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Over the past 18 months, scholars have debated—and likely will continue to long into the future—why voters returned Donald Trump to the presidency. One intriguing theory: It’s because Americans don’t read books anymore. Fewer than half of all adults reported reading a book of any kind in 2022; only 38 percent read a novel or short story. And the proportion of Americans reading for pleasure on any given day is plummeting, according to the latest Atlantic cover story, “The End of Reading Is Here,” by Rose Horowitch. We are all awash in text, of course: messages from friends, headlines, captions on videos. But not the kinds of rich, layered sentences that have shaped our brains for centuries and given rise to many academic disciplines. Hence, we are a populace susceptible to a man who can capture attention, stir emotion, and breezily contradict himself, because his words are not etched in stone, or anywhere, really.
Horowitch joins Radio Atlantic to discuss what it means to live in a postliterate society, what we’ve lost, and how we might recover.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: We’re going to have a conversation about the end of reading today. This idea, proposed in the most recent Atlantic 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 postliterate 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 it change? What’s the last book you read, absorbed, and enjoyed?
[Music]
Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. 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 whole books anymore. Maybe you have a teacher friend who complains about having to assign excerpts 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 how that’s now veering in a different direction.
Rosin: Do you think more people actually read your full article or heard about the debate on TikTok?
Rose Horowitch: I hope that people read it, but I don’t know.
Rosin: I’m talking today to the author of that cover story, Rose Horowitch, who is not the elderly professor type that you might normally assume wrote an Atlantic story called “The End of Reading Is Here.”
Horowitch: It’s so funny because I initially had a joke in there, like, You probably think I’m retirement age, reading this whole piece.
Rosin: Rose is actually in her 20s.
Horowitch: Yes.
Rosin: She did grow up learning to love to read. But then as she got older, she found it harder.
Horowitch: 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 would just, after every couple pages, want to check my phone in case I missed a notification. Or I would 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 drawers or putting it in another room so that I really could not check it. So that was more what I noticed, yeah.
Rosin: Right. So that’s your experience, and from your article, I’m seeing that’s the experience of lots of people. So just lay out the basics. In what ways and among whom has reading books declined?
Horowitch: So reading books has declined very broadly, even among the groups of people that, you know, have been the most stalwart readers: Women and retirees and college graduates, they’re seeing a decline. 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 percent.
And that, 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 percent read a novel or short story. So we know that reading is just really in decline kind of across demographic groups.
Rosin: And is it the types of books people now read, has that changed as well? I’m feeling very superior now ’cause I just finished my book last night, but anyway, keep going. (Laughs.)
Horowitch: (Laughs.)
Rosin: Yeah.
Horowitch: 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. New York Times best sellers have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. And I spoke with the head of the New York Public Library, and he was saying that young-adult fiction has really become 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, the book that they read is shorter and the sentences are simpler and the vocabulary’s simpler, and that’s a real change as well.
Rosin: You’ve written a lot about the decline of reading. I feel like it’s your subbeat now. (Laughs.)
Horowitch: Yes.
Rosin: When you were doing research for this particular story, was there statistics or a comment from a teacher or something that really stuck with you or surprised you?
Horowitch: 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 percent of American adults read to a child on any given day. And we do see that kind of every year older a child gets, the less they like to read.
I spoke with 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?
Rosin: The way this argument is framed—and you just used the word chilling—is: There’s a problem. 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 this generation of students. Some will say schools just gave up, and it’s this iteration of education that’s the problem.
Do you, in your head, have a clear answer for who to blame?
Horowitch: 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.
Rosin: That’s why I’m glad you wrote this story—
Horowitch: Right.
Rosin: —and not the retiring professor. Right.
Horowitch: Yes. As a member of Gen Z, I’m like, If it’s kids these days, it’s me. But I think this is a story of technologies crowding out the time that people would’ve once spent reading books. We know that when the television was first invented, American households were spending tons of time watching that. Then obviously streaming, internet, smartphone, social media—it all just takes up so much of our time now that might have previously been devoted to reading a book.
Rosin: We’re in some ways inundated with text. I feel on a daily basis I read a much higher quantity of actual words than I used to. So what is the difference?
Horowitch: 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 social media, the number of emails you get for your job, and text messages with friends and everything.
And so the difference is that we’re almost swimming in so much text that we just don’t actually have the time or, sort of, attention to kind of focus for an extended period on a rich or complex work, because our attention is turning to so many different things. And so that’s why I called it really a postliterate age instead of an illiterate age.
Rosin: Explain postliterate. That’s a really important word in your argument. What does postliterate mean?
Horowitch: Right. So what I was trying to get across is that 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 civilization.
So that was what I was trying to get across by postliterate, 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.
Rosin: That was an excellent and fast summary, 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. It’s sort of ironic that you write—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 wanna dig in a little more slowly and deeply to why reading is important, ’cause 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 our brain via reading, it doesn’t seem that important. I can be like, I read what I want. Leave me alone.
So maybe we’ll start with the work of Walter Ong.
Walter Ong: 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 in here—
Rosin: I love his work because he’s a priest, so everything he writes about and thinks about has a spiritual dimension. He was also a teacher. So talk about his work around oral traditions versus written traditions and how they change the brain.
Horowitch: Right. So I think the one thing that Ong really understood was that writing text is just a very different process than speaking it.
Ong: Writing has reinforced the old. It’s made talkers talk more, but it’s made them talk differently.
[Music]
Horowitch: We tend to use more complex sentence structures and vocabulary. When you write something down, it 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. It’s a more dispassionate spread of information because you don’t immediately see the person who wrote it at the same time.
Ong: 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.
Horowitch: And so he was arguing that it’s just 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 a precondition for a lot of the modern types of study that we think about today. Philosophy and modern science and history as an academic discipline, that those things required reading and writing.
Ong: 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.
Rosin: Yeah, there’s this quote you reference 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.
Horowitch: Yeah, so I think there’s two elements to it. One is that we just speak a lot faster than we write. And so 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, when it is frozen before you, you can see it reflected back at you, this message, and so you can 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.
Rosin: I’m just realizing that podcasting, therefore, is for Neanderthals because— (Laughs.)
Horowitch: No. No, because it’s secondary orality. It’s mediated through this kind of writing, ’cause we’re talking about writing.
Rosin: 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 postliteracy. What are the characteristics of a postliterate society, as opposed to the literate society you just explained?
Horowitch: Yeah, so as part of my reporting for this piece, I interviewed a lot of cognitive scientists and was kind of trying to understand, Okay, what does happen to our consciousness? And 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, we’re going to have less background knowledge to aid in comprehension. We’re going to have a less rational, analytical mode of thinking.
We’re more accustomed to switching our attention and less accustomed to a kind of 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.
Rosin: There are some times when you describe it dispassionately, it almost sounds like a superpower, you know? Because speed is often thought of as good. 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?
Horowitch: Right. Well, I was trying to leave open that possibility. We do see, even as we see on tests, that it appears that IQs have been declining for the past two decades. At the same time, we are doing better on some forms of spatial rotation. So I definitely wanted to leave open the possibility that there could be these 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.
[Music]
Rosin: After the break, who might thrive in a postliterate society? A clue: He’s currently president.
[Break]
Rosin: Okay, so that’s on the level of, like, an individual brain. There’s also an entire civilization because you start—
Horowitch: (Laughs.)
Rosin: (Laughs.) —the story at a broad civilization level. We can start at the easiest place, is with Trump. You describe him as the ideal president for a postliterate society. What does that mean?
Horowitch: 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 postliterate age.
So we see that he actually has kind of retrieved a lot of conventions from preliterate times. He contradicts himself as though there’s no record of what he said before.
[Music]
President Trump (in May): You’ll never have a leak. It’s very strong. If you had a knife, you can’t even cut it, it’s so strong, so powerful. It’s like powerful rubber.
Reporter (in June): National Guard and police have been all over the Mall. How would these vandals have gotten so close to do something like that?
Trump (in June): 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?
Horowitch: He speaks with a lot of emotion, you know, often anger, and that’s just easier to remember than when someone gives a sort of dispassionate speech.
Trump: 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.
Horowitch: We also see that he uses these kind of epithets that almost call back to Homer in the way that the poet described people. He says, “Sleepy Joe,” “Crooked Hillary,” and that’s just way easier to remember and repeat. And you just start to associate it.
Trump: I call him Crooked Joe and Sleepy Joe. I find them to be equal actually. I do polls. Which is better: Crooked Joe? Or Sleepy Joe? And they poll about even.
Horowitch: So we see that Trump has kind of understood how to entertain people, go viral, present things as very simple and authentic, and that’s helped him get elected.
Rosin: The piece you 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 book-reading public, especially the publishing world. Is there any pushback that you’ve received that you think is interesting?
Horowitch: Well, 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, and so that is certainly a fair critique.
But at the same time, I tried to indicate in the piece, when I noted that, that 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.
Rosin: One thing I was thinking about is the democratization of text. 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, 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.
Horowitch: No, and 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 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, we are still seeing a huge decline in reading. So it’s like, have people taken advantage of them? It’s not clear to me.
Rosin: 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?
Horowitch: 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 there’s a lot more emphasis on excerpts and on reading-comprehension drills.
I guess my concern would be: You want everyone to have the option to read any work that they would want to, and so just making sure that students are 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.
Rosin: 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 a literate society. But it is your people.
Horowitch: Yeah. One thing that really struck me in that Postman book was that before 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 with some young people that there really is this drive towards more analog technologies. It seems to be a backlash to living in a digital age where everything feels ephemeral.
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 tangible and concrete and that they can hold. So there certainly is that countervailing sign.
Rosin: I know. It’s so funny. It’s like a print book is like a vinyl record.
Horowitch: (Laughs.)
Rosin: (Laughs.) 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. Like, it’s a lot more like the letters you quoted from the average Civil War soldier than it is like texting. And so 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 a return to discipline and what it’s presenting to you in a way that I find interesting.
Horowitch: No, it’s funny. It’s sort of the ultimate irony that we talk about this technology that’s just 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 we are actually living in a time where there’s more text.
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 appears polished and professional and something that you might trust and take in. And so that’s why I think it’s 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.
Rosin: Maybe that’s a useful way to think about this argument, that it’s not just about books. 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.
[Music]
Horowitch: No, and I think that that has been true for so long. But one thing that I think we might be seeing now is that for a while at least, a lot of information on social media was presented in text. And now we sort of see with new capabilities just so much more short-form video.
TikToker 1: The United States of America is becoming postliterate.
TikToker 2: The end of reading is here, so I wanna talk about why this is a reality that I refuse to accept. Over the weekend, I read The Atlantic’s August cover story, about the death of reading.
TikToker 3: According to the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than half of American adults reported having read any book in 2022.
Horowitch: 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.
TikToker 4: I’m about to talk about the death of reading on the app that is allegedly killing it. Stay with me.
Rosin: Yeah, there was a really interesting interview with one of the leading figures at The New York Times who talked about the Times shifting very explicitly towards video, and that seemed like a moment. Partly just because we’re journalists, but we do think of The New York Times as a bastion of sort of literary, straight newsgathering. So it’s something interesting. And them acknowledging the future is video, 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? Do they have method strategies, anything they employ that wasn’t just kind of, Do like we used to do?
Horowitch: Well, I think there are some signs that there’s a little bit of a backlash brewing. Certainly, we see it against tech in schools, you know, states banning cellphones during the school day. And when Texas did so, a district in Dallas saw 200,000 more library books checked out. So I think that—
Rosin: Wait—explain the experiment again. What exactly happened?
Horowitch: So Texas banned cellphones during the school day, and 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 I guess when people had more time and there was nothing else they could do, they were like, Okay, I’ll read a book.
Rosin: That actually seems very simple and significant ’cause so many schools are banning cellphones during the day that it’s just out of sheer boredom. You’re like, Okay, fine, I’ll read a book. My teacher says it’s interesting. I’ll try it out.
Horowitch: Right. Exactly. And so we don’t know that it inherently leads to 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 this, 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 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 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 Julius Caesar burned it. What the new consensus is among historians is that: No, these 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 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.
Rosin: Did doing this research change your own reading habits at all?
[Music]
Horowitch: I definitely have tried to read more. And I think what I find is just when I do have time, I always love reading and get back into it. But there’s always that little 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 made me think about that much more and notice it more clearly.
Rosin: I feel like that’s a no. (Laughs.)
Horowitch: (Laughs.) I’m trying to be positive. I’m like, No, I should read more.
Rosin: Shouldn’t we all.
Well, Rose, thank you so much for joining me today.
Horowitch: Thank you for having me.
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Yvonne Kim fact-checked. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid 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/Listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
The post Is the Age of Reading Over? appeared first on The Atlantic.
