Reading shaped the modern mind. Its decline will reshape it—and transform civilization, Rose Horowitch argues in our August cover story.
“Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to,” Horowitch writes. A 2023 study 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. Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.
What’s more, “the books that people do read are simpler than they used to be,” Horowitch continues. “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.”
“This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. And it’s true that Americans’ basic reading skills are declining,” Horowitch writes. “And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.”
Americans “are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate,” Horowitch argues. And “things are about to get worse, and fast.”
At the link, read more about how our postliterate society will shape our politics, our culture, and even our innermost thoughts: https://theatln.tc/Sqf0buFC
— Emma Williams, associate editor, audience and engagement, The Atlantic
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