Rose Horowitz

speaker

180 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 23 Jul

Rose Horowitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Radio Atlantic · Is the Age of Reading Over? · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

So funny because I initially had a joke in there, like, you probably think I'm retirement age reading this whole piece.

That's a story probably a lot of people can relate to, of reading much more than when you were young and then gradually noticing it disappear.

I think I was noticing more so when I would try to read a book that I would just, after every couple pages, kind of want to check my phone in case I missed a notification, or I would, like, take a look at my watch to make sure that I didn't have any notifications.

So I had to start putting my phone in, like, drawers or putting it in another room so that I really could not check it.

So reading books has declined very broadly.

Even among the groups of people that, you know, have been the most stalwart readers of women and retirees and college graduates, they're seeing a decline.

You know, we know that in the past two decades, the share of Americans that read a book or an article on any given day has declined by 40%.

And that, you know, as of 2022, which is the last year that we have really great data for, fewer than half of all Americans read a book at all in the year.

And only 38 percent read a novel or short story.

So we know that reading is just really in decline kind of across demographic groups.

So the types of books, we know that when people do read, the books that they're reading are shorter and simpler than they used to be.

You know, New York Times bestsellers have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago.

And I spoke with the head of the New York Public Library, and he was saying that young adult fiction has really become, you know, one of their most popular offerings, even among people who are not young adults.

So we're definitely seeing that when people do pick up a book, kind of the book that they read is shorter and the sentences are simpler and the vocabulary is simpler.

And that's a real change as well.

I think some of the things that have been most chilling for me in reporting this out were the things that were really about children reading.

And so we know that only 2% of American adults, you know, read to a child on any given day.

You know, we do see that every year older a child gets, the less they like to read.

I spoke with, you know, one researcher who did focus groups and high school students described reading for pleasure as an alien practice.

And so that really stuck out in my mind, just like, okay, how did we get to this point when kids view readings

Showing 1–20 of 180 · page 1 of 9