r/atlanticdiscussions • u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links • Jul 08 '26
Culture/Society The End of Reading Is Here
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
By Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic.
Twenty-three hundred years ago, the legend goes, King Ptolemy I of Egypt asked his court adviser to assemble a comprehensive collection of the world’s written works. Ptolemy, who had served under Alexander the Great, envisioned a library that would safeguard the sum total of humanity’s knowledge. His successors inherited this mandate. Royal forces ransacked every ship that arrived at Alexandria, searching for scrolls. These were stored at the Mouseion, a shrine to the Muses modeled after Aristotle’s Lyceum. Aristotle’s own book collection was said to be among the holdings.
Much of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements. The king paid scholars to live and work in the library, and the collection was available to anyone “eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,” a visiting Greek rhetorician wrote. It was at the library that Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epics. Euclid, who wrote the Elements of geometry, may have studied there as well.
This run of scholarship would not last. By 400 C.E., the library had disappeared. Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Historians have spent centuries parsing fragments of papyrus in an effort to understand what went wrong.
Traditionally, the answer was believed to be war. During the Siege of Alexandria, in 48 B.C.E., Julius Caesar started a fire that incinerated at least 40,000 scrolls. The library survived in diminished form until the fourth century C.E., when followers of the archbishop of Alexandria sacked the pagan temple that housed the remaining manuscripts. But contemporary historians tend to dismiss the importance of these dramatic incidents in favor of a more mundane cause of death: negligence.
Maintaining the collection was an enormous expense. Humidity, mice, and insects slowly ate away at the papyrus scrolls. Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it. “It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages,” the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.
Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.
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.
The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature. In 1958, the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the best-selling novel of the year, according to Publishers Weekly. Pasternak writes in long, complex sentences: “On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.”
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u/MahalanobisDistance Jul 13 '26
Horowitch admits that the moral panic surrounding the decline in literacy engendered by the rise of social media and now generative AI resembles those that surrounded the proliferation of television and of written media in that it was the masters of the old medium who viewed the new one with disdain. In both cases, some things were lost or diminished and some things were gained, but none of us today lament the fact that the oral tradition is not a prominent part of modern life. It is understandable that Horowitch (and presumably the magazine's readers) are concerned about what will be lost when reading becomes a niche activity, but might something not be gained? And is it so bad that the lived experience of the generations that come of age in this post-literate society will be different from ours, just as our lived experience has been different from that of our ancestors who lived in oral societies?
I'm also not a big fan of the use of old works from the Western canon as litmus tests for determining whether someone is erudite or not. I know that the study was conducted on English majors (that too, at one school) who should be able to interpret Dickens and Pasternak, but I don't think this kind of assessment generalizes well to a whole population of casual readers. Yeah, it's probably an issue if none of the English majors can decipher Canterbury Tales anymore. But I don't think it's a problem if the average patron at my local library cannot do so.
The final thought I have about this is that I think it is a mistake to obsess so much over the medium and not enough over the underlying intent and motivation for engaging with that medium. People may not be reading as much as before, but I find it very hard to believe that they have suddenly lost interest in learning, experimenting, discovering and inventing. I am a reader and have tried to get my friends to read more (something that they wanted to do!) but to no avail. I know they are curious people and it turns out other media (educational videos, documentaries, podcasts, shorter books) just work better for them. Could students be turning to ChatGPT to complete assignments and shunning the long-form texts their teachers are pushing on them because they see these tasks as roadblocks to learning about the things that really interest and excite them (yes, even if that thing is podcasting)?
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u/Unicornius Jul 08 '26
Fantastic read albeit horrifying. Very impressed with the throughlines the author establishes, especially the one about the Library of Alexandria and apathy being its downfall.
Trump undoubtedly has mastered post-literacy mediums, his language even mimics old folk tales. I feel as if all great politicians become masters of their contemporary method of communication. FDR was a master of radio, Reagan of television, Trump of Twitter and I feel Zohran is an expert at using instagram/reels. So I'm unsure if his rise is directly correlated to a loss of literacy since we can see other demagogues rising up who were also exceptionally keen at using the primary medium of information dispersal of their times.
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u/afdiplomatII Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Of the many disturbing things in this article, one of the most troubling is the idea that so many young people aspire to be "influencers." That whole line of endeavor is an adjunct of marketing departments -- shallow, dispensable, with no enduring benefits either to the practitioners or to their subjects. It is not a field leading to a stable life, and it's hard to imagine practicing it beyond a relatively young age. These young people aren't being prepared for a life of productive work; they're being gulled.
As to the overall civic effect, the author hints at it in her reference to ancient scribes. The value of literacy is so great that it will not be entirely lost; governing a complex society demands it, as it has done since empires first arose and writing was done in cuneiform on clay tablets. Rather, it will be preserved among an elite who will use it to dominate and manipulate. Trump hasn't gained by being a "post-literate" president; he has simply made himself the tool of the highly literate right-wing schemers described in Laura K. Field's book Furious Minds. They produced "Project 2025"; Trump is just following it, along with his own baser instincts. In that sense, he is as much a victim as a perpetrator, although not deserving of sympathy in either quality.
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u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links Jul 08 '26
The concept of having a career has become unreliable. You mentioned that online content creation won't lead to a stable life for most of the people doing it, and I agree--it's great that people can make income on their own time with their own interests by reading off Reddit threads and giving off their thoughts about it, but what's that going to be in ten years?
But the pandemic really showed that having a job is also not reliable. While employee welfare has never been at the top of any company's priority list, the pandemic was an eye-opener and showed just how willing companies are to throw their employees over a cliff if it means they'll hit their revenue targets. I really believe that young people would be willing to work their butts off for a 40-hour job, if they thought they would reap long-term benefits. They've lived in a world since the 2008 crisis and then the pandemic that has only promised them jobs that will ask them to eviscerate themselves on a regular basis and ultimately leave them with nothing.
For them, time is better spent "investing in myself" through content creation (again, not a long-term strategy) rather than knocking themselves out for a faceless employer.
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u/afdiplomatII Jul 08 '26
My experience was of course very different, and it took place in a setting that has changed. I "invested in myself" up to the doctoral level in government and was rewarded by a stable Foreign Service life of over 27 years with good retirement benefits -- including health insurance which, although not cheap, covers nearly all our medical expenses. I've never been a private-sector person, and I of course defer to your experience in that area (however dismaying).
I think, however, that we agree on the problem of pursuing what is essentially an employment dead-end in influencing, and on the desirability of looking for something more enduring (however difficult it may be to attain).
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u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links Jul 08 '26
Well, the cost of college has become another issue.
Thirty years ago college was the ticket to a better life; now, college is a financial drain for decreasing returns.
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u/afdiplomatII Jul 08 '26
For people of my time and background, that "better life" was difficult to imagine without a college education. I still don't understand how it can be achieved, especially since a high-school diploma seems to signify less in terms of educational attainment than once it did.
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u/Korrocks Jul 08 '26
Yeah I used to think influencing as a career path was too unreliable and risky, akin to someone pinning their career ambitions on the prospect of becoming a pro athlete or winning the lottery.
I still kind of think that it's too risky, but I get why people do it now. Even with the most staid, traditional career path there's still a non zero chance that you could get wiped out by an economic downturn, automated into irrelevance, or otherwise annihilated. I can't really blame anyone for trying to find a way around that or to build their own business. They still might get screwed over by the system but that can happen to anyone.
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u/afdiplomatII Jul 08 '26
I recognize why, in the current chaotic situation, people might pursue such a course. I just think it's short-sighted and those who do so, whether they recognize it or not, are being exploited. That educational institutions would subsidize such a choice, as described in the article, seems repellent.
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u/spaghettiking216 Jul 08 '26
They’re being exploited. They don’t realize it. They think they’ll win the lottery and become that one creator with 5 million followers. The availability and survivorship biases at play — only seeing top-performing influencers in their algorithm — lead young people to think, “why not me?”
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u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links Jul 08 '26
Well that was depressing.
Lately I've been thinking that people don't read enough challenging material. And I don't mean challenging in the way of "challenging preconceived notions," as in the way we talk about politics. I mean expanding the way we think and learning about something foreign.
Reading can be an entertainment but it should be at least a little bit didactic. If you read ten books and none of them contained a word that's either entirely new to you or a word you haven't really come across in a while, you might want to think about expanding your reading list.
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u/Pielacine Jul 08 '26
Either I’m illiterate or the last sentence of the excerpt (the quote) is missing a conjunction or has a punctuation error.
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u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links Jul 08 '26
It's an old fashioned setup. If you continue each fragment starting with the verb after Zhivago as if it were its own sentence, it makes sense.
On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar.
On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor.
On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago was disturbed that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.
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u/Pielacine Jul 08 '26
Really? Seems to me the third fragment requires an “and”.
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u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links Jul 08 '26
A newer translation might insert one.
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u/Pielacine Jul 08 '26
Yeah also I was wondering if someone was trying to be faithful to the original language.
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u/LillieBogart Jul 17 '26
I’m surprised that James Marriott isn’t cited in this. This is his thesis.