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
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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.
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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