Recently, professors at elite colleges told Atlantic writer Rose Horowitch that their students don’t read whole books anymore. They blamed cell phones, standardized tests, and extracurriculars, and they mostly agreed that the shift began in high school. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we make the case for reading books, one memory at a time. We talk to Horowitch, and we hear from several Atlantic writers about the books they read in high school that stuck with them, and how their views of these books and the characters in them changed over time. Read Horowitch’s reporting here: “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” Share understanding this holiday season. For less than $2 a week, give a year-long Atlantic subscription to someone special. They’ll get unlimited access to Atlantic journalism, including magazine issues, narrated articles, puzzles, and more. Give today at TheAtlantic.com/podgift. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
I'm Karla Lally Music, cookbook author and snack enthusiast. Do you have a sweet tooth? Tune in to Sweets Unwrapped, a new podcast from Ferrero and Atlantic Rethink, the Atlantic's creative marketing studio, where I dive into the stories behind America's favorite treats.
Reading is just so central to my mind to what it means to be human.
Whatever you do when you read fiction is commit a small act of empathy. You know, you think about situations that are not like your own. You think about people whose lives are not like your own.
You know, of course, there are ways to build empathy and curiosity about the world that aren't sitting down and reading a full-fledged novel. But the novel's proven to be a pretty reliable way of building up the brain and building up, you know, the ability to think about a world outside of your own. So it would be sad if that went away forever.
I just think what a magical time your teenage years are. to form those kinds of impressions and books have been the reliable way to do that. So it's like, it's alarming to me that kids would be cut off from that voluntarily or through some other force.
I can't imagine having lived through adolescence without that as part of my life. I can't imagine life without having had these different worlds in which I could lose myself and feel like I was learning all about how human beings work, how society works, and what's possible to do with words, which in the end proved really important to me.
It may not be surprising that Atlantic writers and editors grew up with a deep connection to books. But American students today might not get to have that experience.
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.
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