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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And here I think it's kind of useful to return to how I opened the essay, which is with this metaphor about the Library of Alexandria.
I wrote about that because the Library of Alexandria is, you know, known as this real intellectual center of this earlier era.
And for a long time, people thought that the library was destroyed by an act of war that like Julius Caesar burned it.
You know, what the new consensus is among historians is that no, these sort of external attacks didn't matter that much.
The library died because people didn't care that it lived.
They neglected it and then it eventually fell into disrepair.
And so I think that is a sort of really useful way to think about the present that we just have to decide because we're doing this to ourselves that we want to choose differently.
Did doing this research change your own reading habits at all?
I definitely, you know, have tried to read more.
And I mean, I think what I find is just that when I do have time, I always like love reading and get back into it.
But there's always sort of that little like first hump that I have to get over to kind of retrain my brain.
I don't know if that's actually what's happening inside my brain, but it feels like I can't just get through it.
And then I start to get engrossed and then I stop looking at my phone as much.
And so it's definitely made me think about that much more and kind of notice it more clearly.
I'm trying to be positive.
I'm like, no, I should read more.
I spoke with 33 professors, and the majority of them said that they noticed a clear change in their students in the last 10 years. This is Atlantic assistant editor Rose Horowitz. A Columbia professor said that his students are overwhelmed at the thought of reading multiple books a semester, that they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
A professor at the University of Virginia told me that his students shut down when they're confronted with ideas they don't understand. And the chair of Georgetown's English department said that his students' struggle to focus comes up even when they're reading a 14-line sonnet.
You know, students are really arriving in college struggling to read books in a way that they were not a decade ago.
That was what the professors were saying, that it really showed up when they were asking their students to kind of attend to something longer and that it just seemed like something that, you know, they were unaccustomed to.
Showing 141–160 of 180 · page 8 of 9
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