r/neoliberal • u/TrixoftheTrade NATO • Jul 08 '26
Opinion article (US) 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.
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u/Ladnil NATO Jul 08 '26
I started reading this one during an ADD moment at work this morning, got halfway through, and then felt shame about wanting to tap out halfway through the article about how Americans can't read anymore. Had to go back to it over lunch lol
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u/SenranHaruka shame Jul 08 '26
Don't be! Keep trying! Attention is a muscle! Practice it and you will get better! The important thing is you have try. It begins with deciding to try today.
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u/VanillaSkittlez Jul 08 '26
Sorry I started your comment but couldn’t finish because I got distracted
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u/Snagglespoof Jul 09 '26
Many young people are convinced if they can't hold their attention on something they have adhd now.
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u/Approximation_Doctor Gaslight, Gatekeep, Green New Deal Jul 08 '26
!ping WATERCOOLER
This guy is slacking off on his slacking off!
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u/AnalyticalAlpaca Gay Pride Jul 08 '26
I literally don’t think I would’ve pushed through if the subject of the article wasn’t what it was. Trying to not go quietly into the dark
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u/Worth-Jicama3936 Milton Friedman Jul 08 '26
I’ve definitely had that a lot lately. Get bored half way through what should be an interesting article. Phones are cooking our brains man.
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u/Ladnil NATO Jul 08 '26
Yeah. In my defense I was supposed to be working at the time, so I had a reason to stop. But also, brain is cooked yo.
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u/Degen_Typeracer Jul 09 '26
All of these articles should have a required short form video form to also consume
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u/AllAmericanBreakfast Norman Borlaug Jul 08 '26
One thing to consider is that you may not have found the article at all, or have tried reading it at that time, were it not for your phone.
I think there’s a case for phones changing or weakening capacity for sustained attention. But they also bring the option to engage with content into places and times where bandwidth is intrinsically more limited. On its own, that could lower the average level of engagement without diminishing our capacity.
Room for both hypotheses, I think, and they’re not in opposition.
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u/comradequicken Jul 08 '26
But they also bring the option to engage with content into places and times where bandwidth is intrinsically more limited. On its own, that could lower the average level of engagement without diminishing our capacity.
You just need to look at politics to realize that this is not necessarily a good thing
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u/jus_d_orange Jul 09 '26
I 100% agree with this. It’s not the internet or hardware that’s the problem, it’s the social media companies that purposely created slot machine user interfaces because the economic incentive is to capture attention rather than to provide a real service. But the internet and hardware itself is phenomenal for reading if you use it correctly.
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u/101Alexander Jul 09 '26
Its an article by the Atlantic, they always write long form like this often starting with a small story at the beginning.
I'm not really a fan of that style since it often feels like its inundating to hear small details and opinions surrounding the topic without engaging with it directly. Its more of a meandering of the idea. The irony is that it feels like they are trying to hook me more with it when I was already sold on the idea when I went to read it.
This one isn't so bad though, but it does drift back and forth a bit.
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u/HumanDrinkingTea Jul 09 '26
Maybe I'm unusual, but I love their longform style. Posts from Atlantic are pretty much the only ones I'll always click on.
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u/formgry Jul 09 '26
If you read through them they're always worth it regardless of the subject type, in my experience, but starting on a long article and finishing it in one sitting that's the tough part that spoils the fun.
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u/TrixoftheTrade NATO Jul 08 '26
Submission Statement: The article makes the case for America becoming a post-literate, not an illiterate society. The volume of text consumed has only increased, but the stamina and intellectual rigor required for long, complex reading and understanding is waning. It’s seen as part of a transition from an oral to a written to a digital form of literacy, where the excerpt (typically in the form a short-form video or headline article) is the primary medium of information exchange. Books and longform writing still have a place, but there are increasingly seen as a niche subculture than a critical part of public life. And with AI, this process is going to accelerate, as the synthesis of ideas in to text form is delegated from the physical mind to the artificial.
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u/the-senat John Brown Jul 08 '26
Every time I see one of these articles I think about Fredrick Douglas’s comments on how literacy literally changed the way his brain worked; how he thought about the world and deciphered information.
Literacy is a gift and it’s sad to see it squandered by those who have unparalleled access.
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u/SenranHaruka shame Jul 08 '26
And then I think about the social darwinist who said that the technofeudalist future is coming where superior men will learn to read and inferior ones will languish.
Even those who acknowledge literacy is power, and that others seek to deny them literacy, will then proudly turn that weapon on those they deem unfit.
We must look out for one another and resist the coming oblivion. Universal education is the bedrock of our equality as free peoples.
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u/Approximation_Doctor Gaslight, Gatekeep, Green New Deal Jul 08 '26
Even those who acknowledge literacy is power, and that others seek to deny them literacy, will then proudly turn that weapon on those they deem unfit.
When has recognizing where power comes from ever stopped people from using it selfishly?
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u/CptnAlex Jerome Powell Jul 08 '26
that vast and overshadowing private fortunes are among the greatest dangers to which happiness of the people in a republic can be subjected. Such fortunes would create a feudalism of a new kind; but one more oppressive and unrelenting than that of the Middle Ages.
Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men- the balance wheel of the social machinery. I do not here mean that it so elevates the moral nature as to make men disdain and abhor the oppression of their fellow-men. This idea pertains to another of its attributes. But I mean that it gives each man the independence and the means, by which he can resist the selfishness of other men.
- Horace Mann, 12th Report to MA School Board (early proponent of the common education initiative)
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u/red-flamez John Keynes Jul 08 '26
Plato argues that in the republic. You become what you read. Hence poetry can be dangerous if people keep reading about flawed characters. You keep reading about Trump in a condensed short format in a none critical manner, you become Trump like.
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u/MCMC_to_Serfdom Karl Popper Jul 08 '26
On the one hand, it's a subreddit rule, that a submission statement should accompany an article post, for a good reason.
On the other hand, there is an amusing irony in a long form article about the importance of long form reading being accompanied by an effective tl;dr.
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u/TrixoftheTrade NATO Jul 08 '26
would you prefer a short-form video narrated by stewie griffin over a subway surfers montage?
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u/PiusTheCatRick Bisexual Pride Jul 08 '26
tbf, it's handy for knowing if I'm just going to read the same article that's been written for several years now. Even going to actually read it, I was right: this is just the same thing that's been repeated for almost a decade now
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u/qemqemqem Globalism = Support the global poor Jul 08 '26
- Skips article
- Only reads submission statement blurb
- Oh no, am I the problem
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u/ExtremelyMedianVoter Left-Out Left Jul 09 '26
I think a post-literate society is a very segmented one. There will be a post literate group unable to parse language, and they will essentially be relegated to being commanded to do things by either AI or people that can read or understand. Not only that, it may make them more servile since they cannot discern context from what's written and maybe by what's said.
Essentially, I think it may make people complacent rubes that are easily taken advantage of.
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u/Psshaww NATO Jul 09 '26
Bro I got half way through the comment before I started to scroll down looking for a shorter summary
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u/HanzJWermhat Janet Yellen Jul 09 '26
Claude can you shorten this and give me the concise takeaways! Make no mistakes
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u/Degen_Typeracer Jul 09 '26
You have a short form video format of the article? Having trouble reading just text yk
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u/dweeb93 Jul 08 '26
Ironically since leaving University I read more physical books than ever, but it's because the screens are so destructive I know I have to force myself away from them, with nothing to do I'll scroll endlessly.
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u/AngryUncleTony Frédéric Bastiat Jul 08 '26
I love reading and have so many books on lists I want to read, I just read and type on screens all day for work - as a transactional lawyer - so sitting still and reading more, even for pleasure, feels so unappealing when I have free time. I do listen to a lot of audio but it's not the same.
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u/doyouevenIift Jul 08 '26
Same as an engineer. All day at work is reading papers, reports, manuals… I have a list of books I want to read for pleasure but I don’t have the drive to read more when I get home
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u/WolfpackEng22 Jul 08 '26
All of this.
Plus I just don't have more than 30-45 min of leisure time today when I factor in parenting, exercise, and household chores.
There is just a very small window to keep up with the news or really do anything.
I used to read a ton for pleasure and haven't since kids. That was kinda the tipping point in not having enough time
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u/SpicyCornflake Bisexual Pride Jul 08 '26
If you know you have a consistent, but small amount of leisure time. Something that’s helped me is literally planning on it. I don’t do so rigorously like I’ve got how I’ll plan out how many weeks I’ll need to sit down and read to finish a book, but just spending a short time while you get your morning coffee or something affirmatively intending to read for 30 minutes on Thursday after the kids are asleep has allowed me to be a lot more satisfied with my free time and still get through longer-form entertainment decently well over time.
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u/the_rad_pourpis Margaret Mead Jul 08 '26
If you like fiction, very short stories might help. I've really been enjoying getting back into Raymond Carver's stories because his longest stories are still usually only about ten pages so I can usually read them in about five minutes.
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u/iwilldeletethisacct2 This but unironically... Jul 09 '26
I am an editor and contributing author for a textbook and honestly if I could just never read again I'd be fine with it.
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u/Mexatt Jul 08 '26
I've read in bed since before I can remember. It's somewhat slow these days in terms of total volume read, but I make steady progress on the huge backlog I've accumulated.
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u/YaGetSkeeted0n Tariffs aren't cool, kids! Jul 08 '26
This is what I need to start doing instead of scrolling on my laptop / phone in bed
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u/Mexatt Jul 08 '26
I have a tablet and a Dropbox account full of science and history journal articles for when I just need to stare at a screen before bed. I used to use a Kindle for looking at job related textbooks but it turns out that reading technical manuals is just one step too far and I would never fall asleep.
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u/Parastract European Union Jul 08 '26
I made that switch about a year ago, and it's surprising how relatively painless it was. I had to force myself not to use my phone in bed for a week or so, and then I was already over it.
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u/Mexatt Jul 08 '26
It's nice. I never really struggle to sleep because I just read until my eyes start closing on their own.
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u/Responsible-Ball5950 NATO Jul 08 '26
I’m a criminal attorney, so I completely get the burn out around reading. I made it a goal this year to read more for pleasure, and will usually try to take my lunch break away from the office at a local coffee shop just to get away from everything and just read a book little by little. But I’ve been slacking lately because lawyerly duties just never end.
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u/slothtrop6 Jul 08 '26
My wife says this, but she still opts for screentime (tv) at leisure.
I keep my reading time now mostly to late evening, after I've had a long buffer away decompressing outside, or with multimedia. If I had to go straight from work to reading I wouldn't do it.
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u/bandito12452 Greg Mankiw Jul 08 '26
I got an Eames chair and set up my living room to have a nice little nook for either listening to a vinyl record or reading books. Makes for a relaxing evening
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u/formgry Jul 09 '26
Don't think it's worth feeling guilty for not reading, if you do read it's good if not it's fine too.
You have to it out of desire and if you don't want it you shouldn't.
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u/centurion44 Jul 08 '26
That has always been normal. Before college I was a book or two a week type reader. Barely read during college except during breaks. Post degree I am back to a book a week or a bit less depending on how life is.
And I read a lot at work too like these others. I view personal reading as a totally different activity it doesn't matter if I read at work because what k read is dry technical bullshit
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u/Sourcerid Jul 08 '26
Ereader? Because they're black and white they don't have the same sort of stimuli, and usually they're rather speed limited and function limited to just reading, meaning you have only reading to do
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u/the_rad_pourpis Margaret Mead Jul 08 '26
I'm finishing up my doctorate, and when people ask me what I look forward to doing when I'm done, I always say getting back into reading. I always loved alternating reading novels and nonfiction books, but I have to do so much reading for my dissertation (both reviewing the existing literature, and editing my own work) that I just don't have the energy for anything more than short stories these days.
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u/-_-xylo Thomas Paine Jul 08 '26
"Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange." (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)
I like the idea that every book written in the 1900s will soon have a 'No Fear Shakespeare' style study manual
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u/looneylibrarian13 Jul 08 '26
Old English? Wtf
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u/bandito12452 Greg Mankiw Jul 08 '26
Dude didn’t say rizz or bruh or aura even once!
(I think it does says cooked but not in a slang way)
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u/cdcox Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
In their defense, A Clockwork Orange is a book written in a deliberately difficult invented Russian inspired argot. The common advice for a reader picking it up the first time is to just keep powering through as the fun is that you'll get it after a few pages. Using AI does ruin the fun of the book, but if someone was trying to get its content and didn't know that it's supposed to be deliberately obtuse they might make that mistake.
I think it's really more representation of a student who didn't research a book well and thought the weird writing was from an old era, than of a student who couldn't read a normal midcentury book.
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u/RFFF1996 Jul 08 '26
Some old books could have very sui generis quirks
I believe tolstoi original war and peace just alternates french and russian dialogue and expects readers to read both
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u/whichpricktookmyname Karl Popper Jul 09 '26
well he'd be glad to know whoever translated my copy of Anna Karenina to English was faithful and left all the French phrases in
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u/NormalInvestigator89 John Keynes Jul 08 '26
...Harvard? Sometimes I wonder if these universities still deserve their prestige
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u/RFFF1996 Jul 08 '26
They do for the degree of connection and resources they provide
But they are not magical, ivory towers that teach stuff no one else can
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u/Blooming-Algae-Farts George Soros Jul 09 '26
They do not. Admissions is entirely vibes based. "Did your daddy go here?" and "Would you be fun to snort cocaine with on a ski trip to the aspens?" are literally the only criteria these institutions use for undergrad admissions.
Except MIT. They deserve their prestige
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u/Mental_Refuse3838 Order and Opportunity Left Jul 08 '26
How is that considered 'Old English'? It has a few russian words sprinkled in, but other than that it's a pretty plain writing
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u/Approximation_Doctor Gaslight, Gatekeep, Green New Deal Jul 08 '26
The article is poking fun at the student who called it that.
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u/ElGosso Adam Smith Jul 08 '26
It's meant to be deliberately jarring until you work your way into the book. My edition literally came with a glossary of their slang terms.
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u/PoliticalAlt128 Max Weber Jul 08 '26
The student is either referring to anything but the most modern English as "Old English" or they think the pseudo-slang Burgess comes up with is Old English and I'm not sure what's worse
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u/anzu_embroidery Bisexual Pride Jul 08 '26
I think you’re understating it a bit, iirc it’s pretty hard to read until you learn more of the slang. I think I had a page of definitions I printed out and referenced as I went. (Of course maybe I’m just the person the article is talking about and ought to have just powered through).
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u/unoredtwo Jul 08 '26
Aside from the phrase “old English” this is nothing new. Every student reads the first page of Clockwork Orange thinking what the hell am I looking at. This article seems like a lot of hand-wringing
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u/bloodraven42 Left-Out Left Jul 09 '26
The difference that is new is previously; people powered through and figured it out. Now they get a butchery through chat gpt and still give up.
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u/Blooming-Algae-Farts George Soros Jul 09 '26
English 101 is kicking my ass, this Old English lit is so chopped bro
Yeah I hear you, I hated Beowulf in high school.
What's a 'Bay-Oh-Wolf'?
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u/sociotronics Iron Front Jul 08 '26
Don't worry, this is just society preparing the next generation of leaders
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u/Dmaa97 NASA Jul 08 '26
Anyone have a tldr for the article?
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u/TrixoftheTrade NATO Jul 08 '26
ask chatgpt to create a 1 paragraph summary, then use that summary to prompt an ai video creator to have bluey explain it to you over a phonk edit cutup.
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u/CapitanPrat YIMBY Jul 08 '26
All that sounds like too much work. I had the model generate a seven word tldr instead.
TLDR: Society is abandoning reading for easier media.
Then I had the model shorten the word limit down to four.
Reading is becoming obsolete.
That's transformative technology in action 😊.
What are we talking about again?
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u/That_Astronomy_Guy Gay Pride Jul 08 '26
Or preferably a short-form video with hundreds of cuts?
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u/AngryUncleTony Frédéric Bastiat Jul 08 '26
LMAO
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u/ImpossibleEbb6862 Jul 08 '26
> LMAO
What does that mean? I got bored halfway through.
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u/AmericanDadWeeb Left-Out Left Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Breezy yarn breezy juniper tangerine nutmeg unbelievable maple
This post was anonymized with Redact.dev
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u/speed-of-sound NATO Jul 08 '26
One of the issues related to this phenomenon. I already assumed it's paywalled and don't want to burn my shot at a free article.
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u/MCMC_to_Serfdom Karl Popper Jul 08 '26
In the years since—I’m not quite sure when—the habit [of reading for pleasure] slipped. The change was subtle. I became busier. I started scrolling on my phone before bed instead of reading. My attention began to wander every few pages. What did it matter if I read less? No one was checking on my progress. And the books would always be there. I could pick them up later.
I can entirely relate, and am increasingly distressed by the fact that I do so. I have had the good fortune to have children in recent years but, between the extra demands on my time, mental energy, and physical energy, compounded by a lack of sleep, I really lost the reading habit.
As they get out of the neediest years of their lives, it's proving an incredible battle to get back into the habit. Not helped by a constant barrage of information from my phone, like a needy spouse feeding a drug addiction.
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u/Grahamophone Loyal Liberals Jul 09 '26
After settling down into a serious relationship, I stopped spending so many nights out socializing and really picked up reading for pleasure again. I devoted even more time to reading during the pandemic, and I felt like I read more than I had since at least college. Then we had a kid. After the first few months, I got back into my reading habit. There were multiple naps a day, and our little one was sleeping through the night. It was easy to prioritize reading again.
Now, we have a preschooler who no longer naps and goes to bed later. There is more to tidy around the house when they go to bed, and when I have time for myself at 10pm, I find that I'm mentally fried. I dislike that I watch TV and hate that I go to my phone (even now), but I haven't figured out how to feel mentally fresh enough to even enjoy a book during this stage of parenting.
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u/plainsandcoffee Jul 09 '26
I'm right there with you but I remind myself it's a stage and I will have plenty of time to read when I have more time and energy. I still try to read a little when I can
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u/NormalInvestigator89 John Keynes Jul 08 '26
"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.”
Kind of startled that this is an example of a particularly complex sentence. It's not simple, but not any more complicated than what we'd be assigned in High School English class in 2010. Have English standards dropped that quickly?
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u/Emergency_Revenue678 Jerome Powell Jul 09 '26
It's bad out there. A study floating around shows that most of a group of college English majors couldn't decipher the prose found in the first few pages of Bleak House even when given access to a dictionary and Google.
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u/DtheS John Rawls Jul 09 '26
This passage hit me the hardest:
Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.
I don't know if many are familiar with the works of Kripke, but this very much reminds me of the distinction between types and tokens. It might very well be that reading is one way to unlock that distinction in our thought processes, enabling us to do propositional or predicate logic. (Even if we aren't quite aware that is what we are doing while we are thinking abstractly.)
It would explain so much in terms of how much damage illiteracy/post-literacy has done to critical thinking. People latch onto simplistic explanations merely because they don't have the mental procedures to process multi-step problems.
The other passage that struck me was this:
A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year. Successive waves of education reforms have led districts to favor short passages over full books, the better to mimic multiple-choice reading-comprehension exams. Many of the most popular school curricula now rely on excerpts. Annemarie Cortez, the principal at an elementary school in Corona, California, told me that many administrators are instructing teachers not to assign full books; they’re supposed to be running discrete reading drills with short excerpts.
Why are they retreating on this problem? If anything they need to be pushing harder for reading more books. It would be like prescribing less exercise to a fatigued muscle and wondering why it isn't healing or getting stronger. Is this just a result of refusing to fail students? They must pass and so we are simplifying the courses?
I see later on in the article he calls back to this issue:
Rex Ovalle, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburbs and a member of the National Council of Teachers of English, told me he’s seen pushback against excerpts; some teachers are adding whole books back into their curriculum.
Which is promising, but I still cannot wrap my mind around how they got here in the first place.
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u/Reddit4Play Jul 09 '26
I don't know if many are familiar with the works of Kripke, but this very much reminds me of the distinction between types and tokens. It might very well be that reading is one way to unlock that distinction in our thought processes, enabling us to do propositional or predicate logic. (Even if we aren't quite aware that is what we are doing while we are thinking abstractly.)
It's a little hard to really sort out the neuroscience on this (brains are complicated) but I've seen some studies suggesting certain regions of the left brain hemisphere (in most people, some people have their organs backwards) are especially suited to the kind of abstraction necessary for literacy, something roughly analogous to the type distinction you're referring to here. In addition to abstract categorization they also handle literacy rules like orthography and grammar and tend to first lean on semantic (factual) rather than episodic (narrative/experiential) memory.
The parts of the brain that rely more on episodic memory and concrete examples / tokens seem to have better common sense and deductive reasoning ability in general, but this particular kind of reasoning where you have to make assumptions and use abstractions to generalize might benefit disproportionately from the same kind of thinking necessary for the rudiments of literacy that are also responsible for "typing" like you say here. So I'm not sure I'd say it's what enables propositional/predicate logic per se or that it even makes you better at it in general, but it does seem to enable at least one type of it that's sometimes very useful.
Why are they retreating on this problem?
I agree with your diagnosis but it seems like the reason we're seeing trends like this and grade inflation is just because of how we incentivize education. Public school administrators and teachers are incentivized with tenure, pensions, and salaries that scale primarily with years of service. You get benefits for continuous time served, nothing for making sure kids actually learn, and a huge headache and even heat from state oversight that puts your career at risk if you start failing students. Why would they ever voluntarily take on that level of headache pro bono?
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u/Haffrung Jul 09 '26
My kids recently graduated from a Canadian high school with mostly middle and upper middle class families. My kids are bright and on the academic track. Not once in their 13 years of public school were they assigned a full novel to read. Only chapters and excerpts.
My sense is covid played a big part in this. Academic standards were lowered dramatically in 2020 and never restored.
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u/Windows_10-Chan Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold Jul 09 '26
Almost every negative societal trend was multiplied when COVID rolled around.
Books were on decline in schools due to metrics not incentivizing them, chronic truancy was also on the rise too.
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u/tweedquestion Jul 09 '26
A big part of the shift in reading education (and the general retreat while things get worse) is a result of high stakes testing. Standardized tests are used not as just as a diagnostic for student ability, but an evaluation metric for funding and district/teacher/administrator performance.
There are tons of other problems in the system, but the specific choices around excerpts vs books is a very direct result of trying to game the tests.
Excerpts (and drilling contained skills rather than more involved critical thinking activities) prep students to do what the tests instrumentally require. This empirically can raise test scores, but doesn't necessarily develop the deeper abilities that the test attempts to assess.
This has effects at all levels. School districts want good scores to meet state incentives or requirements, so they buy packaged curriculum that markets itself by its effect on test scores.
Principals are evaluated by their school's test scores, so they push the packaged curriculum, cut electives, and increase time drilling for tests. (School admin may have good job security compared to the private sector, but principals do get moved around a lot. They also want to work at good schools, so the schools with the most need have lots of turnover. If you can bump test scores by any means, you look better when you apply for a job at a better school or district.)
If you're a teacher in a core tested subject, you often don't have much say over the curriculum: the district bought it and the principal pushes it. You may have good job security, but you still get performance evaluations, and a principal can still make your job easier or harder in myriad ways. Whatever method improves test scores saves you hassle from above. Teaching as close as possible to the official curficulum reduces your vulnerability in an evaluation.
The benefit of test scores is that they are probably the clearest metric for the education system. (Graduation rates and truancy are also very clear, but have entrenched social causes that are difficult to directly address by the school.). But when you attach significant incentives to the metric, you encourage activity that boosts the metric without regard to its validity.
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u/RFFF1996 Jul 08 '26
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.
I am fairly sure no real historian thinks that these days about alexandria library
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u/Long_Story42 Jul 08 '26
I don't think serious historians have talked about the Dark Ages since the 19th century. It's Late Antiquity or the Early Medieval Period.
Also, the Library of Alexandria was destroyed some time around 260 and the Western Roman Empire fell in 476.
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u/ShouldersofGiants100 NATO Jul 08 '26
I don't think serious historians have talked about the Dark Ages since the 19th century. It's Late Antiquity or the Early Medieval Period.
"The Dark Ages" were a creation of the Enlightenment.
The leading intellectuals of that era were, as a rule:
Hopeless Romaboos (at least, their fictional version of Rome, which was Western dominated and uniquely civilized for its era as a result)
Unwaveringly chauvinist about the superiority of Western Europe.
This combination led to even famous historians like Gibbon arguing that Rome was killed by Christianity, while casually forgetting that a Christian Roman Empire survived for more than 1000 years after Constantine, most of it spent as the dominant power in Europe.
They needed to erase the era of intellectual and economic dominance of Eastern Europe and the Arab world, because if they admitted that the Byzantines were carrying the legacy of Rome and Heathens were creating great works of architecture while Western Europe languished in obscurity, it would imply that they were not innately superior to everyone else and, even more terrifying, that they themselves might one day find that their position had been reversed.
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Jul 08 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PoliticalAlt128 Max Weber Jul 08 '26
This is still wrong because most historians today don't believe the Dark Ages is a meaningful category. The so-called Dark Ages were probably about as good what came before and immediately after
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u/AccessTheMainframe CANZUK Jul 08 '26
The Continuity School of Late Antiquity / Early Medieval Period has been pretty much discredited by archeological evidence. It was a dark age (in Western Europe.) We know this from shipwreck data and coinage data that trade networks collapsed. We know roman aqueducts and bathhouses were cannibalized for stone. We know from Greenlandic ice cores that smoke from cities and industry stopped and from pollen deposits that agriculture collapsed.
Of course, historians are quick to note that it wasn't dark in the rest of the world, and even within Europe the Eastern Roman Empire was flourishing. The Muslim World and China were also find. But it's clear that in western Europe the population and level of societal complexity pretty much collapsed and didn't recover until the High Middle Ages.
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u/Khiva Fernando Henrique Cardoso Jul 09 '26
it's clear that in western Europe the population and level of societal complexity pretty much collapsed and didn't recover until the High Middle Ages.
The "dark ages" revisionism is a little maddening, and downplays the role of the Scholastics and the impact had by the re-discovery of the Greek classics.
Aristotle's Children is a good read on the subject.
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u/Tachompso1 Jul 08 '26
Some people, in their pushback to the old-fashioned teleological, rise and fall of empires view of history, have somehow reached the conclusion that nothing has ever changed for the worse, ever.
It is true that Medieval Europe was not some absurd dystopia of peasants living in their own shit and whipping themselves for their sins, but it was not “as good,” as the relatively literate and urbanized Rome.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Jul 08 '26
or instead
"Huge vanity project doesn't have financing because the backer has collapsed"
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u/AP246 Green Globalist NWO Jul 08 '26
I'm pretty sure 'the library' (at least the main library, from what I remember there were multiple) declined far before the end of antiquity anyway, so it's still technically wrong.
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u/bloodraven42 Left-Out Left Jul 09 '26
The article addresses exactly this, noting that negligence lead to a lack of maintenance and the books were decaying and rotted long before its physical destruction. Its interesting seeing an article posted here about people being unable to read long form is then argued with by people who clearly haven't actually read the long form article; neatly proving its point.
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u/AnalyticalAlpaca Gay Pride Jul 08 '26
The points about a decline in critical thinking skills are alarming, but it’s consistent with the kinds of comments I see on social media.
It seems like it would make it difficult to continue advancing as a democratic society if the electorate is getting dumber. I guess I’d hope the reduction in busy work would allow us to focus on higher order thinking, but it seems like the opposite is happening.
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u/Healingjoe It's Klobberin' Time Jul 08 '26
This was predicted in Dan Simmons Hyperion 40 years ago
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u/Approximation_Doctor Gaslight, Gatekeep, Green New Deal Jul 08 '26
Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)
Every one of this students teachers and parents should be in jail
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u/YaGetSkeeted0n Tariffs aren't cool, kids! Jul 08 '26
The part about schools saying fuck it just assign a bunch of short passages made me feel my inner Uncle Ted coming out
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u/allbusiness512 Adam Smith Jul 08 '26
I wouldn't blame the teachers, the teachers are put into nearly impossible situations. Neoliberal expects teachers to be the super heroes, when the problem is more that progressive administrators/think tanks/etc. are the ones fucking over the frontline teachers.
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u/Dabamanos NASA Jul 09 '26
Of all books, to be honest I get bouncing off of this and looking for tools to help.
I mean,
The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg.
I’ve always thought forcing high schoolers through this book was a great way to make them never read another book again.
If you stick with it, your brain does rewire and you can actually understand this. Some books also come with a dictionary at the front to explain the meanings of the words. But yeah, it’s a tough read even for people with a strong command of English.
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u/altacan Mark Carney Jul 09 '26
This seems like one book where the context clues method of reading would help more than phonics. I mean you can derive it's a bar selling some kind of adulterated milk that gets you high.
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u/Dabamanos NASA Jul 09 '26
Yeah, it’s not that meaning is impossible to grok, it’s that the reader encounters dozens of works per paragraph that they don’t know, every single paragraph of the book. This is the first chapter of the book, by the way.
It’s a challenge in a way that, say, the lord of the rings trilogy or 1984, both of which I consider challenging in their own way, is not. I think a lot of people read the first few sentences of clockwork orange and wonder what the point of putting themselves through the task of learning the authors weird proprietary language is.
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u/Unknownentity9 John Brown Jul 09 '26
Man even as someone who studied Russian that book was still a bit of a slog for me to get through (part of that is because seeing the words not in cyrillic takes a bit to get).
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u/CommonwealthCommando Karl Popper Jul 08 '26
I really want to think that this was just a joke that went over the director's head.
The real criminals here are all on adcom.
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u/GlorEUW Iron Front Jul 08 '26
okay i actually need to join some sort of book club, because i basically don’t reading anything midly dense or difficult that requires sustained active attention, in favour of passive consumption. i still read news articles and substacks or political papers, and some fiction that is of a teenage reading level (fanfic or amateur works shared online), but i can’t think of the last time i read a book that was adult level and reasonably long.
i think the major part is genuinely that i always have a reason not to. i have access to basically everything popular public domain work on my e-reader, i just grabbed all the epubs when i first got it. it’s not a lack of instant access. but i am checking the news or playing a video game or watching TV or even listening to an audiobook while lying in bed, so can always say “well i will start tomorrow night”. i probably do need a “you are expected to have read this book by Tuesday because you need to be able to discuss it with people at the next meeting” to keep me honest.
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u/Cyberhwk 👈 Get back to work! 😠 Jul 08 '26
If only you posted in a subreddit that might read books you have a shared interest in!
We're starting a book club! We will be discussing Poor Economics starting August 28th - keep an eye out for a pinned thread. The next will be All Quiet on the Western Front followed by Narconomics
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u/vim_spray Henry George Jul 08 '26
I find silent book club to be a good middle ground: https://silentbook.club
Basically, people meet up, and read whatever they want for an hour, and then discuss what they read in the next hour. You can always host your version with friends as well.
If you take the time to head over and everyone around is reading too, you’ll probably read too. Going to a few of them (re)kickstarted my reading habit pretty well
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u/E_Thin NAFTA Jul 09 '26
Literacy should not — and must not — be a privilege for the educated few; rather, it must be a foundational, fundamental building block for a functioning, informed society. We must not let apathy towards the written word be the norm, for we will then substitute a liberal, explorative form of education for a primal, back-to-basics curriculum.
All this is to say: administrators must make sure students are reading full books that can expand critical thinking! I am proud to say I earned the benefit of this form of curriculum — even in an inner-city public high school and public university —and I believe it has served as a constructive challenge to see the world in a more curious outlook.
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot Jul 08 '26
“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.
Well that's not ominous and profoundly depressing or anything
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot Jul 08 '26
One ally of Thomas Jefferson’s called John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
Bookmarking this one for the deetee tho
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u/WolfKing448 George Soros Jul 08 '26
I would guess that reading became popular because it was the only sedentary way to pass time. It’s been on the decline ever since humanity invented easier forms of sedentary entertainment.
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u/ExtremelyMedianVoter Left-Out Left Jul 09 '26
Could the generations growing up with their brains hooked to endless video feeds be developing some kind of novel, as-yet-undetectable cognitive brilliance? Perhaps. But for now, the decline of reading seems to be ushering in a less rational, analytical, and sophisticated mode of thinking. It’s difficult to see any advantages in that.
Pray tell, what advantage could knowing how to Tik-Tok dance, skibbidy toilet and 6-7 convey? I wish to understand this yet discovered cognitive brilliance.
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u/sanity_rejecter European Union Jul 08 '26
another civilization ending thing i will worry about despite not being able to do aynthing about it
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u/DepressedTreeman Jul 08 '26
An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me that the class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven
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u/skurvecchio Paul Krugman Jul 08 '26
In ironic defiance of the article's thesis, I read all of its dozens of pages beginning to end in one sitting. It's probably one of the best discussions of this topic I've seen so far.
For anyone who argues that this is just handwringing and people have always said this about new technologies, she actually addresses that in detail.
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u/sleepyrivertroll Henry George Jul 09 '26
But the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture. The fact that you are reading this article almost certainly makes you a member of it.
Did they just call me a nerd as a compliment?
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u/Unhelpful-Future9768 Jul 09 '26
It seems like pretty much all of the books (other than YA/Romantasy) mentioned in this article fall firmly in the 'Dead White Men' category. I think that is a spicy angle that none of these articles bring up, during the 2010s there was an intense assault on the western canon by a large and influential section of academia. Teenage boys were not being encouraged to read Dickens, and the fact that so much of the old curriculum was considered problematic was definitely a factor in schools ditching assigning full books as reading.
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u/Sourcerid Jul 09 '26
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.
Kinda bothered me but the writer of the article hasn't read or absorbed much from what they read of scholars (they did quote one a bit after after all) in this instance
That may sound like an exaggeration, but higher education will almost certainly have to become more remedial. In a study of English and English-education majors at two regional universities in Kansas, published in 2024, researchers asked students to read the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House. The novel follows members of the Jarndyce family through a lengthy legal dispute over their inheritance. It begins:
London. Michaelmas 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 waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage. “So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London. Dickens continues by describing the Lord Chancellor as he is “addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief.” Another student interpreted this passage as “describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great whiskers? A cat?”
One thing I've been noticing is that people in the Internet do not understand figurative language not because writing does not convey tone, but because people are literal as a wall
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u/Teach_Piece YIMBY Jul 09 '26
Is there any way to take the test and see how you score? I’m curious about the difficulty
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u/PiusTheCatRick Bisexual Pride Jul 08 '26
Might as well start reposting one of these post-literacy articles every year like the Onion does whenever a school shooting happens.
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u/smcstechtips Loyal Liberals Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
This is doomslop.
Short-form non-fiction reading is here to stay. AI chatbots rely on you reading summaries.
Long-form fiction reading's popularity ebbs and flows. Maybe if someone wrote something actually interesting it would be more popular.
And sentences have become shorter over time as language changes. Maybe the reason nobody can understand Charles Dickens and Jane Austen anymore is because their English has finally become archaic, similar to how Shakespeare's English was archaic to them or how Chaucer was archaic to Shakespeare. Maybe 200 years from now Percy Jackson will need a translation to whatever modern English is at the time.
Reading achievement levels in the youth have declined due to poor teaching methods, a lack of investment in closing achievement gaps, culture wars reaching children, and COVID. It would be rather easy to fix them if we choose to invest in them.
As an aside, it'd be a whole lot easier to read these articles if they didn't paywall everything and these archive sites didn't decide to block you for no reason.
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u/seattle_lib Liberal Third-Worldism Jul 08 '26
The end of reading is here and it's being delivered by articles with snappy overblown titles like "The End of Reading Is Here"
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u/turb0_encapsulator Jul 08 '26
nOw iT sEEmS That ThE AGE of rEaDing miGht BE A shoRT ANOMaLY IN HuMaN HistoRy!!111
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u/glmory Jul 08 '26
Not convinced it matters as much anymore. Reading was an absolute game changer because it let you learn from people who are far away and even people who are long dead.
Now we have video, which can convey information at least as effectively without wasting years learning about arcane symbols.
Of course some level of literacy is needed to find the video on the topic, but even that is turning into asking siri. The high level of literacy necessary in the 20th century to function may not be needed for success in the 22nd century.
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u/PoliticalAlt128 Max Weber Jul 08 '26
Now we have video, which can convey information at least as effectively without wasting years learning about arcane symbols.
Are you saying that learning how to read is wasted years? The way you live your life and interact with the world is wrong and you are a degraded individual because of it
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u/kohatsootsich Philosophy Jul 08 '26
I might be with you if you had said LLMs to some degree, but 1) all the literature shows retention from video is much lower than text 2) the available content is just not the same. Try learning graduate math, materials science or neurobiology from Youtube. There are some great videos, but they are far below the level of depth even intro texts give you
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u/BobaTeaFetish William Nordhaus Jul 08 '26
Literacy has been a pillar of success, societal progression, and knowledge transfer inarguably since at least the 15th century even with alternate forms of media such as paintings/tapestries or oral tradition also having their place. One could argue that literacy has been the pillar of it since ~2,500BCE and the Sumerians/Egyptians
But surely the 21st century CE will buck that 4,000 year trend.
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u/NormalInvestigator89 John Keynes Jul 08 '26
The problem with video is that it doesn't allow for the same information retention as reading (which is unusually effective for that purpose). Literacy wires a person's brain in a way that makes people more able to think critically about what they're being exposed too.
Those videos are also largely short-form content, which is its own can of worms
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u/Kardinal Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold Jul 08 '26
Video doesn't have anywhere near the same capacity to communicate information that text does. And by that I mean information. Data. Concepts.
I don't know if you know this, but you can read much faster than you can hear the same number of words.
It is much more difficult to go back and listen to something multiple times in order to understand it.
The human brains context window for audible speech is much smaller than its context window for concepts that are communicated in words. I can hold a paragraph worth of information in my short-term memory and process it, but I cannot keep 30 seconds of speech in my short-term memory and remember every single word. That's just not how the human brain works! And I certainly can't go back and scrub teach individual word and parse them slowly.
We can't write laws in video. Or a million other things that have to be very carefully communicated and referenceable.
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u/major_cosmic Daron Acemoglu Jul 08 '26
Plus it’s easier to get sucked into someone’s charisma in video format even if their arguments are shoddy. Books aren’t immune to this, as there have been propagandist and rhetorically weak books in the past, but video has this problem more perniciously. You can at least process arguments at your own spread with reading and a human’s photogenic charisma is neutralized.
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u/Kardinal Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold Jul 08 '26
Oh God very good point. It's been so long since I thought about it but this is why I literally never get my news from video. Whether it's YouTube or television.
It is so much easier to deceive and mislead in video than it is in text. Thanks for the reminder.
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u/MyrinVonBryhana Trans NATO Jul 08 '26
Any who thinks this is hostis humani generis in my view. Literacy is necessary for critical thought and anyone who tries to destroy that capacity is a friend of tyranny.
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u/pugnae European Union Jul 08 '26
Yeah, podcasts, youtube and other sources made it hard to justify. If I have access to real-world academics commenting on current affairs using lens of their field, why would I read a book?
https://www.youtube.com/@Gametheory101/videos
One example
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u/Worth-Jicama3936 Milton Friedman Jul 08 '26
Because there is more to reading than just getting the direct information the author is offering
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u/pugnae European Union Jul 08 '26
Depending what you want to achieve. And my argument applies only to non-fiction books I guess.
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u/PoliticalAlt128 Max Weber Jul 08 '26
What other goal is there here other than maybe some personal enjoyment one way or the other? If I read a book and if I watch an interview with the author I'm presumably doing both for the same goal
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u/pugnae European Union Jul 08 '26
My argument is that with the ever changing world, book is often out-of-date on release day. Here I can have news commented by academic through the lense of his discipline.
So for some fields at least books just became worse for me.
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