The headline in the Atlantic strikes a jarring note: "The End of Reading Is Here," it declares over a deep dive into the subject by Rose Horowitch. She makes the case that the country isn't becoming illiterate so much as "postliterate": still surrounded by words, but steadily losing the habit—and capacity—for deep, sustained reading that once shaped everything from individual thinking to democratic life. The numbers she cites are stark: Fewer than half of US adults read any book in 2022, and only 38% read fiction, while the percentage who read for pleasure on any given day shrank from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. And finally this: Gambling is now more popular than reading, with 57% of Americans placing a bet last year.
Horowitch traces how this shift—from books and newspapers to phones, short-form video, and now AI—appears to be reshaping brains, classrooms, and politics. Kids arrive at school with shorter attention spans, teens see reading for fun as odd, college students balk at dense texts and turn to ChatGPT to "translate" them. Meanwhile, social media rewards punchy, visual populism over argument, helping usher in what she calls the era of the "postliterate president." A devoted minority is reading more than ever—an estimated 20% of Americans accounted for 80% of book-reading last year—but it seems to be turning into a niche hobby. Read the full story, in which Horowitch acknowledges a "subtle" decline in her own reading habits.
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