Rose Horowitch, a twenty-something staff writer at the Atlantic, has a knack for going viral. Two years ago, her article about the “elite college students who can’t read books” brought much-needed attention to that problem. A recent follow-up, “The End of Reading is Here”—a cover story—is spurring a tsunami of discussion as well.
As with her piece on college students, Horowitch isn’t breaking new ground so much as digging into and expanding upon information that’s already out there. When I first read her recent piece, I thought it was well done but much of it seemed familiar.1 In fact, I wrote an article myself, months ago, that touched on many of the same points.
But obviously, and understandably, not everyone has been reading the same things I have. They’re seeing Horowitch’s piece as a startling wake-up call. And Horowitch has done her homework.
According to an email from the Atlantic to subscribers, she “conducted 90 interviews, sifted through numerous studies, and yes, read several books on the subject.” She’s managed to weave all that together into a fluent, perceptive, and engaging article, which undoubtedly helped with virality. It doesn’t hurt to have a platform like the Atlantic and an eye-catching headline.2
For those who haven’t been following this discussion, and/or don’t have a subscription to the Atlantic, here are the headlines. There’s been a steep decline in the number of Americans who read books or even longish articles, especially among adolescents and younger adults. While some view this as a “literacy crisis,” Horowitch argues that it’s more accurately seen as the emergence of a “postliterate” society.
Americans can read, by and large, and in fact they’re probably reading more than ever. But what they’re reading are snippets: emails, texts, brief posts on social media. The shift away from reading started decades ago, with the advent of TV, but the internet, digital devices, and generative AI have put it on steroids. People aren’t engaging in the kind of reading that demands sustained attention and the ability to absorb complex ideas.
That kind of reading, the evidence suggests, brings cognitive benefits: the ability to think logically, analytically, deeply, and perhaps creatively. By the same token, Horowitch argues, the disappearance of that kind of reading will lead to—has perhaps already led to—cognitive decline. With short-form videos and images replacing even brief texts, we may be re-entering the kind of oral culture that produced Homeric epic poems.
Those who absorb information through listening rather than reading respond best to epithets, repetition, and descriptions of violence, and they’re not bothered by self-contradiction because they can’t remember what the speaker said before. Donald Trump’s communication style, Horowitch observes, “is perfectly suited to an oral society.”
Just a Niche Hobby?
If, like me, you’re a member of a book club, or you live in a neighborhood with a thriving independent bookstore—or perhaps you’ve even written books that are selling pretty well—you may be thinking: Really?
Horowitch acknowledges that books are continuing to sell, but she points out that it’s not a mass phenomenon. “Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year,” she writes.3
Perhaps it was ever thus, unless you go back to the nineteenth century, when authors like Charles Dickens commanded huge audiences. But Horowitch argues that “being a person of letters confers less status than it once did.” She quotes a historian of reading who says it’s becoming “a niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.”
“For most people,” Horowitch concludes, “a life of letters is an economic dead end.”
But there’s another possibility. It’s too soon to know for sure what the AI revolution will bring, but some within the tech world are saying that a background in the humanities will become more valuable. As AI takes on more tasks, we’ll need fewer people who can write code and more who can write, or at least read, books—and thereby think about problems in ways that a Large Language Model probably cannot.
To some extent, that’s already happening. Enrollment in computer science courses at Stanford has declined for the first time in 20 years. AI firms are hiring philosophy majors, paying them big bucks to ponder questions of consciousness.
“The people who are reading hard books and are still writing have built these brain circuits, and they’re comfortable with cognitive strain,” computer science professor Cal Newport told the New York Times. “These are the people with real value if everyone else has fried their brains.”
That raises a possibility Horowitch doesn’t touch on: if the death of reading coincides with the birth of AI, people with the “niche hobby” of reading books and other complex texts could come out on top. Those people are likely to already be on top, and always have been, in the sense that they come from more highly educated and well-resourced families. But if AI ends up making it lucrative to be a deep thinker in an age of brain rot, we could end up with an even more unequal distribution of wealth than we have now.
The Role of Education
Horowitch paints a pretty bleak picture: we’re heading for an apocalypse, and there’s basically nothing we can do to avert it. But if there’s anything that can be done, it probably lies with K-12 education.
Education surely isn’t the sole cause of the decline in reading, and it almost certainly isn’t enough to turn Dickens into a best-selling author again—or level the societal playing field. Some kids, like Horowitch herself, will end up cognitively well developed because their families encouraged deep reading, even if their schools didn’t. Still, a change in the nature of schooling is our best hope for turning out young adults who are at least capable of sustained attention and analytical thinking, regardless of their family background.
Horowitch does nod to the role of education, both in exacerbating the problem and possibly addressing it. She notes that schools “might have been expected to resist the impulse toward shorter passages and shallower reading. Instead, they spurred it on.” Under pressure to raise standardized reading test scores, educators have mimicked the test format: short excerpts or brief passages followed by comprehension questions.
That’s all true, but there’s a deeper cause than testing. Even before the federal No Child Left Behind legislation made tests so important 25 years ago, educators had come to see reading comprehension as a set of skills, like “making inferences,” despite evidence showing that background knowledge is far more important to comprehension. As a result, they often focused their instruction on skills rather than on any particular text—although they were more likely to use whole texts to do it.
The rise of standardized tests, which purport to measure those skills, certainly intensified the focus on skills instruction and contributed to the use of excerpts rather than whole texts. But the identification of reading comprehension with “skills” is deeply entrenched, and it would take more than eliminating the tests to reverse it. Among other factors, there’s been a marked decrease in homework—partly because kids just aren’t doing it—and it’s hard to get through a whole book if all the reading has to be done in class.
To the extent that whole books are still being taught, some kids are getting more books than others. Horowitch cites, and bemoans, a 2025 RAND study finding that middle and high school English teachers assigned, on average, zero to four books during the school year. She doesn’t mention that teachers in schools serving students from low-income families and historically disadvantaged minorities generally assigned fewer books and were far more likely to assign no full books. Those “book assignment inequities” start in elementary school, the researchers found.
As Horowitch wrote in her previous article about college students, if you’re expected to read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school. Similarly, if you’re expected to read a book in high school—or middle school—it helps to have read a book in elementary school.
To get kids hooked on reading, it’s best to reach them early, before they’re seduced by social media and glued to their phones. And if book readers will have an advantage in the era of AI, it’s imperative that all children get exposure to books—not just the ones lucky enough to have well-stocked home libraries and highly literate parents.
What Some Schools Are Doing
Horowitch notes that some states have banned cellphones at school and that some educators are pushing back against excerpts. But she’s dubious about what education can do. “If these acts of defiance against a postliterate culture seem futile,” she writes, “the holdouts lose nothing by trying.” In other words, good luck with that.
But there’s more going on in schools than Horowitch acknowledges, especially at the elementary level. Literacy curricula that incorporate whole books—and build the knowledge that actually fuels reading comprehension—are gaining ground. Judging from the speaking requests I get, and from book sales, an increasing number of educators are realizing that if we want to produce literate adults, we need to teach not only reading but writing—and writing is probably the most effective way to build the ability to engage in analytical and complex thinking.
If kids don’t get access to books in elementary school, middle and high school isn’t too late to at least acquaint them with the experience of sustained, deep reading. Even college may not be too late, if colleges are willing to help. Students may want to put away their phones and get immersed in a book but just can’t do it on their own.
A course at the University of Pennsylvania called “Existential Despair” requires students to hand over their phones once a week, from 5 p.m. to midnight, and spend that time reading an entire book and then discussing it. The students who enroll include those who are planning to go into business or engineering or nursing—not necessarily the humanities. But they haven’t read a book in years and want to “experience something new” before graduating. Last year, 400 students applied for the course and only 41 got in. By the end of the course, participants have read 17 novels and, according to the professor, will become “lifelong readers.”
Of course, it’s too soon to know if that’s true—and there’s no guarantee that the experience of reading books in school will ensure that behavior continues into adulthood. But at least people will have had the experience of plunging into a lengthy, complex text and making sense of it—which, in the case of the Penn course, includes grappling with questions about how humans deal with things like pain, anxiety, and despair. That’s the experience that all students deserve to have at some point, including at lower grade levels, in an age-appropriate way, both because of the experience itself and the lasting cognitive benefits such grappling can bring.
We should all care about enabling students who come from less privileged circumstances to share in that experience, and not only because we should care about those students as individuals. A functioning democracy depends on the cognitive abilities of the electorate. And a postliterate society could pose more of a threat than an illiterate one. Unfounded rumors and falsehoods have always spread, but they spread a lot faster in a society where almost everyone has access to the internet.
If the cognitive abilities of the American electorate decline on a large scale, we all suffer, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the “end of reading” could mean the end of democracy as we know it. Horowitch’s article raises that specter; another title, in fact, could have been “Existential Despair.”
But as the college course by that name suggests, the situation may not be as bleak as Horowitch believes. In any case, rather than a dirge of despair, we need a call to action—and that call should focus on schools, which are in a unique position to act.
The cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf, cited by Horowitch, has addressed these issues in her books Proust and the Squid and Reader Come Home. More recently, much of the same ground has been covered by James Marriott in a BBC podcast and by Sam Kriss on his Substack.
As Timothy Noah has noted, the Atlantic has a penchant for such headlines, having previously declared “the end of” such things as men, diplomacy, high school English, and minimalism. But it’s not the only publication that has used the locution. A few years ago, the New Yorker ran an article titled “The End of the English Major.”
An extreme case in point, recently reported by the New York Times, is the man who was recently evicted from his small studio apartment because the landlord deemed his collection of 10,000 books to be a fire hazard.
This is a great article with many important and compelling points! But I think the most essential point is summed up in the last sentence: "...rather than a dirge of despair, we need a call to action—and that call should focus on schools, which are in a unique position to act."
I agree with all of this. My struggle is trying to teach reading in a school district that eliminated whole books from the reading curriculum. Instead, teachers are expected to teach a standardized program that favors textbook excerpts and comprehension questions over novel studies and building knowledge to improve reading comprehension.