For The Atlantic’s August-issue cover story, “The Age of Reading Is Over,” staff writer Rose Horowitch argues that we are living in a “postliterate world” where fewer and fewer adults read books of any kind, and examines whether civilization can survive this era. Horowitch wrote the viral 2024 essay “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” and now explores the subject across American society, where the decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse in reading, while careers in letters, the humanities, and newspapers are in steep decline and are widely seen as an economic dead end. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of, Horowitch writes; she warns that the “decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.” It’s not as if we no longer know how to read—in fact, we’re likely consuming more text than ever, in the form of emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. But Horowitch argues that we seem to have lost the desire to read book-length works, and with that are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. Horowitch writes that “things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids.” Donald Trump is representative of this era, Horowitch writes: “Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text.” The president “has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age.” Examining the effects of AI on our relationship to reading and writing, Horowitch argues that “what’s at risk is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself. If people become overreliant on AI to write for them, they could lose the capacity to interrogate or even develop their own views. These are quintessentially human capacities. ‘If we gave those up,’ the NYU philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah told me, ‘we’d stop being the kind of humans that we are. We’d be very different creatures.’” Horowitch concludes that even though we live at a time when nearly all information from the past is just a few keystrokes away, “the threat of apathy remains. What we’re losing is the ability and inclination to read those texts. An astonishing wealth of information and wisdom has been bequeathed to us. What we’ll do with this inheritance is up to us.” Rose Horowitch’s “The Age of Reading Is Over” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests. Press contacts: Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic [email protected]
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