Dear Reader,
For the August issue of The Atlantic, I investigated what our society will look like as reading vanishes for all but the smallest sliver of Americans. The share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day has fallen by 40 percent over the past two decades. In 2022, fewer than half of all adults had read a book of any kind in the prior year. Only 38 percent had read a novel or a short story. One historian I spoke with described reading as a “niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.” And its disappearance shows no signs of slowing down.
Humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect how we think, how our elected leaders campaign and govern, what skills our culture values, and even how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.
This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. But that’s not quite right. Americans can still read. Paradoxically, they might be reading more words than ever before. People’s lives are filled with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions. But these snippets of text have crowded out the time necessary for sustained reading of complex texts. And over time, people have lost the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
I started reporting on this topic in 2024. That year, I published an article about students who arrived at the nation’s most elite colleges unprepared to read full books. I traced how middle and high schools had pulled books from their curricula in favor of short excerpts. Last year, my editors asked me to revisit the topic. It’s often dispiriting to track just how little people are reading. But I found glimpses of hope as well. When Texas banned cellphones in schools, one district saw 200,000 more library books checked out compared with the year before. And writing this article gave me the occasion to reflect on the books that shaped me as a thinker and a person. I hope that reading it will allow you to do the same.
To report this story, I conducted 90 interviews, sifted through numerous studies, and yes, read several books on the subject. It took many months of work and collaboration with too many colleagues to name here. If you’d like to read the story and support The Atlantic’s journalism, please consider subscribing.
Rose Horowitch
Staff Writer
