Our 'Post-Literate World'

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we're gonna talk about the decline of reading in American life and what it might mean. The cover story of the August edition of The Atlantic makes the case that America has entered what the writer calls a post-literate age, a post-literate age. It's from staff writer Rose Horowitch. A librarian in Texas told Horowitch about a three-year-old who cried on her first day of school for her tablet.
A professor at Harvard told her about a student who used ChatGPT to translate A Clockwork Orange into simpler English, because the original novel was tough to get through. Horowitch has been collecting stories like these, and she thinks they're evidence of a real shift in how Americans relate to reading and therefore to the world. Her piece in The Atlantic is titled, The End of Reading is Here. Rose, thanks for doing this. Thanks for coming on the show about it. Welcome to WNYC.

**Rose Horowitch** (1:09)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:12)
And listeners, you can help us report this story. Do you yourself read less than you used to? Are you a teacher, librarian, student or parent? Seeing the shift up close, among others, what do you want to say? What do you want to ask? 212-433-WNYC-212-433-9692.
For the majority of the listeners who have not read your article, begin and end it with the Library of Alexandria. Why was that the right place to bookend a piece about reading habits in 2026 America?

**Rose Horowitch** (1:45)
Yes. I started a very long time ago with the Library of Alexandria, and I started with the story of the Library of Alexandria because for a long time, historians thought that the library disappeared because of an act of war violence. People thought that Julius Caesar burned it.
But lately, the scholarly consensus has been that actually, the library just was neglected until it eventually disappeared. So it wasn't that this very dramatic action led to the start of the Dark Ages. It was actually that the fact that the library was allowed to be destroyed, that nobody cared about maintaining it, meant that the Dark Ages were already there. And I wanted to kind of draw a parallel with today, what we see, the decline of reading, kind of the decline of the importance of reading, that maybe we're going through something similar.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:48)
Let's define the decline of reading. You have some data, I think, on how much less the average American is reading compared to the past.
But you also write that paradoxically, and I know people will call in text with this, and they won't be wrong, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before because of all the social media and texting and everything else. So what's the data that you're working from to write an end of literacy article?

**Rose Horowitch** (3:17)
Yes, exactly. So the data shows that the share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day has declined by 40% over the past two decades. In 2022, which is the most recent year that we have really strong data for, fewer than half of all Americans read a book at all, and only 38% read a novel or short story. And so the data is very clear all going in this direction.
But you're right to point out that, I note in the piece that people often talk about this as a literacy crisis. And I don't think that's right. People are actually probably reading more than ever. We read so many emails, so many text messages, so many social media posts. But what I think is happening is that, that is actually crowding out kind of the time necessary to read, to really get engaged in a serious work of literature.
And so, and it's making it hard to focus on anything for an extended period of time. So we're almost reading so many words that, you know, we can't really pay attention to any of them.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:35)
And so, to the place of schools in all of this, you write, faced with shrinking attention spans and decline in comprehension, schools might have been expected to resist the impulse towards shorter passages and shallower reading, your words, and yet, what actually happened?

**Rose Horowitch** (4:56)
Yes. So we have a lot of data that, you know, teachers are assigning fewer and fewer books.
A survey from last year found that, you know, most teachers assigned between zero and four books a year, which is a decline from the past. And so, you know, we're seeing kind of an emphasis on excerpts, on reading comprehension questions to prepare students for standardized testing.