Is the Age of Reading Over?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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We're going to have a conversation about the end of reading today. This idea, proposed in the most recent Atlanta cover story, is that the age of reading is turning out to be a short anomaly in human history, and that we are fast entering a post-literate society. But before we do that, I want you to think about the arc of your own relationship with books. How did you read as a kid? In school, when did that change? Did you notice a change? What's the last book that you read, absorbed, and enjoyed? I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic. I'm guessing that you've heard someone lament about how students in middle school, high school, or even in college don't read books anymore. Maybe you have a teacher friend who complains about having to assign excerpts or increasingly simple texts.
Maybe you are a young student and books seem annoying and time-consuming to you. Or maybe you're an adult and just find yourself trying to read, but instead reaching for your phone every couple of pages. The argument we're discussing today is much broader than mere phone distraction and spans back to ancient Egypt. It's about how reading shaped the human mind and then human society and how that's now veering in a different direction. Do you think more people actually read your full article or heard about the debate on TikTok? I hope that people read it, but I don't know. I'm talking today to the author of that cover story, Rose Horowitz, who is not the elderly professor type that you might normally assume wrote an Atlantic story called The End of Reading Is Here.
So funny because I initially had a joke in there, like, you probably think I'm retirement age reading this whole piece.
Rose is actually in her 20s. Yes. She did grow up learning to love to read. But then as she got older, she found it harder.
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 that was more what I noticed, yeah. Right. So that's your experience, and from your article, I'm saying that's the experience of lots of people. So just lay out the basics, yeah. In what ways and among whom has reading books declined?
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.
And is it the types of books people now read? Has that changed as well? I'm feeling very superior now because I just finished my book last night.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–5:02
2
How did the hosts introduce the debate over whether reading is ending?
5:02–12:47
3
Who is Rose Horowitz and what prompted her to write 'The End of Reading Is Here'?
12:47–17:47
4
Which groups have seen the biggest decline in book reading and by how much?
17:47–22:03
5
How have the kinds of books people read changed in recent decades?
22:03–30:11