Rose Horowitch wrote an article for The Atlantic titled The End of Reading Is Here (August 2026).
« Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10% do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40% say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it. »
« Amanda Kordeliski, who is on the board of the American Association of School Librarians, told me that she and her fellow librarians have had to buy new books to accommodate students’ diminished reading levels. Some of the most popular are graphic novels: updated classics such as the Magic Tree House series for elementary-school students, and manga for middle and high schoolers. »
« Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30% of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20%. »
« 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. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate. »
« Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. »
« The written word is fundamentally different from oral language… Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever. This frees up the mind to think of new ideas and make new discoveries. »
« “More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” Walter J. Ong, a historian and Jesuit priest, wrote in his 1982 book, Orality and Literacy. He argued that literacy created the conditions for inner concentration, extended focus, and logical deduction. It allowed for a new kind of rational, linear, and analytical thought. »
« America’s Founders used a print document to construct their new nation and believed that the system they had devised would work precisely because citizens would be informed readers. Franklin was himself a newspaper publisher and established America’s first lending library. “These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans,” he wrote in his autobiography, and “made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.” Early on, Americans came to see staying informed as a civic and even moral imperative. »
« Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding… But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge. »
« John Hutton, a pediatrics professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, compares scrolling TikTok to a lab rat pushing a button and getting a dose of cocaine… In 2004, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes, Gloria Mark, a psychologist at UC Irvine, told me. By 2012, it had dropped to 75 seconds. Five years ago, it fell to about 47 seconds. “We become accustomed to having content change rapidly,” Mark said. »
« Watching videos is a more passive form of engagement than reading. »
« American adults’ ability to answer logic questions, reason effectively, and analyze patterns declined from 2006 to 2018. American adults also tend to have a smaller vocabulary than those with an equivalent level of education did half a century ago. Recent studies suggest that the Flynn effect—the steady rise in IQ between generations since the 1930s—has reversed over the past two decades. Average IQ scores are declining by about three points a decade, Elizabeth Dworak, a research psychologist at Northwestern’s medical school, told me. »
« Writing is hard. Orwell likened the experience to a “long bout of some painful illness.” AI promises a simple remedy. The trouble is that writing is not merely the act of transcribing fully formed thoughts—if it were, it wouldn’t be hard. Writing is the way people figure out what they think, and how to convey those thoughts to someone who doesn’t already share them. Cal Newport, a computer-science professor at Georgetown University, argues that the process of writing forces people to think in an orderly, linear fashion. It exposes flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning. And the time and focus it takes to form thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs allow the author to make new connections and discover new insights. »
« Writing is hard because the writer is learning. If AI eliminates the challenge, it also eliminates the learning. »
« The skill of deep thinking will likely become rarer and rarer in a world where much of the population uses AI to avoid writing… AI produces crisp, professional prose. Presented with human- and AI-produced text side by side, even M.F.A. candidates have been shown to prefer the work of the machines. If AI writing is pleasing and convincing, however, it is also unoriginal, often inaccurate, or both. People will therefore need their powers of discernment and comprehension more than ever. They will need to know what they think and how to make their own judgments. These are the exact skills that the use of AI threatens to erode. »
« What’s at risk is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself. »
Related reading:
- Rose Horowitch on the elite college students who can’t read books, The Atlantic, November 2024.
- Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf (2019)
Articles of Interest 