Data from Gallup and the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Americans are reading fewer books and spending less time reading than ever.There's been reporting on college kids struggling to finish longer texts. And last month, in a viral post, one user lamented their loss of concentration for reading, which led to a larger online discourse about how to approach books again.Brittany is joined by Elaine Castillo, author of the book How to Read Now, and Abdullah Shihipar, Research Associate at the People, Place and Health collective at Brown University, to get into why reading books is on the decline, the battle for our attention, and what people can do to get their reading grooves back. Support public media and receive ad-free listening & bonus. Join NPR+ today.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Why are Americans reading fewer books?
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. In the words of RuPaul, Reading is what? Fundamental. But are we losing our grasp on it? Our ability to read books, or our lack thereof, has been in the zeitgeist lately.
Chapter 2: What factors contribute to declining attention spans?
There's been some viral reporting on college kids struggling to finish longer texts. I've seen multiple posts on X where adults are bemoaning their waning attention spans and asking for advice on how to read books again. I mean, you know we're cooked when Oxford's 2024 word of the year was brain rot. I'll say for myself, I've been there.
I love to read, but I feel like I've really had to work to be able to enjoy books like I used to. And the data says the same thing. Polls from Gallup and the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Americans are spending less time reading than ever. So I wanted to know, why is that?
The desire to information forage. That innate code in us has essentially been captured.
That's Elaine Castillo, author of the book, How to Read Now. Hello, thank you for having me. I'm also joined by Abdullah Shihipar, research associate at the People, Place and Health Collective at Brown University. I'm happy to be here. Thanks so much. They are here to walk me through the battle for our brains, how reading helps develop our souls, and what we can do to get our reading grooves back.
To jump right in, according to a Gallup survey from 2022, Americans are reading fewer books per year than ever before. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Time Use Survey, the time people spend reading has dropped steadily over the past 20 years. What do you think is behind this decline? What are the main factors here?
I think sometimes the issue I have with the way that the supposed decline in reading is framed is that massive corporations have essentially captured the capacities in us for reading, which is to say our attention, our capacity for critical thinking, imaginative thinking, all of which are things that are baked into us, into our code, into our evolutionary processes.
you know, selves the desire to information forage, but that innate code in us has essentially been captured. And maybe I'm using this metaphor because I'm currently on a sobriety journey, but a lot of it is really about thinking of that type of doom scrolling and the algorithms that go with it as essentially putting some of us in a kind of
Active addiction, because it offers a kind of momentary dopamine hit or momentary pleasure, essentially for the enrichment of the wealthiest people in the world. I'm saying this, hopefully it's coming across with compassion, because I'm also speaking about myself. Massive corporations have... eaten into the time that might otherwise be spent reading.
But at the same time, they replace reading, but they're not replacing the restorative aspects, the way that it works on our brain, reading books versus doom scrolling. So it's an illusory kind of replacement of that impulse in us.
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Chapter 3: How does technology affect our reading habits?
That's really interesting. I 100% understand. To open up about myself a little bit, I am 37. I had a television, cable television with a remote in my bedroom from age six to like, I don't know, maybe through the first two years of college. Then after that, I have never had television in my bedroom ever again.
I grew up watching a ton of TV, but I maintained a reading habit really strong, no matter what was happening with me having a television in my bedroom. My reading got troubled once I got a smartphone, and then it really went downhill once I got TikTok. For me, the phone is the thing. But Abdullah, I'm wondering, why is it harder to read than to watch TV or to scroll on social media brain-wise?
Watching something on TV doesn't necessarily require much of your brain. I find there's a bigger, I call it, quote unquote, like a mental load when you're starting a new book or you're approaching a new book. And it just feels like this insurmountable mountain, whereas with Scrolling, you just kind of like scroll, you see the news, scroll, scroll, scroll.
But there's actually studies that show that reading a book, reading physical media is, for lack of a better term, superior than reading on a screen. Why this is, I'm not really sure. But there's some hypotheses. I think there was one UCLA researcher, I think her name's Marianne Wolfe. Her hypothesis is that a lot of the reading we do on screen, implicitly, we are skimming.
People retain information a lot better when they've read it on a physical medium than when they read it on a screen-based medium. So it's not even just like television and movies. Screens can have an impact even in terms of reading articles and whatever we may be reading on the computer or the iPad.
Yeah, I mean, screen time is an issue that people of all ages face, but I hear it brought up constantly in regards to kids and young people. Abdullah, you said something really interesting to our producer Liam in your pre-interview about how you see less of an emphasis on reading, even for young people. Is the culture around reading different now?
I grew up on a diet of PBS kids. So we grew up with, what, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, Arthur, Reading Rainbow, and... The hits. Exactly, and they were all tied to reading in some way. I mean, Arthur had that, like, whole song about, like, having a library card.
Having fun isn't hard When you've got a library card Having fun... There were memes with DW holding a library card, being like... Now I know what true power feels like Ha!
Reading Rainbow, obviously, was in the title, and it was literally just reading a book, but it also encouraged people to go to your local library. Public television, I think, is molded in the public interest. There are people with doctorates in education and stuff who are involved in crafting those episodes, partially due to online stuff, partially due to the vast array of
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Chapter 4: What are the differences between reading on screens and physical books?
If you really don't make an active effort to promote it, to encourage children to do it, it will inevitably decline, especially as more things compete for people's attention.
but also even thinking about how adults interact with reading now. I think it's something you have to be a little bit more intentional about now because it's so much easier to indulge in other kinds of media intake. To me, reading also kind of feels more like niche hobby. Like there are strong communities of people who read a lot who are on social media, on BookTok or BookTube.
But our producer Liam mentioned that he thinks reading might be going the way of sewing, like something that used to be a more widely utilized skill, but is becoming kind of a niche pastime.
I would prefer reading not to become a niche activity. I'd prefer... social media and apps to become like smoking or sort of repetitive head injury that they come with certain general warnings. I appreciate the ambition.
Yeah, I think if reading is going to go the way of sewing in society, then we are in big, big trouble. At the end of the day, you could pay a tailor. But reading is a fundamental way of how we think and how we interact with the world. And the idea that it's changing has scary implications for just how we think.
I was looking up this study from Duke, and they actually gave people three tasks—reading tasks, writing tasks— They then presented them with reading comprehension questions later.
They found that when they were using an AI tool to do the reading task or do the writing task, they found that the reading-assisted task, when they used AI, it was down 12%, meaning that there was like a 12% decline in people's comprehension. It was even more dramatic with writing.
So when AI did the reading for them, their comprehension went down. And when AI did the writing for them, comprehension went down even more.
Yeah, so that's what I worry about with artificial intelligence, specifically for reading and writing tasks, is that When people get used to not writing their emails or using it to summarize certain large pieces of information, I worry that we're entering a phase where you have even less comprehension, even in terms of, forget reading books, but just not engaging with the written word at all.
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Chapter 5: Is reading becoming a niche activity?
The thing that scares me the most around AI and how we use it is that we ourselves are prepared to abdicate our own humanity and our capacity to read, to contemplate, to wrestle with difficult concepts, to imagine our lives and the lives of others, to read the terms and conditions of our own lives, essentially.
Because it is work to think critically, to practice media literacy, and to do the kinds of things that ultimately build a soul. But I think for centuries and centuries, literacy has been a thing viewed as hostile by people in power, right? That there's a capacity for defiance that's built into reading. Why? Because you're able to critically understand...
the world around you, the world in which you find yourself, because you're able to imagine other people's lives. And if you're able to imagine other people's lives, you're also less likely to dehumanize those lives because you've built the capacity in yourself to imagine them.
And if you've built the capacity in yourself to imagine other people's lives, that means you've also built the capacity in yourself to imagine your own life differently. doing the kind of work that restores you to being able to imagine the world differently is defiant.
There's so many good observations you just shared. To talk more about what you mentioned with literacy and literacy education, I recently learned that around half of American adults read below a sixth grade level, and 21% of US adults are illiterate or functionally illiterate. So, you know, This is not new.
And it's not always an issue of whether or not people want to read, but rather, if they can at all. And to say more about this, only about a third of illiterate American adults were born elsewhere. That's not a comment about literacy rates elsewhere. But to point out that the majority of illiterate American adults ostensibly had some kind of interaction with the American school system.
So how is the school system failing so many people?
You know, American public education has been underinvested. And to really tackle that problem, to tackle the problem of illiteracy, we need to invest in it. It will take a real effort, a real governmental-wide effort to not just encourage reading, but to get people's literacy rates up. And to me, that should be seen as sort of like putting a man on the moon or a cancer moonshot.
Like, people should aim, we should aim for the highest literacy rate possible. And not just highest literacy rate, but the highest level of reading possible.
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Chapter 6: How does AI impact our comprehension and engagement with reading?
People who read books had a 20% decrease in mortality compared to people who did not read books. Stick around.
What do we as people miss out on when people stop reading books?
It's incredibly pleasurable and innately fun. to us to be in intimacy and imagine lives that aren't our own. And it's also such a gift to be able to spend time, even when we're in isolation, with the shape of another person's mind. Over the summer, I read for the first time The Lord of the Rings. I'd never read that series ever. I'm now like a Tolkien stan.
And really annoying people around me because I'm like, have you heard of this up and coming writer, J.R.R. Tolkien? So then I went down a rabbit hole of reading his essays. And there's a really beautiful essay that he's written called On Fairy Stories.
But he talks about the joy of the happy ending and that the point of the fairy story or what he calls eucatastrophe, which is to say sudden and miraculous grace, you know, happy ending, consolation. which is contrasted to die catastrophe, sorrow, failure, poverty, loss. And die catastrophe are the things that people are wanting to escape from. I mean, Tolkien himself was in the First World War.
So the happy ending, or eucatastrophe, as he puts it, is a sudden and miraculous grace never counted on to recur. And it doesn't deny the existence of... you know, sorrow, failure, absolute loss. But what it does deny is universal final defeat. What it offers us is a glimpse, a fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of the world, as poignant as grief.
That is what we get when we read and when we truly connect with stories that we know will matter to us and that we know will change us. We get that glimpse of joy beyond the walls of the world or beyond the walls of the smartphone or whatever the walls of the contemporary world.
I also wonder about like the health benefits of reading. Like why might reading be good for us as like human beings?
Yeah. So one study that I found looked at people's engagement with reading and it looked at their longevity, how long they lived. And it found that people who read books had a 20% decrease in mortality compared to people who did not read books. Whoa. I remember when I mentioned that I was working on a piece at the time, and I mentioned that to one of my editors.
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Chapter 7: What roles do corporations play in our reading decline?
And this kind of works off the other sort of studies that have been done that showed that reading is protective of cognitive decline and is protective of, for children who spend a lot of time reading as children, it's associated with reduced mental health issues as adolescence.
Granted, these are studies here and there, but they all sort of come together to make this broader picture that reading is good for your brain. And therefore, what is good for your brain is good for your body.
Part of the reason why people have been talking so much about reading, I think, also is because it's top of the year. You know what I mean? Everyone's feeling a little bit like a sack of potatoes. So I'm not surprised that people are thinking a lot about reading now. But for people who want to get back into reading, how can they do it?
What I've been doing, because I like to read, I find it a pleasure in it, but I also think they're so busy. You find before the day ends, you just don't have enough time. So I've set a goal for myself this year, and it's been working, to at least do a minimum of 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes in the evening, and that way... You can just fit it in here and there.
And my strict requirement right now, maybe it'll change later, is not to do a page limit. Don't get caught up in how much you've read necessarily, just that you've, you know, you've checked it off. So that's what's, I don't, there's no, there's no necessarily science or anything behind that. That's just like something that's helping me right now.
Well, I completely agree. Each book is its own kind of individual time dilator, right? And there are some books that you're like, I'm flying through this. I'm finishing it yesterday. And there are some books that want you to spend... hours and hours or days on one page.
So I think that, you know, not holding ourselves to some standard of being, you know, I'm a machine that has to finish 500 pages by, you know, such and such date, because then it becomes just another chore slash it becomes just another kind of gamified or kind of optimized activity, you know, at a time when we are surrounded by sort of pulls to optimize every part of our lives.
The thing that gets you out of fatigue is not someone, you know, cracking a whip at you and being like, we'll read more peon. Like, well, no. You can have marathon reading and enjoy that and tear through books. Or you can just be like, you know what? I'm spending this year with...
The first chapter of War and Peace, and that's what I'm doing, and I'm not holding myself to more than that, and I'm just going to really live in that world. The word, I think it was you that used it, Brittany, was intentional. The care that we can put into reading intentionally will ultimately help
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Chapter 8: How can we encourage reading in today's society?
My imagination is working again because, you know, in the face of all of the kind of addictive algorithms, et cetera, sometimes I think of readers as like, conservationists in which the endangered habitat we're thinking about is our imaginations.
My gosh, Elaine, Abdullah, this has been such a great conversation. You all have me so reinvigorated and so hyped up to read. Like, thank you so much.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much for having us. That was Elaine Castillo, author of the book How to Read Now, and Abdullah Shihibar, research associate at the People, Place, and Health Collective at Brown University. This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Liam McBain. Barton Girdwood. This episode was edited by Jasmine Romero. Our executive producer is Veralyn Williams.
Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sanguini. All right. That's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. Talk soon.
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