Most of my professional colleagues have been passing around, posting, and commenting on the July 8 essay “The End of Reading is Here,” by Rose Horowitch in the Atlantic Monthly (link below). It is a particularly impassioned screed about how technology is altering our brains and putting books on the endangered species list.

It annoyed me to the point where I’m now going to carp at it.

Let me just say: The statistics in the article are perfectly fine, and yes, alarming. Both adults and children read less than they used to. And I thought that the article’s defense of the value of reading was particularly good. To wit:

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"Reading has never been natural. Humans have no innate cognitive machinery designed to string letters into words and connect them to their real-world analogues. To read, people had to repurpose regions of their brain used for speech and object recognition. The practice first emerged 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. For millennia afterward, most of the population was illiterate. Literacy became a mass phenomenon relatively recently, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440.

"The written word is fundamentally different from oral language. Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever. This frees up the mind to think of new ideas and make new discoveries.

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I couldn’t agree more.

The article goes on to finger the invention of television, and its spread into American homes beginning in 1962, as the beginning of the end; it quotes Neil Postman, as one must, to prove that television “hijacked Americans’ attention and turned politics into cheap entertainment,” and that our current entertainment culture does an even more efficient job of “crowd[ing] out the silent time necessary for reading”:

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"Not too long ago, at-home screen entertainment was finite. Shows aired on a certain day, at a ceratin time. If you wanted to watch an old movie, you had to put your shoes on and go to a video store. Books could compete in that environment. Some people, at least, would turn off the TV and read a book before falling asleep.

"Now entertainment is limitless. There’s no hard stop—one show bleeds into the next. People watch TV with their phone in hand, monitoring social media or texting with friensd. Netflix has reportedly told directors and screenwriters to assume that the audience isn’t paying attention and to constantly remind viewers what’s going on. In this environment, people have to be really determined to read. Most aren’t."

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The piece goes on to chronicle a litany of familiar concerns about the current state of our brains: they’re not working as hard as they used to, they’re becoming addicted to the dopamine hits of social media, they can’t score decently on the SAT or ACT reading and English tests. You can read it all at the link.

Most of it, I agree with.

So why am I annoyed?

Let’s start with the title: “The End of Reading is Here.”

Folks, I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s a journalistic technique, not a historical observation. Journals/magazines/news organizations/click-bait sites have to convince you that it’s worth your time to read whatever essay they’re providing.

What better way to do it than to announce the apocalypse?

For perspective, the Atlantic (which, to be clear, I read frequently and often appreciate) has also announced “The End of Cigarettes” (May 4, 2026), “The End of Cyberspace” ( May 1, 2019), “The End of Brawn” (August 11, 2016), “The End of Job Growth” (June 6, 2013), “The End of Soda” (May 18, 2012), “The End of Chinatown” (December 2011), “The End of White America” ( January/February 2009), “The End of Celebrity” (July 7, 2009), “The End of Palestine” (June 25, 2007), “The End of School” (May 1992), oh, and let’s not forget “The End of Desire” (October 1903).

There are more. But perhaps those illustrate my point. And at this point, I have to quote Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “ It turns out I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse.”

As an additional illustration of this problem, the piece begins with a stirring description of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.

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"Much of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements….This run of scholarship would not last. By 400 C.E., the library had disappeared. Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages… The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived."

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You’d never know from this that there is an ongoing debate among scholars as to whether the Library of Alexandria actually existed—at least in the form described by its earliest chronicler, Strabo, who lived a generation after the Library’s putative destruction.

But why point out the uncertainties, when the metaphor of the Library’s destruction provides such a great parallel to the problems of the present? Because the transition is:

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"Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to."

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Without the Library’s destruction, the apocalyptic assertion that darkness is gathering loses some of its power.

I’d also add to my annoyances with the essay that there seems to be a bit of blindness to the fact that, well, sometimes readers put books down because they’re just not all that interesting. As one of her supports for the fact that our brains can no longer process difficult sentences and complex idead, Horowitch writes:

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"Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series. Brian Bannon, the chief librarian at the New York Public Library, told me that young-adult fiction is one of the library’s most popular offerings—including among decidedly not-young adults."
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Here’s a thing about novels for kids: They’re engrossing, because they deal with elemental needs and fears, aspirations and catastrophes. The Hunger Games series, Harry Potter, The Dark Is Rising, The Hobbit: Perhaps they’re still capturing something that contemporary “adult fiction” is failing to provide.

But now, let’s go back to the apocalypse. As we move towards the end of the piece, we get this:

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"Today, reading is again clustered among a small minority of the population, but being a person of letters confers less status than it once did. The remaining readers are marginalized, mocked, and in many ways irrelevant. For most people, a life of letters is an economic dead end. Employment at newspapers has fallen by 75 percent in the past two decades. Job openings for academics in the humanities are likewise in decline, and fewer and fewer of the remaining positions are tenure-track. In 2024, only 8 percent of college graduates earned a bachelor’s degree in a humanities discipline. That year, both English and history departments awarded 40 percent fewer degrees than they did in 2012. There’s a fear among historians, whispered during panels and conferences, that they will be the final generation to systematically examine the past."

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The essay makes so many well-sourced points that I find this paragraph particularly infuriating. Who is being marginalized and mocked, exactly? How did we suddenly get from our brains to an economic dead end? What is the (here unexplained) relationship between reading books and a job in higher academics in the humanities? (If you’ve been following me for ANY time at all, you know that this is not a simple parallel.) And which fearful historians exactly are whispering during panels and conferences?

I’m not denying that we’re at an inflection point, or that the ways in which we read (like the ways in which we socialize, and eat, and elect our leaders) are in a massive and unsettling state of flux.

I’m just irked by the ways in this writer, dealing with this difficult subject, is pulling out all the stops to invoke panic without doing the really hard part:

My question would be: What do we do now? And so the piece concludes:

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"An astonishing wealth of information and wisdom has been bequeathed to us. What we’ll do with this inheritance is up to us."

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We could…read? Without the threat of apocalypse hanging over us?

Because as a historian, I can actually assert that the threat of apocalypse never impelled any society to a kinder, better, more productive way of carrying on.

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The End of Reading Is Here

www.theatlantic.com

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

1 week ago