus on something. Even two decades ago, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes. And five years ago it was 47 seconds.

[Hanna Rosen]

There's sometimes when you describe it dispassionately, it almost sounds like a superpower, you know, because its speed is often thought of as good. Like we test students on how quickly they can do things. Tests are always timed. So I don't know, just as you were talking, I was thinking, could speed be some kind of intellectual superpower that we just don't understand yet?

[Rose Horowitz]

Right. Well, I was trying to leave open that possibility. You know, we do see, even as we see on tests that, you know, it appears that IQs have been declining for the past, you know, two decades. At the same time, we are doing better on some front forms of spatial rotation. So I definitely wanted to leave open the possibility that there could be these, like, cognitive benefits that we just don't understand and that this is a trade off. But what we get will end up being worth it. And I think it's too soon to tell if that's possible.

[Hanna Rosen]

After the break. Who might thrive in a post literate society? A Clue. He's currently President Foreign.

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[Hanna Rosen]

Okay, so that's on the level of like an individual brain. There's also an entire civilization because you just start, you start the story, you know, in a broad civilization level. We can start at the easiest place with is with Trump. You describe in the as the ideal president for a post literate society. What does that mean?

[Rose Horowitz]

Yeah, so what I meant by that was that it's sort of difficult to imagine Trump being elected in a country where information is primarily spread through text, but he really understands how to kind of grab attention and keep it in this post literate age. So, you know, we see that he actually has kind of retrieved a lot of conventions from pre literate times. You know, he contradicts himself as though there's no record of what he said.

[Interviewee or Person Quoted (possibly a witness or commentator)]

Before 50 years, you'll never have a leak. It's very strong. You couldn't. If you had a knife, you can't even cut it. So strong. So powerful, powerful rubber.

[Walter Ong (quoted)]

National Guard and police have been all over the mall. How would these vandals have gotten so close to do something like that?

[Hanna Rosen]

Do you have any proof of this?

[Interviewee or Person Quoted (possibly a witness or commentator)]

I mean, we didn't have. We didn't have a lot of them, then who would think that somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it?

[Rose Horowitz]

He speaks with a lot of emotion, you know, often anger. And that's just easier to remember than, you know, when someone gives a sort of dispassionate speech.

[Interviewee or Person Quoted (possibly a witness or commentator)]

I think it's a disgrace. And I say that, and I say that, and that's something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do. I think it's a disgrace.

[Rose Horowitz]

We also see that he uses these kind of epithets that almost call back to Homer in the way that, you know, the poet described people. You know, he says, like Sleepy Joe, Crooked Hillary. And that's just way easier to remember and repeat. And you just start to associate it.

[Interviewee or Person Quoted (possibly a witness or commentator)]

I call him Crooked Joe and Sleepy Joe. Find them to be equal. Actually, I say I do polls. Which is better, Crooked Joe or Sleepy Joe? And they poll about even.

[Rose Horowitz]

So we see that Trump has kind of understood how to, you know, entertain people, go viral, present things as very simple and authentic, and that's, you know, helped him get elected.

[Hanna Rosen]

The piece you wrote, wrote, caused quite a stir, and especially among people who love books. People who love books tend to read the Atlantic, So maybe we're getting a skewed sample, but let's just say it caused quite a stir in the. In the book reading public, especially the publishing world. Is there any pushback that you've received that you think is interesting?

[Rose Horowitz]

Well, I mean, I think it's interesting. There are a lot of positive signs for reading, which I did try to indicate in the story. Print book sales were higher last year than they were a decade ago. That is certainly a fair critique. But at the same time, I tried to indicate in the piece, when I noted that, that, you know, what we're seeing is that the people who are devoted to text are perhaps even more devoted to it than ever before. They spend more time reading than they used to, but they're just becoming a smaller and smaller minority in society.

[Hanna Rosen]

One thing I was thinking about is the democratization of texts. Like when you wrote about people reading shorter sentences or YA novels. Maybe one way of looking at this is that there used to be gatekeepers, sort of people who would tell us what was literary, what was considered good to read. Whereas now maybe you read what you want, which might be Colleen Hoover, which might be fan fiction, which might be someone's online manifesto. And is that necessarily bad? In the same way, everything's been democratized, because if more people are buying books, it just means maybe they're Buying not literary books, but books?

[Rose Horowitz]

No, in that I think that is a fair critique. And it sort of fits in with audiobooks almost that they make it more accessible to read. And so I definitely do think it is a good thing if, you know, stories and information has been democratized and are accessible to more people. I think the challenge is just even as these things have become more widely available, you know, we are still seeing a huge decline in reading. So, you know, it's like, have people kind of taken advantage of them? It's not clear to me.

[Hanna Rosen]

Yeah. And is your worry that because you write so much about reading inside the educational system, that down the road people will even stop reading those kinds of books? Because reading is just so much less fluidly integrated into education at all levels?

[Rose Horowitz]

Definitely. We see in schools that teachers are just assigning far fewer books. I think a survey from last year found that most middle and high school teachers assign between zero and four books a year. And so we do see a big change where we're, you know, there's a lot more emphasis on excerpts and on reading comprehension drills. I guess my concern would be, you know, you want everyone to kind of have the option to read any work that they would want to. And so just making sure that students are sort of equipped with the skills and mode of attention and practice that they can read whatever they want to instead of having some of it be unavailable to them.

[Hanna Rosen]

Right. And I suppose there's also a return to the analog, like reading retreats and that kind of thing. So there's some kind of self conscious niche, like, I'm a reader. So it's almost like your identity is you are a reader and you go out to a reading club and that's who you are. It's not everybody. It's not a sign of illiterate society, but it is your people.

[Crocs Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Rose Horowitz]

You know, one thing that really struck me in that postman book was that before, you know, radio and television was invented, there was no way to be a reader, because there was no way to not be a reader. If you knew how to read, you had to. That was the only way to get information. And so it's only now that being a reader is optional that it really can be an identity marker. And we are seeing, you know, with such young people that there really is this drive towards more analog technologies. It seems to be a backlash to living in, like a digital age where everything feels ephemeral. You know, I spoke with the head of the Cleveland Public Library, and he was saying that the young people that Come in. They want a print book because they want something that feels like tangible and concrete and that they can hold. So there certainly is that countervailing sign.

[Hanna Rosen]

I know, it's so funny. It's like a print book is like a vinyl record. Like, there will be stores that are like, we sell books and vinyl records. The bombshell of AI. One thing I noticed is that AI has an oddly formal way of speaking to you. It's more like the letters you quoted from the average Civil War soldier than it is like texting. And so I did. I know that superficially it seems like, of course, AI will destroy deep thinking and reading, but I also sense that AI returns a level of kind of full sentences, formality, like, here is how you should think through things. There is a kind of return to discipline in what it's presenting to you in a way that I find interesting.

[Rose Horowitz]

No, it's funny. It's sort of the ultimate irony that, like, we talk about this technology that's just, you know, gonna destroy thinking or whatever, and it's text, or at least now it communicates with us via text. And so the point that I tried to make is that. But we are actually living in a time where there's more text. You know, AI has led to a threefold increase in the number of books released on Amazon, more scientific papers being published, and a lot of this text, at first brush, kind of appears polished and professional and something that you might trust and take in. And so that's why I think it's sort of more important than ever to cultivate your powers of critical thinking and discernment, because AI is creating this superabundance of text, and we need to be able to sift through it.

[Hanna Rosen]

Maybe that's a useful way to think about this argument that it's not just about books, like, it's not just about novels. It is about taking note of a world in which, because you are inundated with text, you can have this feeling that you are, in fact reading a lot. But maybe pay attention to the ways in which whatever reading you're doing is eroding an ability to think critically, think deeply, think independently. Just note that evolution or change.

[Rose Horowitz]

No, And I think that that has been true for so long. But, I mean, one thing that I think we might be seeing now is that, you know, for a while, at least, a lot of information on social media was presented in text. And now, you know, we sort of see with new capabilities, just so much more short form video.

[Hanna Rosen]

The United States of America is becoming

[Crocs Advertiser]

post literate the end of reading is here. So I want to talk about why this is a reality that refused to accept.

[Rose Horowitz]

Over the weekend, I read the Atlantic's August cover story. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than half of American adults reported having read any book in 2022. So I do wonder if we will get to a point where we're not even reading more text because it's just videos. Now I'm about to talk about the death of reading on the app that is allegedly killing it. Stay with me. I read a piece in the Atlantic.

[Hanna Rosen]

Yeah, there was a really interesting interview with one of the leading figures at the New York Times who talked about the times shifting explicitly towards video. And that seemed like a moment. I mean, partly just because we're journalists, but we do think of the New York Times as like, a bastion of sort of literary straight news gathering. So it's something interesting in them acknowledging the future is video. Like, we haven't really even talked about that. We've been pretending as if we're going to continue to live in a world inundated with text, but that may not be true at all. I know you interviewed a lot of professors, researchers. Did they have ideas beyond woe is me? I wish more people would read books. Like, did they have sort of method strategies, anything they employed that wasn't just kind of do like we used to do?

[Rose Horowitz]

Well, I think there are some signs that there's a little bit of a backlash brewing. You know, certainly we see it against tech in schools. You know, states banning cell phones during the school day and that, you know, when Texas did so, a district in Dallas saw 200,000 library books checked out. So I think that.

[Hanna Rosen]

Wait, explain the experiment again. What exactly happened?

[Rose Horowitz]

So Texas banned cell phones during the school day, and they were. Nearly two dozen states did it. And then the year after that happened, there were 200,000 more library books checked out at this Dallas school district than there had been the year before. So it did seem that, you know, I guess when people kind of had more time and there was nothing else they could do, they were like, okay, I'll read a book.

[Hanna Rosen]

That actually seems very simple and significant because so many schools are banning cell ph the day that it's just out of sheer boredom, you're like, okay, fine, I'll read a book. Like, my teacher says, it's interesting. I'll try it out.

[Rose Horowitz]

Right, exactly. And so we don't know that it inherently leads to, like, better grades or people doing better in schools. It seems like the evidence is mixed there. But it does seem like it definitely forces people to just, okay, we have so much more time back. So either we're gonna hang out with each other, we're gonna get a book, maybe do all of the above. So that's a change. But in terms of things that we can do to kind of address, I guess the challenge is because I think it is such a big shift, it would require something of similar magnitude to move back to reading, if that's something that we decide is worth it and something we're not willing to give up. And here I think it's kind of useful to return to how I opened the essay, which is with this metaphor about the Library of Alexandria. I wrote about that because the Library of Alexandria is, you know, known as this real intellectual center of this earlier era. And for a long time, people thought that the library was destroyed by an act of war that, like Julius Caesar burned it. You know, what the new consensus is among historians is that, no, these sort of external attacks didn't matter that much. The library died because people didn't care that it lived. They neglected it. And then it eventually fell into disrepair. And so I think that is a sort of really useful way to think about the present, that we just have to decide, because we're doing this to ourselves, that we want to choose differently.

[Hanna Rosen]

Did doing this research change your own reading habits at all?

[Rose Horowitz]

I definitely have tried to read more. And, I mean, I think what I find is just that when I do have time, I always love reading and get back into it. But there's always sort of that little, like, first hump that I have to get over to kind of retrain my brain. I don't know if that's actually what's happening inside my brain, but it feels like I can't just get through it. And then I start to get engrossed, and then I stop looking at my phone as much. And so it's definitely. It definitely made me think about that much more and kind of notice it more clearly.

[Hanna Rosen]

I feel like that's a no. Try to be positive.

[Rose Horowitz]

I'm like, no, I should read more.

[Hanna Rosen]

Shouldn't we all? Well, Rose, thank you so much for joining me today.

[Rose Horowitz]

Thank you for having me.

[Hanna Rosen]

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Janae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Yvonne Kim fact checked. Rob Smirciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudina Bate is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you enjoy the show. You can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com link listener I'm Hanna Rosen. Thank you for listening.

[Charlie Warzel Promoter]

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