You would be surprised just how quickly you can re-learn the focus to enjoy long-form writing and novels. Much like exercise, don't let your ego get in the way. Find something you enjoy, even if it's a bit trash, and just make it a habit. Like with everything you do regularly, your brain will get better at it, the habit will become more automatic, and you'll find yourself wanting to read more, and more often. It's very much not too late to turn the ship around on an individual level.
I did this in the last couple years, I used an 'atomic habits' kinda approach. I put a book on the back of the toilet and pledged to read 1 page before looking at my phone. It worked out nicely, I've read a bunch of books over the last year or so after kicking it off in that way.
I am also not a lifelong reader, I didn't start reading until college. My girlfriend read a ton and the first Lord of the Rings movie was about to come out, I got caught up in the excitement and read all the books. Ever since then, I've read pretty steadily. Interesting though, it wasn't social media or anything that slowed my reading to a trickle, it was audiobooks. I freakin love them when the narrator is good. Anyway, that's how I got back to reading and now I haven't listened to an audiobook in a while. :)
Some of the statistics in the article included audiobooks as reading. It seems like they must trigger at least a subset of the qualities of reading (like maintaining an imagined environment, parsing sentences and paragraphs into meaning, etc)
Absolutely. I used to read constantly, from my teenage years through my early 30's, but stopped about 5 years ago? I guess life stress and short form social media taking my free time.
But I managed to get free of all the apps, and I jumped back in by re-reading some books from my childhood (Sword of Shannara, some bad 60's/70's sci fi, etc), and really enjoyed them. It was enough to shake me out of my lull and now I have an active queue again.
My commute and mornings are so much better than scrolling instagram on the train.
What's also massively undervalued is medium high dosage of the amino acid creatine. If you take >10g/day you'll have a much easier time staying focused over long periods. It becomes noticeable only after consistent intake however, and only if you actually pay attention to it - as you won't feel any different. (And it's effect is also supposedly diminished with high Coffein intake)
I took a long break from reading for enjoyment after I graduated from college. I got burnt out from reading things I didn't enjoy in high school and undergrad. Now it's what I do to wind down my day before bed. It's a nice relaxing activity that allows my imagination to run a little.
To add to this, it isn't "doing it bad" if you aren't out there reading deep texts. Just as it isn't "doing it badly" if you can't run a 4 minute mile.
As you say, you get better at what you are doing. If you want to get faster, at anything, you don't really have the option of skipping the slow phase.
But it's also important to realize that it is "doing it bad" if you are hoping to run a 4 minute mile but your only training is slowly walking around the block forever. At some point you have to seek out more substantial books. You can't just continually read pulp fiction and think you're going to improve at anything; you have to progress.
when you spend long times focusing your attention upon that whole reading process it tends to stick. Like a drug with long-term effects. Do you want those effects?
> Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)
Has the author read A Clockwork Orange? It is filled with made-up "slang" that's basically just Russian. Needing some help to understand that is totally reasonable to me -- I definitely looked up a bunch of the words when I read it!
We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read.
Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. More what seems to be the case is people have enjoyed coding as a kind of video game.
But this generalizes to the general population too. Marshall McLuhan's message remains a very important medium.
> "I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong."
It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not a prestigious or high paying job and computers were much cruder and required much more skill to get adequate performance from them. Generally, aspiring hackers were very well read people.
There were, of course, corporate programmers doing business programming back then too but they weren't considered hackers and wouldn't even have wanted themselves to be considered hackers.
Progamming in a corporate/business environment was not prestigious or high paying then either. It was a decent job, don't get me wrong, but something more similar to accounting or other back-office work in terms of pay and prestige.
if you wear yourself out mentally all day as part of your occupation, digging into a "good" book is often too much work.
As anecdata: My wife has a "brainy" occupation and her brilliant sister does not. Correspondingly, my wife has no interest in "brainy" books in her free time whilst her sister is always recommending new 900 page tomes.
You absolutely can learn orally, what I'd question is if you can do so without active listening. Listing to anything while doing, well anything, is pretty pointless to me, I tends to not listen and not absorb anything. I can barely listen to a podcast while working out, I miss huge gaps where my brain just isn't listening.
Imagine gatekeeping learning. I suppose the blind are incapable of it, then? Or is taking in information via the fingers somehow more valid than via the ears?
How in the heck can you plausibly correct someone else like that? You (almost certainly) don’t know that person, even in passing.
People can learn from watching a documentary just as well as they can learn from reading, but reading teaches you how to interpret language as you continue reading, and other forms of information delivery convey understanding of their own mediums in their own ways. I would not have learned how to quickly spot a terrible documentary over a great one if I had not watched so many in my life. It doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything because I watched and listened instead of read, it just means that I didn’t read the documentaries.
Pro tip: don’t correct people about their own lives.
I'll admit fault for my remark, but I'll stand by the point I meant to express.
Part of disagreement probably stems from what type of 'learning' we're discussing. In my view, at the broadest sense that we can define 'learning', is incorporating information about our surroundings into our internalized world model. The type of learning I see most valuable personally, is the type that expands this horizon the most, or helps us think in frameworks that break down the least in different contexts.
This type of foundational building often requires deep thought, but is also often deeply rewarding if you get it right. This doesn't require reading by itself, but ruminating and neural rewiring can often be produced by it, if you consume the right content for you. I think it's important to have different experiences, many of which come from consuming different mediums, as well as doing things in real life, but a significant part of knowledge to this day has been passed down by books.
Even if we mean 'learning' to be more similar to 'gathering information', I think it can be most efficiently done by reading, or doing. I don't hold as much disagreement there, nor any judgement, but I wouldn't equate the two. Perhaps a bit pedantic, but I read 'liking learning' beyond the means by which it's achieved, and 'hating reading' reads temperamental to me.
We read, a lot, but not books. We read manuals, get started docs, apis, git repos, AI responses, wikipedia, tik tok comments just for fun, we read constantly and will read till the end of times. That's the way we learn and entertain ourselves, there is no other way around that.
Given that I have mental bandwidth available, I enjoy a mentally stimulating read (though, the definition of that surely varies between individuals), but people do indeed come into programming from a variety of different angles.
What initially attracted me to programming was the ability it gives one to create. As a kid the idea that a “regular” person like myself could make computer programs — and not just simple CLI toys but full on lovingly crafted, end user friendly complex GUI applications — blew my mind. Programs weren’t like every nearly every other product which only ever came out of some factory that nobody saw themselves.
As such my interest in programming comes with a slant towards practical usability. I don’t do well with abstract concepts without a rock solid grounding real world use case, even though those are intellectual candy for a few subgroups of programmers.
> I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.
Perhaps the fact that our jobs are intellectual is the problem. I find that at the end of the day I don't have the capacity for intellectual pursuits and I find physical hobbies / activities more relaxing. I suspect the opposite is probably also true.
Honestly it doesn't matter much, go grab a random book from goodwill. If you do "need" a recommendation, I'd suggest "Roots", I'm reading it now and it's amazingly well written.
One suggestion I would make is to read something from before 1980. No real reason why, but books from 1900 - 1980 work better for me personally, not sure why.
You are a programmer? You understand that different firmwares and operative systems work in different ways and excel at different things?
For the record I do like reading. I just don't like all the reading. I tried learning rust by reading the book. Ugh. Horrible for me. Much better experience working on a project of my own. I saw that for some people it worked. Good for them. It didn't for me, and I had to find a different path. I learn by tinkering. Others might learn by copying, or by drawing boxes and arrows. Who am I to judge their firmware?
This is not a bad thing. That's good! Variety in ways of thinking is one of humanity's strengths.
If you find someone who is good at programming but doesn't like reading, try to find out how. You might be able to learn some of their abilities that complement yours.
I think a reasonable definition of "novel" is a long-form work in prose, that tells narrative stories, often looking at individual families and characters and their development over time. In that sense, novels are not that novel and there are novels preserved from classical antiquity, India's golden age, and medieval China.
By what standard are novels "recent"? The earliest novels we have originated not long after the first books (aka codices) appeared. The first modern novel was written at the same time as the king james bible, over 400 years ago.
They're not the newest kind of literature. Arthurian legends and religious canons are two examples of newer forms, neither of which I think would be typically described as "recent." I could also use the novella, and the anecdote as examples instead.
I gave up reading when I got my first portable computer. Not sure why. But after some time I got sick of it and got back to reading and I love it!
For some reason I suddenly got an urge to read long deep fantasy. Storm light archive is perfect for this, I recommend play some fantasy reading music on background. It's a bliss, especially in summer afternoon with cold coffe.
I gave up on reading because the authors want to spend a considerable number of pages telling me the color of the buttons on an imaginary character's outfit. They have no such right to waste my time with (or even worse, charge me money for) that.
No one says "I gave up on eating because restaurants kept serving me spicy food". You just order different food. A short story that's a couple pages long isn't going to waste them describing the color of buttons, and not every novelist is Tolkien.
Then maybe you should not read prose. It is about conveying an experience, a story. You might have simply picked a bad author. Personally, I prefer long reads. I understand that some people might not enjoy that style of storytelling, but saying “give up reading” overall is a shame. Try something like Warhammer 40k novels. They are simple, entertaining, and split into shorter parts. What you are describing does not happen there.
I read The Goldfinch a while back. Not at all my usual fare. The plot progressed at a snail's pace, but I enjoyed every page of it. (The movie treatment was horribly shallow in comparison, but there's no way they could possibly convey the depth in two hours.)
I thought that The Goldfinch had a contrived beginning and a weak ending, but a long, delectable middle that made up for both ends. Also try the author's earlier novel The Secret History if you haven't read it yet.
>Of course, the new republic was not always a haven for sober analysis. The Founding Fathers attacked their enemies in the papers, spreading lies to incite the public against their opponents. One ally of Thomas Jefferson’s called John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
As a non-fiction author, I find myself reading a lot of non-leisure material for research--books, old newspapers, and that sort of thing. A few years ago I noticed that my leisure reading was on the decline, so I decided to delete all of the social media, news, and gaming apps from my phone, and replace them with an e-reader app.
Now, when I have a few idle moments away from my computer, instead of checking something like reddit, I read a few pages from a book. It's great, I recommend it! I'm back to reading a couple of novels per month, and I don't have so much of that queasy wasted-time feeling that social media tends to give me. I've even learned how to pause reading mid-paragraph and resume easily later; that part took some practice.
One thing that helped my friends and I really enjoy reading again is book clubs! Since the start of Covid, I've personally run ~3 books clubs with different people where we all vote on a book together, set a pace (usually a few chapters a week), and a time to meet weekly on discord and then discuss.
It's been a great way to solidify friendships, broaden my interests (Not every book that's been voted on was one I'd have picked alone), and cultivate a habit of reading and enjoying meaningful time with people.
I highly recommend anybody with friends who might be interested to reach out and give it a shot! It's been a delight! I've even branched off into hosting a movie club now with the same idea, just pick a movie weekly and watch it asynchronously, then hop on a call to discuss :)
I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person.
Reading is definitely a skill that needs to be learned and maintained. Going from reading a couple of hundred words, to even a longer 30 - 60 min article can be tough if you’re out of shape. Same with writing.
It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.
A good idea to consider might be what Hans Magnus Enzensberger referred to as "second-order illiteracy".
> [The second-order illiterate] has come a long way: his loss of memory causes him no suffering; his lack of will makes life easy for him; he values his inability to concentrate; he considers it an advantage that he neither knows nor understands what is happening to him. He is mobile. He is adaptive. He has a talent for getting things done. We need have no worries about him. It contributes to the second-order illiterate's sense of well-being that he has no idea that he is a second-order illiterate. He considers himself well-informed; he can decipher instructions on appliances and tools; he can decode pictograms and checks. And he moves within an environment hermetically sealed against anything that might infect his consciousness. That he might come to grief in this environment is unthinkable. After all, it produced and educated him in order to guarantee its undisturbed continuation.
I recently argued with someone in their 60s who argued, in total sincerity, that nobody should ever need to read or write more than 500 words at a time. I asked about Terms of Service agreements, hospital paperwork, etc, and she insisted that it was not a useful skill. I think she might qualify as illiterate.
(For reference, your comment and my reply combined make for about 180 words.)
The UNESCO/World Bank literacy rate is basically defined how you thought. But high income countries don't usually report this because literacy by this measure is nearly universal. So they often report at higher thresholds (e.g. how many people can read at a grade 9 level), and news headlines often don't make it clear that this is not the same as the UNESCO definition.
> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate,
Under normal circumstances for a healthy human, I'd say no, at least directly. Not a scientific analysis of course, but I don't feel reading ability in a language that you use regularly is going to degrade that significantly. A very similar problem might come about through a drop in attention span which is definitely an issue for many these days, but I wouldn't count this as a literacy problem: the written letters/words/sentences/… are not the issue and other things are going to be equally impacted.
For a second+ language, especially if you never got to a particularly fluent state, this is probably quite different - for anecdata I did pretty well at Spanish GCSE then never spoke a word the 32 years before starting to relearn last year. But again I would not really call this a general literacy problem.
One place where you do see literacy fall precipitously is due to mental degradation due to common complications of old age, if you have relatives with dementia you will have seen this first hand. While literacy is only part of a massive problem here, reading and writing abilities are things that fall away relatively quickly for many (presumably due to them being relatively complex operations, and needing conscious concentration rather than being autonomic life-preserving functions).
> I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person.
Indeed, and this is the source of the discrepancy in the reddit-style gotcha that gets repeated about Americans being illiterate. It's not that they can't read, it's that illiteracy (as measured by whichever agency in the US does the measuring) means something more than just "can't read at all."
I think that literate people can recover from a period of not reading (books) at all.
I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading.
In my case reading books is a kind of fever that I get every year or so.
Unfortunately there really aren't any other books like the culture series. You might enjoy Banks' "The Algebraist" and the completely unrelated though similarly named "The Alchemist".
> I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum.
It's a very recent redefinition, pushed by people looking to make money from a panic. They're trying to make people who are simply incurious (through stupidity, fear, boredom or whatever) into illiterates. More people are literate than ever before because of the internet. Before the internet, there were an enormous number (up to a quarter of the US population) of actual illiterates.
The new definition of illiteracy is (manipulatively) somehow including people who wouldn't be able to understand something that is being read to them.
I suspect that a lot of middle-class people are illiteracy truthers, because they've never met someone who actually couldn't read. I'm from poor, black, uneducated, working people, and before the internet there were plenty who simply couldn't read. If you asked them to write the word "STOP" they would make a good attempt to copy what they remembered from a stop sign, and draw it like a picture. They're normal people, though, and if you didn't know them well, the strategies that they've developed over a lifetime would keep you from noticing.
It's going to be back again - technology has removed the need to read and write because of voice recognition and interfaces. We're calling it too early.
> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.
I think it's too easy to be exposed to words. To fall into illiteracy through atrophy would be like forgetting Spanish while living in Mexico. The good thing about comprehension-type skills is that they put you into a virtuous circle passively. Once your French gets to a certain point, it takes an effort not to understand French; and every piece of French you fail to fail to understand makes you better at understanding French. If you're in Paris, riding the bus, and somebody is babbling into a cellphone, you'll wish you didn't understand French.
English (like French) is just an absurdly hard language to read and write. Of course there are people who can't, at all. French, although absurd, is probably easier to read than English (though a bit harder to write.)
> Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.
It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".
Your selective quote left off the part that made it a fairer comparison. "Only 38 read a novel or short story" was a follow-up to "fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022." That's a year-long stat.
> Reading an entire book takes much more time than placing an online bet.
Yes, but do you only do things for pleasure if they're done quickly? Is your sex always over in a minute?
Also, I was responding to this:
> Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".
Yes, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a different measure than "placed a bet last year", but "read a book of any kind in 2022" is the same length of time, though not the exact same year.
This is a nit-pick, and I agree with the long arc of this article. (And it is very well-written, to boot). But, on this phenomenon,
> 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.
I wonder to what extent this can be attributed to decades-long release windows for some of these novels. I find myself alienated by the dominance of simple and childrens media among my age group peers, but I read Eragon as a child, kept up with the series, and have the 2023 release in the Eragon series on my books-to-read list. The Hunger Games started in 2008; I couldn't bemoan someone who was captivated at 13 then for enjoying the occasional release in 2025.
> Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.
Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.
For better or worse, testing was used as an assortative matching between students and universities they applied for. Though far from perfect, a university that set their acceptance bar at a certain level could expect incoming students to at least be at or around that level.
The less rigorous the filtering, the more you have to accommodate the lower ends of the incoming students’ abilities. So as standardized testing is softened, so too is the curriculum that students are exposed to.
There is a movement against standardized testing that gained traction in the past decade, arguing that because it’s flawed and imperfect we should abandon it. The movement never had a good replacement for it, though, so the shift was toward looser standards and judging students based on vibes and non-academic measures. Many of the universities that went this direction are reversing course and adding standardized testing back now because the reality of higher education is that you need to filter incoming students by some academic measurements if you want to be able raise the bar for your curriculum.
The effects cascade everywhere. In a perfect utopia everyone would get individualized perfect tutoring and we wouldn’t have to worry about testing, but in the world we inhabit a lot of the education decisions and realities are downstream of what we can test for.
The implication is not that people learned this skill from the SAT, but rather that not requiring it to score well on the SAT further lowers the baseline.
Doing well on the SAT used to require some measure of reading stamina. It no longer does, so some students who would have been prompted to increase their stamina in order to do well on the SAT will no longer feel that pressure.
Hmm. If someone knew the number of graduates from 2017 to 2026, they could estimate what fraction of them could paraphrase and make inferences.
My stab at it: Looks like about 36 million high school graduates from 2017 to 2026. The US population is about 350 million.
20% of 350 million is 70 million, so 70 million people couldn't paraphrase in 2017. 30% is 105 million, so 105 million people couldn't in 2026. That means that of the 36 million high school graduates from 2017 to 2026, only one million of them could paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text?
I know the US educational system is a mess, but I find it hard to believe that it's quite that much of a mess. Can anyone point out flaws in the math?
That assumes the shift was entirely due to high school students becoming adults. There are also people who haven't read much over those years and have had their skills declined to the point of failure. Or, also likely, sample size issues.
You're making the assumption that the change in absolute terms is entirely driven by deficient additions to the population. It's just as possible that some portion of the population lost their skill by allowing it to atrophy from underuse.
GenX here... I thought this was a great read. I still hope for a young rebellion against the forces the presented in the article. And the author does point out some reasons to hope.
Personally, I read and write every day. I usually have 2-3 books I'm going through at any one time.
I've noticed that on long-haul flights, the movies typically hold no interest and I just read for hours—what a luxury to have nothing else to do!
We gave away our TV. The shows were just less compelling, we found. We don't miss it.
I feel like we tried to catch the wave, and almost did, but we were unable. It rolled out from under us and now we're floating once again in the calm sea beyond.
I have Moonreader installed on my phone, so I can reach for a book any time. This morning I was hypothesizing that since I use my phone for reading books, I'm fooling my brain into that association and maybe that's helpful in consuming long-form content online...?
I also read paper books, a Kobo, my computer, and an Xteink x4. Really anything, I guess!
That hardest part is knowing that more has been written than I will ever have time to enjoy.
No offense, but this comes off as incredibly smug... Glad you're able to find the time to read and write every day, but not not everyone has that luxury.
It's true that I'm in a place of privilege in the world. But it's amazing how much time gets freed up of one doesn't watch TV or read social media. Like the numbers show, it's hours per day.
I sympathize with people who truly do not have the time, but that's different from most people who simply choose not to spend their time reading or writing.
For me, reading used to be a way to enjoy part of my free time.
Nowadays is still that but it’s also a way to relax. Even though I don’t have accounts in the main social media networks (instagram, fb, twitter, youtube, etc) I still consume them indirectly on a weekly basis (e.g., i like to watch videoclips in YT, a friend sends me a twitter link, etc). It makes me anxious. I’ve realised that consuming in tiny bits (short videos, ads, stories, tweets, private messages, even going to those stores where everything is under $5) doesn’t suit me well, therefore reading regular books for at least 1-2h per day (plus other activities like working out alone, or going for a walk to a park) is becoming essential for my wellbeing.
I realized this recently as well, on how much social media has started affected me. I've made some changes to how I use my phone now but haven't seen a lot of improvement overall, basically because I've found that there is "Social Media" everywhere I go. I removed all the Meta apps from my phone and found myself spending more time on LinkedIn. Removed that and I end up on Reddit. I do feel better about not being on FB and Instagram anymore though which I found were the biggest source of my wasted time. I'm not able to fully limit all the apps, and that may just come over time with better habits.
The positive upside to all of this has been that I've been reading more in general. Finished 2 books last month, and almost done with a 3rd one. Not having any of the main apps on my phone just has meant that I end up reaching for a book or something physical to occupy my time, which in general has been a better use of my time.
It's funny, I signed up for tiktok when I was curious about the hype, explored a bit for the science / history / educational content I normally watch on youtube and found there was almost nothing, and what little there was was of much lower quality.
I deleted my account after about 15m of looking, and hilariously enough, a tiktok researcher reached out, and actually paid me ~ $200 to understand why I bounced off the platform.
I suggest blocking all platforms that provide short-form video and firmly deciding not to consume such content for a set period of time (e.g., 2 weeks). For me, this is the only way to stop once I fall back into the habit.
Doing this enabled me to spend more time developing and pursuing my own ideas, which is invigorating.
Or even just setting up a timer, I've set up a 20 min timer for myself recently, once it's done I do stick to it, I did get to do some things I've been pushing away, I still get some value out of these but... I get a lot more by not spending an hour on them.
Have you also run into the attention deficit effect of all these short forms of media? Overriding my brain's desire to put a book down after a couple pages is certainly not my favorite pastime.
I found that when trying to rekindle my reading habit, book choice had a big effect. Some books are like vegetables you know you should eat but really don't want to and other books are junk food. Empty calories that you love.
Pick from the latter pile at first and rebuild the muscle.
It's been my impression that classic literature is going the same way as painting and other forms of high art.
It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Many people still read novels. I live in NYC and see numerous people read books and Kindles every day on the train.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much
It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series. Stories that used to be told in an hour and a half are now being told in 8 hour-long segments
which could, for the most part, be boiled down to 2 hour-long segments. so much is stretched out for the sake of padding. the good news is that scrubbing through shows is possible — it is usually painfully clear when to stop & watch at double speed — & time otherwise lost is recovered in this way.
Movies are good for plot oriented stories, with clear beginning, middle, and end.
But they are not ideal for more character driven or lore oriented content.
Long slow burning stories told over many episodes let you really show many facets of characters and also opportunities to hint at a much larger world than what can be shown within 2 hours.
TV has always been about characters - they couldn't do a plot well because they well knew regular viewers would once in a while not be able to watch an episode and so they can't found on your knowing what happened last time - people would miss. TV needed a way to get people to watch as many shows as possible, and that meant getting you involved in the characters, and write stories that could be watched in any order.
Movies meanwhile had a long time between the next one and so you couldn't get people deeply involved in the characters. However you had enough to pull off a slightly complex plot and so that is what movies did.
I miss when episodes were episodic. Watched Deep Space 9 recently, and it was such a blast: Characters developed and had arches, but there were no episodes where nothing happened! In more recently produced tv series there are so many episodes where nothing happens. There is no story, just vibes. In DS9 every episode was a story with a beginning, middle and end, exploring some idea.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Cinema is dying from mostly self-inflicted wounds though. They keep making movies (or re-making movies) with bad writing, bad stories, and unrealistic character development arcs that not many people want to watch.
Good movies have been rewarded in theatres. Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, etc. all had great box office sales when other movies around them flopped.
'Movies' at Blockbuster level pivoted to ersatz carnival rides post-'Pirates of the Caribbean', focusing on safe IPs and simple plots designed to aid comprehension of the major story beats in the SEA markets without the need to resort to subtitles or dubbing.
'True' Cinema has been going from strength to strength the last decade, with even Netflix putting out Fincher spectacles like 'Mank' on streaming, and A24 bringing introducing a new audience to phenomenal Korean Cinema like 'Parasite' and 'Minari'.
Even in the traditional studio system we have been spoilt in recent years by a succession of Palm D'Or and Oscar winners like Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle of Sadness, Zone of Interest, The Brutalist, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon.
A friend at the gym raved about Top Gun: Maverick when it came out, and against my better judgement I watched it on a streaming service. It was essentially Top Gun, again. Absolutely uninteresting and completely predictable. And I rather enjoyed the original.
Even accepting that Project Hail Mary, Obsession, and Top Gun are "good movies" (which I completely reject), you're cherry-picking. The top three films of the year are Super Mario Galaxy, Michael, and The Devil Wears Prada 2.
Energy is more difficult to gauge, but the average American has over 5 hours of leisure time daily. When there was more of a time crunch in the past, Americans read more.
Buddy, I just laid out the exact numbers that show less people go to cinema by almost half. The defintion of dying.
And beyond that if you go deeper, the revenue growth is almost entirely attribured to higher prices in ticket sales while attendance in real terms continues to decline.
The number of people who buy tickets to sit in theater to watch movies is not a good measure of people's interest in watching movies or the success of the medium. Most people are streaming films and while streaming services continue to suck at very basic things you'd expect from a media player they're still very popular.
I think it's mostly due to mobile phones. Most people seem to spend a substantial amount of their free time staring at their phone screen rather than engaging with books or other forms of entertainment. Phones being bite sized entertainment orientated is probably changing the way people feel about longer forms.
> who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
>> who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
> Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
Most of those are passive entertainments, suitable for people who've been drained of the energy to do anything else.
You are good at reading so it is passive. Someone who doesn't read much is not good at it, and so no reading is passive. Get that person to read some more and eventually they get good and it can become passive, but for most it is not.
I could watch TV passively (I don't watch TV, but I could). However if you switched my TV for one that received only Spanish - I have enough Spanish that I could understand, but it wouldn't be passive for me, it would be hard work to understand.
> Someone who doesn't read much is not good at it, and so no reading is passive.
How did people get worse at reading, other than choosing to spend time on the alternative activities that I listed? You may be reversing cause and effect.
I wouldn't call social media relaxing. After all, it's known as doomscrolling. I think reading is actually more relaxing. Social media is addictive, like a drug. Nobody calls cocaine relaxing.
What exactly does "mentally passive" mean? I doubt cocaine is that either.
Anyway, I don't buy the "energy" story, that doomscrolling is somehow low-energy, or even that people can't muster the energy for any activity other than doomscrolling.
> bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Capitalism is "fixing the glitch" of workers having space energy. I hope soon we'll achieve the ideal bimodal distribution of labor: work intensified to the point where workers that have the energy for nothing but work, and the impoverished totally unemployed that we can just corral and forget about.
How does this viewpoint account for the times when "capitalism" was, by all objective measures, worse for laborers? I.E. the early industrialization period when laborers worked 14-16 hour days alongside children in factories and mines, risking life and limb?
The brief nightmare where workers had enough power to demand better conditions is thankfully ending, and we can return the happy days where workers would slave away for just enough compensation to sustain themselves, and they'd be happy to do it because they had no better options.
Same with my girls (parents of boys seem to mostly have a different experience). Hopefully your kid gets access to digital libraries like Epic or Sora at school. There are also public libraries with ebook lending that can make the habit cheaper.
It does. People who bet on sports sink hundreds of hours into forums and consuming visual content. Placing a bet takes 30 seconds, deciding what to bet on takes people a very long time. As long as reading a book.
I think you're vastly overestimating the amount of time people put into researching. A very small minority, sure, but most sports bettors look at the lines and pick.
I'm inclined to believe that the decline of our education system is intentional. Certain people don't want the masses to be capable of critical thinking.
Were they though? Or were they only illiterate because literacy was measured in Latin not their native language? We know that historically that did happen, and it is hard to figure out what was done.
Even today, most talking about literacy rates are using a very high level read skills to make things look bad, when most people can read just fine for the normal level things are written in. I'm near illiterate if you only test me on medical papers.
Even in the 1800s the literacy rate in the US was over 50% (the highest in the world), because it was founded by "sola scriptura" Protestants for whom Bible reading was a religious duty.
That merely shows that a very basic education is more widespread. One thing that's always struck me, listening to letters read aloud in history shows, is the eloquence and mastery of the language they possessed.
TLDR: fewer people may have been literate, but the ones who were, were damned good writers.
“A Clockwork Orange” as “Old English” is an amusing anecdote, but it might be worth noting that the novel is written in deliberately nonstandard English mixing in Russian words, so it might be nontrivial to read for people lacking interpolation skills.
In the first paragraph, e.g., there is:
> There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
It's also New Wave science fiction, and once you get past the conlang and the genre conventions, it's still incredibly violent! Kubrick iirc even once said in an interview that he removed some book scenes from his (initially X-rated) film adaptation, because he thought the invented language helped make them less disturbing to read, but audiences watching them dramatized would just give up and walk out. Anyway I sure do see some of the trends described in the article with my younger students and relatives, but such a strange unforced error makes me suspicious of the strength of the research.
My kids are active, voracious readers. At least one book (500-700 pages) a week. It feels like one of the only things that I've really done right as a parent.
Kids come out as a person, with strong opinions and desires. You can shave off some rough edges, and maybe bend a few branches of their experience.
But if you present a kid with the opportunity to read, and they read, you can’t take much credit. That’s just who they are. Others are given the opportunity and don’t.
You can fail to provide the opportunity, but after that, it’s pretty much up to the kid.
As a life long reader, on my own, and to my kid, including many a night time baby -> toddler -> easy chapter -> harder chapter read, my kid doesn’t read books. Certainly competent to do so, but just doesn’t. Possibly we could have continued to deny access to Netflix until later (it was 1 hour a week until about 10). No YouTube allowed. Still, didn’t read. Other kids do, and I’m jealous.
And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before.
This sentence undermines the whole article.
People do read more than ever. But we don't recognize it as such. We read on our phone while intermittently reading subtitles of Netflix in the background. We read every time we look at a computer, phone, advertisement etc. But we only count reading paper as "real reading".
The shape of reading is changing yes. I think the "deep" thinking associated with reading has always been a bit of an elitist idea. Why would reading 1000 words of a great philosopher be any different from reading 1000 words of smut online. In some way losing this kind of stigma will make reading more accessible.
Writing and publishing is dying first. And that has to go long before reading dies anyway.
"the "deep" thinking associated with reading has always been a bit of an elitist idea" - precisely. This is all about massaging the categories such that consuming or producing a given type of media in a particular style is "good" and everything else is inadequate.
So if I read a bunch of tech manuals, I'm not a reader because it's not fine literature?
What if I read them as PDFs? What if I print them? Where's the line?
I think we ought to call it something other than simply "reading", because the author seems to be leveraging the dual-meaning of that word to make their point more strongly. But "consuming literature for enjoyment" doesn't come off quite as spicy as pretending that others that don't are illiterate.
It is very odd, I do more deep reading then ever before but its curated through llms.
I do the exploration then the dive on papers.
Many novels we love were released as serials.
I haven't gotten stuck trying to understand an idea because its poorly explained in a book in a while.
I think humans have been very inefficient at finding gaps in logical progression in explanations because anyone who already knows it subconsciously skips steps in the explanation.
That said, llms, woof. Still so much misunderstood.
>Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do.
Most of the news are not worth reading. I listen to news when eating, and I am very glad I don't have to waste my reading span on this crap.
I wish there was a local news paper around me. There are national news papers with a local edition, but they don't have local reporters digging into local stories and so are not worth reading.
Long read. But this has been known for over 20 years.
> Reading has always been associated with education and more generally with urban social elites. Although contemporary commentators deplore the decline of “the reading habit” or “literary reading,” historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly.
"Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century"
I wonder if someone educated in this could provide the neurological benefits of reading, outside of communication. They are numerous, are they not? Memory, neuroplasticity, focus, stress relief—I'm sure there are many other benefits too.
If you want people to read, you have to be willing to accept a population that does not feel harassed and hurried. You have to give them a raise when they say they can't afford shelter and food. You have to stop gatekeeping education as a scarce credential rather than giving it freely as a public good. You have to build systems that allow them to access their needs without movement or seeking help being difficult or even a death trap. You have to rein in the forces that wish to monopolize their attention.
People read when they feel secure. We don't live in a particularly secure society.
Even as the author points out people are reading more, he continues to conflate books with reading - and not just that but reading specifically physical books (referring to his stats around book ownership).
The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.
The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.
I still read books sometimes. It’s a different experience. But it’s only a dumbing down of society, if the things you’re reading are dumb.
> The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.
> The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.
You're in good company. Sam Bankman-Freid:
I would never read a book. I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.
You do actually need to read huge swaths of information to understand the relevant information. A good nonfiction book isn't long because of low information density: it's because the ideas are so complicated that it takes an entire book to explain it. Your approach is emblematic of a modern trend where people know a bunch of smart factoids but have no broader wisdom or understanding.
Not reading books because of "information denisty" is a lazy rationalization for dumbing yourself down. Wikipedia is good as a quick reference if you already understand something, but a disaster for learning.
I do read huge swaths of information, just directly relevant to the questions that I have, and the things required to understand that information.
Don’t have to read a book on every US president to understand what happened during the Reagan administration. And if I’m primarily interested in the Cold War, I can focus on that subject and skip out on when Reagan was governor of California, or how he met his wife.
More than that I can get information from a variety of sources, including ones that disagree with each other and have different perspectives. That has absolutely enormous value when trying to comprehend something new…and isn’t often available in a single book.
You still can’t be lazy. Laziness is antithetical to truly acquiring knowledge. But it definitely can’t only come from a book.
There are very few non-fiction books that actually need their space to communicate their idea, instead of doing it in a chapter and filling the rest of it to reach some word-count target.
I've read plenty of scientific articles that read like the author is trying to fulfill a word count. There's definitely something to be said for brevity.
I read all day, every day. I read email. I read news. I read HN.
I don't read books though. I've probably read one novel in the past five years. I used to read more books, newspapers, and magazines and can't really say why I don't anymore other than the news and magazine content is all online now, and it just doesn't seem like there is time left in the day to sit down with a book.
> > London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
> The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage. “So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London.
It's less that we've forgotten to read and more that technology has made maintaining the historical pretense of mass intellectualism non-viable. The mass bulk of humanity has always been this stupid. Curiosity, epistemic discipline, critical thinking, and counterfactual evaluation have always been the privilege and burden of a few. We've only pretended otherwise to flatter our sense of fair-mindedness, which itself is sparsely distributed among the primate biomass of humanity.
Reality punishes you for refusing to model it properly. A non-predictive theory is worthless. An anti-predictive theory is a hazard. Let's remediate the epistemic toxic waste that is the idea that everyone is capable of the highest level of thought if only properly trained. If you're out in public, look around. A good chunk of the people you see can't understand, having had breakfast, that if they hadn't, they'd be hungry. When you're selected into an environment of concentrated rigor, you lose track of just how dumb most people are. The article is sad yet unsurprising.
The issue with this stance is that it folds under immediate scrutiny. It posits that there are intellectually-capable elites and dull, leaden-eyed masses, and uses literacy levels as evidence of that.
Except the people our society views as intellectual elites can't read that well. Every tech billionaire demonstrates a fatal lack of meaningful literacy, and everyone who shares your opinion disqualifies themselves. It's a running joke [1].
Either our elites aren't that elite, and we should ignore their vicious misanthropy, or they are, but their evidence is faulty (and so we should ignore their vicious misanthropy). More succinctly, Preacher points out that the people with the strongest superiority complexes tend to be the worst examples of the relevant trait [2].
Intellectual and economic accomplishment aren't exactly parallel vectors, but you can't expect me to believe they're orthogonal. A mediocre tech CEO is going to run intellectual circles around some random guy you pick out of the DMV ticket queue.
And, yes, some people are smarter than others. Some people are a lot smarter than others. Also, smart people are rare. Very smart people are very rare. These are basic facts of life that continue to exist whether or not you believe in them. Ignore them at your own risk.
> A mediocre tech CEO is going to run intellectual circles around some random guy you pick out of the DMV ticket queue.
There is literally no reason to believe this; having money is no proxy for intelligence, and tech CEOs specifically--the ones who fell hook line and sinker for craze after craze after craze--really aren't a solid argument here. We can be confident that a randomly selected person is unlikely to believe that an LLM loves them, or that there will be settlements on Mars in two years, or that they can live forever with blood transfusions. We cannot say the same of tech CEOs.
More importantly, we don't have to use money as a proxy at all here--we started with literature understanding, and at that we know the tech CEOs are not running circles around anybody. Here's just one example of Musk not understanding art [1].
I'd agree that highly intelligent people are rare, but I don't think that's as important as another fact: none of the actually highly intelligent people share your opinion. The belief that everyone without money is a dull-eyed serf is exclusively the province of cranks.
Books have their advantages, but I don't think you necessarily need to read books—in fact, I think books can sometimes be worse. One strength of books is that their structure, starting with the table of contents, trains you in logical composition.
But books also have drawbacks:
1.If there's incorrect information at the time of writing, it becomes fixed at that point.
2.The author's worldview can become overly authoritative, and the messiness of reality is smoothed over for the sake of a neat narrative.
3.Counterexamples and recent debates are often missing.
There are also bad papers that manipulate data to get results, and books are no different. I think books are not bad for introductory maps and mental training.
If you look at programming books from about 10 years ago, they're like historical relics—hard to apply today.
In a rapidly changing world, if you only read books, you'll easily fall behind. Information is pouring in, and books are static media, slow to adapt. Training yourself to read text is important, but it doesn't have to be through books.
Books help build a mental structure of tables of contents and conceptual sequences, but I question whether that structure can only be formed through books.
And realistically, there's a lot of bad content in books too. Self-help books are full of nonsense and scams that exploit people's desire for success. But they're venerated simply because they come in the form of a 'book.'
What we should venerate is not the 'form of a book,' but the 'way of reading that builds a mental framework.'
So I question whether reading only books is really the right approach. I think of this as 'form over substance.' The core is training logical thinking—that doesn't have to come in the form of a book.
I sometimes think it's worth recalling what Socrates said in Plato's Phaedrus: 'Writing is not a remedy for memory, but a means of making it external, leading to forgetfulness.
Once you write something down, you no longer try to remember it within yourself. You come to trust the external symbols.
Writing doesn't give people true wisdom—it only gives them the appearance of wisdom. What matters is not what's written in a book, but what knowledge you internalize. I don't understand the obsession with the form itself.
There's a quote from Marcus Aurelius: "Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers". People who just believe whatever they read in books don't actually learn to think, just to regurgitate, and often become out of touch with how the world actually works (although this happens to heavy consumers of any kind of fiction).
I read more than ever, but Substack is taking a sizable share of the pie whereas lit and non-fiction is now my late evening. I don't do the audiobook thing, though I understand that has become increasingly popular yet not really given much credence.
Desire might be theoretically limitless, but time and attention is not. Time I spend reading is time I'm not consuming endless short-form videos. People have gotten hooked on phones and the medium dictates what they consume.
There could be boom and bust cycles for this. Trends lose lustre and people are always looking for ways to signal status/competence. It's probably why "booktok" is a thing.
I would like to argue against the common opinion that Reading Is Good. I don't believe that reading pulp is good in any way. I don't believe that reading an airport novel is any better than watching TV.
Books have the potential to better the mind, but they don't do so simply by being written words. The books must be of a certain artistic caliber. The push to get people reading in general cannot be the end goal. The end goal is to get people to read quality books, to better the mind, affirm life, practice empathy, experience pathos, feel the grace of God. Too many forget this is the end goal and just think reading words on paper is somehow intrinsically a noble endeavor.
I think the common advice to get people into books is wrong and misses the point. "Find a fun trashy book and just read it" is maybe not productive advice unless attention rehabilitation is needed. Sure, some of those people might eventually stumble upon a good book, but advice can be much more efficient than that.
Here's what I would recommend to a burgeoning reader: There are many easy and fun books that have artistic merit; read those. Find them via Booktok lists from pretentious looking people, or common school reading lists, or wherever; generally only read things you have heard of or that you saw on a list somewhere; don't randomly pick off the shelf. Teenager classics like 1984, Book of the New Sun, Kafka on the Shore, American Psycho, Lord of the Rings are fun and easy reads that have meat on the bone. Ignore the airport novel and anything published recently. The average book has the same lack of value as the average TV show, just less entertaining, more boring, and more effortful to experience. Why would you waste time and effort consuming boring, less entertaining media when the phone and the TV are right there? But when you find good books, there is no replacement; you are doing an entirely different thing than mindlessly entertaining yourself. That is what we're trying to do.
> Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
What dreadful hyperbole. If reading is in decline, it’s just that we are in a crisis of widespread ignorance and broken education system, but good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read.
The anomaly might in fact be that we are regressing in human general intelligence compared to the rest of history.
Not "the rest of history," but relative to the ~1800-2000 period of steadily increasing literacy and educational attainment.
The European Dark Ages after the fall of Western Rome was a real thing. Many people regressed to the Stone Age for hundreds of years, and we lost almost every written work from ancient Greece and Rome. That can absolutely happen with the US and EU by 2200, especially considering digital information is far more fragile over centuries than papyrus and parchment.
Whether or not people are reading long or complex works for pleasure - what does this trend do to hiring for jobs which require serious comprehension of long, complex documents?
Will we see in-person-only "interviews", where candidates drop their smart phones & glasses into a box, spend hours reading documents, then have to answer questions about 'em?
The United States has made literacy into a Holy Grail of education, and our systems have reduced illiteracy levels to record lows. However, in the real world, there are so many basic jobs, unskilled labor jobs, that should not require literacy at all, and for thousands of years there were all kinds of workers who were never required to achieve literacy at all. So there may be a lot of wasted investment in education trying to make people literate when it's not actually required.
Even if the foregoing is completely false and abhorrent to you, we must also come to terms with a "new literacy" in terms of ideograms and emoji. I am learning how to type emoji, and replace many textual expressions with singular emoji and symbols. Computers and electronic devices, as well as our own garments, are frequently labeled with ideograms that transcend human language, but must be interpreted for proper use.
I have noticed some people around me who aren't really good at reading at all, and this is a real handicap to them when paperwork, and computer readouts, and just signs posted all over, are full of words, and our world surrounds us in words to read and comprehend, and if we can't read at lightning-speed levels, and comprehend what we read, we find ourselves at distinct evolutionary/legal/financial/social disadvantages.
So I contend that future literacy will increasingly involve non-English emoji and symbology, and that not every human in the world needs to be literate in a particular written language, and while a majority of society can afford such an education, nothing of value may be lost.
i got xelink ereader few months ago and i've been reading a ton more. i have all sorts of kindle but i stopped reading but xelink attached to my phone got me back.
I would love a phone where this is a standard feature. dont care about fancy cameras and stuff.
I couldn't attach my xteink to my phone because of a standoff around the camera on my phone case. I just now realized that the standoff could be removed and now the magnet works! :)
Did you install Crosspoint on it? I absolutely recommend it.
Are you reading this? Consider yourself a reader. I quit reading The Atlantic a decade ago due to their hot takes. Slate and Salon a decade before that. If you read Reddit and romance, you’re literate.
I’ve flagged the article and I would suggest others do the same. The Atlantic never posts things that satisfy the hacker spirit in any way. It is almost always puffery and melodrama meant to attract clicks and views, but the subject matter itself is trite and not worth discussing on a hacker forum.
Interesting phenomens are often discussed here so I personally do not perceive it as offtopic. Yet as you said, I have the same feeling from this article. Click bait grievance posting.
Who cares about reading? Take a step back - humans don’t exist to read, reading is a tool, a means to an end. It’s to transmit information from one to another. If we can do that with more information-dense, less lossy methods, all the better.
Lamenting the end of reading is like lamenting the end of manual farm work: the goal isn’t to work in fields, it’s to harvest. We found ways to harvest more than ever for less effort and time than ever, let’s celebrate it.
Half joke: If I had to bet, I would guess that reading will exist for as long as civilization does.
More seriously: I am less certain that it will exist in its current form (mass media, publishing houses, etc), but I am certain that textual information will be a standard means of communication and that people will read it. I do think that computer-assisted cognition (including computer-assisted reading) are eventualities at this point. This sort of thing fundamentally challenges the concept of reading: is your brain (by computer-assistance) scanning a hard drive reading? Even though it's alien to us now, I think the answer is yes.
I'm trying really hard not to be judgemental about this...
Until we invent some sort of matrixesq knowledge transfer, the printed word is hands down the best technology we have to transfer knowledge from one human to another. If a student finishes their education, and is so uncomfortable with reading that they never read another book, we have failed them.
Images / Video can be useful to convey something which is hard to describe in words, but books give an author the ability to dive in much deeper depth on a subject than a video ever could.
What method do you suggest is more information-dense and less lossy?
What people are lamenting is that reading is being replaced with less information-dense, less accurate, less effective mechanisms, like Tiktok shorts and TV news.
You would be surprised just how quickly you can re-learn the focus to enjoy long-form writing and novels. Much like exercise, don't let your ego get in the way. Find something you enjoy, even if it's a bit trash, and just make it a habit. Like with everything you do regularly, your brain will get better at it, the habit will become more automatic, and you'll find yourself wanting to read more, and more often. It's very much not too late to turn the ship around on an individual level.
I did this in the last couple years, I used an 'atomic habits' kinda approach. I put a book on the back of the toilet and pledged to read 1 page before looking at my phone. It worked out nicely, I've read a bunch of books over the last year or so after kicking it off in that way.
I am also not a lifelong reader, I didn't start reading until college. My girlfriend read a ton and the first Lord of the Rings movie was about to come out, I got caught up in the excitement and read all the books. Ever since then, I've read pretty steadily. Interesting though, it wasn't social media or anything that slowed my reading to a trickle, it was audiobooks. I freakin love them when the narrator is good. Anyway, that's how I got back to reading and now I haven't listened to an audiobook in a while. :)
Some of the statistics in the article included audiobooks as reading. It seems like they must trigger at least a subset of the qualities of reading (like maintaining an imagined environment, parsing sentences and paragraphs into meaning, etc)
Absolutely. I used to read constantly, from my teenage years through my early 30's, but stopped about 5 years ago? I guess life stress and short form social media taking my free time.
But I managed to get free of all the apps, and I jumped back in by re-reading some books from my childhood (Sword of Shannara, some bad 60's/70's sci fi, etc), and really enjoyed them. It was enough to shake me out of my lull and now I have an active queue again.
My commute and mornings are so much better than scrolling instagram on the train.
I never read Sword of Shannara but my brother did. It is a nostalgic title for me. :)
What's also massively undervalued is medium high dosage of the amino acid creatine. If you take >10g/day you'll have a much easier time staying focused over long periods. It becomes noticeable only after consistent intake however, and only if you actually pay attention to it - as you won't feel any different. (And it's effect is also supposedly diminished with high Coffein intake)
I took a long break from reading for enjoyment after I graduated from college. I got burnt out from reading things I didn't enjoy in high school and undergrad. Now it's what I do to wind down my day before bed. It's a nice relaxing activity that allows my imagination to run a little.
To add to this, it isn't "doing it bad" if you aren't out there reading deep texts. Just as it isn't "doing it badly" if you can't run a 4 minute mile.
As you say, you get better at what you are doing. If you want to get faster, at anything, you don't really have the option of skipping the slow phase.
But it's also important to realize that it is "doing it bad" if you are hoping to run a 4 minute mile but your only training is slowly walking around the block forever. At some point you have to seek out more substantial books. You can't just continually read pulp fiction and think you're going to improve at anything; you have to progress.
Royalroad has been a great place for me
when you spend long times focusing your attention upon that whole reading process it tends to stick. Like a drug with long-term effects. Do you want those effects?
> Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)
Has the author read A Clockwork Orange? It is filled with made-up "slang" that's basically just Russian. Needing some help to understand that is totally reasonable to me -- I definitely looked up a bunch of the words when I read it!
Wow. That went over the heads of both a Harvard student and an Atlantic journalist.
We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read.
Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. More what seems to be the case is people have enjoyed coding as a kind of video game.
But this generalizes to the general population too. Marshall McLuhan's message remains a very important medium.
> "I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong."
It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not a prestigious or high paying job and computers were much cruder and required much more skill to get adequate performance from them. Generally, aspiring hackers were very well read people.
There were, of course, corporate programmers doing business programming back then too but they weren't considered hackers and wouldn't even have wanted themselves to be considered hackers.
Progamming in a corporate/business environment was not prestigious or high paying then either. It was a decent job, don't get me wrong, but something more similar to accounting or other back-office work in terms of pay and prestige.
if you wear yourself out mentally all day as part of your occupation, digging into a "good" book is often too much work.
As anecdata: My wife has a "brainy" occupation and her brilliant sister does not. Correspondingly, my wife has no interest in "brainy" books in her free time whilst her sister is always recommending new 900 page tomes.
I love learning, but I hate reading. Most of my learning now is via audio books while I'm doing something else.
In my view, software development is mostly skimming and pattern recognization. Very little actual, deep reeding in my opinion.
>Most of my learning now is via audio books while I'm doing something else.
You're not actually learning anything then. Memorizing trivia, sure. But not actually learning.
That seems like a pretty controversial take. Why would you not be able to learn things orally?
You absolutely can learn orally, what I'd question is if you can do so without active listening. Listing to anything while doing, well anything, is pretty pointless to me, I tends to not listen and not absorb anything. I can barely listen to a podcast while working out, I miss huge gaps where my brain just isn't listening.
It’s the focus that’s important. If you’re listening while doing other things, you’re not really focusing on it.
You're not actually using your brain to do much, just as OP said, sort-of badly memorizing trivia.
> I love learning, but I hate reading.
Correction: you love the feeling of consuming information, not learning.
Imagine gatekeeping learning. I suppose the blind are incapable of it, then? Or is taking in information via the fingers somehow more valid than via the ears?
Reading is not the only modality for learning.
Why not go further - learning is doing, not consuming (reading, watching, listening)?
How in the heck can you plausibly correct someone else like that? You (almost certainly) don’t know that person, even in passing.
People can learn from watching a documentary just as well as they can learn from reading, but reading teaches you how to interpret language as you continue reading, and other forms of information delivery convey understanding of their own mediums in their own ways. I would not have learned how to quickly spot a terrible documentary over a great one if I had not watched so many in my life. It doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything because I watched and listened instead of read, it just means that I didn’t read the documentaries.
Pro tip: don’t correct people about their own lives.
I'll admit fault for my remark, but I'll stand by the point I meant to express.
Part of disagreement probably stems from what type of 'learning' we're discussing. In my view, at the broadest sense that we can define 'learning', is incorporating information about our surroundings into our internalized world model. The type of learning I see most valuable personally, is the type that expands this horizon the most, or helps us think in frameworks that break down the least in different contexts.
This type of foundational building often requires deep thought, but is also often deeply rewarding if you get it right. This doesn't require reading by itself, but ruminating and neural rewiring can often be produced by it, if you consume the right content for you. I think it's important to have different experiences, many of which come from consuming different mediums, as well as doing things in real life, but a significant part of knowledge to this day has been passed down by books.
Even if we mean 'learning' to be more similar to 'gathering information', I think it can be most efficiently done by reading, or doing. I don't hold as much disagreement there, nor any judgement, but I wouldn't equate the two. Perhaps a bit pedantic, but I read 'liking learning' beyond the means by which it's achieved, and 'hating reading' reads temperamental to me.
Can I ask why you hate reading? Is this a general statement or is it about the quality of programming-related reading in particular?
We read, a lot, but not books. We read manuals, get started docs, apis, git repos, AI responses, wikipedia, tik tok comments just for fun, we read constantly and will read till the end of times. That's the way we learn and entertain ourselves, there is no other way around that.
Given that I have mental bandwidth available, I enjoy a mentally stimulating read (though, the definition of that surely varies between individuals), but people do indeed come into programming from a variety of different angles.
What initially attracted me to programming was the ability it gives one to create. As a kid the idea that a “regular” person like myself could make computer programs — and not just simple CLI toys but full on lovingly crafted, end user friendly complex GUI applications — blew my mind. Programs weren’t like every nearly every other product which only ever came out of some factory that nobody saw themselves.
As such my interest in programming comes with a slant towards practical usability. I don’t do well with abstract concepts without a rock solid grounding real world use case, even though those are intellectual candy for a few subgroups of programmers.
> I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.
Perhaps the fact that our jobs are intellectual is the problem. I find that at the end of the day I don't have the capacity for intellectual pursuits and I find physical hobbies / activities more relaxing. I suspect the opposite is probably also true.
Can you recommend me a book to read?
It's difficult to recommend things without knowing a reader's taste, but I blanket recommend The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_My_Destination
I saw this recommended by the Bookpilled youtube channel, I just ordered it. \(^-^)/
I just read this! Also recommend.
Theft of Fire is my favorite book in the last ten years for sure.
https://devoneriksen.com/products/theft-of-fire-orbital-spac...
What counts as a good book varies from person to person.
But take a look at anything by Asimov. I have a collection of his short stories and it is a nice read. Oh, and any short story collection by Chekhov.
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
If you can stomach older English novels: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
How about an Elmore Leonard novel? Very digestible novels from a deceptively skilled craftsman.
Honestly it doesn't matter much, go grab a random book from goodwill. If you do "need" a recommendation, I'd suggest "Roots", I'm reading it now and it's amazingly well written.
One suggestion I would make is to read something from before 1980. No real reason why, but books from 1900 - 1980 work better for me personally, not sure why.
Fiction or non-fiction?
You are a programmer? You understand that different firmwares and operative systems work in different ways and excel at different things?
For the record I do like reading. I just don't like all the reading. I tried learning rust by reading the book. Ugh. Horrible for me. Much better experience working on a project of my own. I saw that for some people it worked. Good for them. It didn't for me, and I had to find a different path. I learn by tinkering. Others might learn by copying, or by drawing boxes and arrows. Who am I to judge their firmware?
This is not a bad thing. That's good! Variety in ways of thinking is one of humanity's strengths.
If you find someone who is good at programming but doesn't like reading, try to find out how. You might be able to learn some of their abilities that complement yours.
Programming probably is more intellectually stimulating than reading fiction novels.
As someone with a degree in literature, I'm gonna disagree there. It depends on both the novel and the programming.
It’s not.
Novels are fiction by the way.
Yes? What's so important about novels? They're a relatively recent innovation in literature.
I think a reasonable definition of "novel" is a long-form work in prose, that tells narrative stories, often looking at individual families and characters and their development over time. In that sense, novels are not that novel and there are novels preserved from classical antiquity, India's golden age, and medieval China.
By what standard are novels "recent"? The earliest novels we have originated not long after the first books (aka codices) appeared. The first modern novel was written at the same time as the king james bible, over 400 years ago.
The epic and the play are several thousand years older. Novels are the newest kind of literature, even if it has been a few centuries at this point.
They're not the newest kind of literature. Arthurian legends and religious canons are two examples of newer forms, neither of which I think would be typically described as "recent." I could also use the novella, and the anecdote as examples instead.
I see that pedantry is more intellectually stimulating than either programming or reading!
I gave up reading when I got my first portable computer. Not sure why. But after some time I got sick of it and got back to reading and I love it!
For some reason I suddenly got an urge to read long deep fantasy. Storm light archive is perfect for this, I recommend play some fantasy reading music on background. It's a bliss, especially in summer afternoon with cold coffe.
I gave up on reading because the authors want to spend a considerable number of pages telling me the color of the buttons on an imaginary character's outfit. They have no such right to waste my time with (or even worse, charge me money for) that.
No one says "I gave up on eating because restaurants kept serving me spicy food". You just order different food. A short story that's a couple pages long isn't going to waste them describing the color of buttons, and not every novelist is Tolkien.
Books have a built in fast-forward feature.
Then maybe you should not read prose. It is about conveying an experience, a story. You might have simply picked a bad author. Personally, I prefer long reads. I understand that some people might not enjoy that style of storytelling, but saying “give up reading” overall is a shame. Try something like Warhammer 40k novels. They are simple, entertaining, and split into shorter parts. What you are describing does not happen there.
I read The Goldfinch a while back. Not at all my usual fare. The plot progressed at a snail's pace, but I enjoyed every page of it. (The movie treatment was horribly shallow in comparison, but there's no way they could possibly convey the depth in two hours.)
I thought that The Goldfinch had a contrived beginning and a weak ending, but a long, delectable middle that made up for both ends. Also try the author's earlier novel The Secret History if you haven't read it yet.
The headline absolves me from reading the article. My work here is done.
It's true; I also started reading the comments before clicking the article. Show of hands?
I made it about 15% through the article, but that is a about normal for the Atlantic.
They generally get their point across and then rattle on for more time than I am interested in reading.
Guess I'm part of the post literate world. I also perfer short stories instead of novels.
Well, you missed this:
>Of course, the new republic was not always a haven for sober analysis. The Founding Fathers attacked their enemies in the papers, spreading lies to incite the public against their opponents. One ally of Thomas Jefferson’s called John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
As a non-fiction author, I find myself reading a lot of non-leisure material for research--books, old newspapers, and that sort of thing. A few years ago I noticed that my leisure reading was on the decline, so I decided to delete all of the social media, news, and gaming apps from my phone, and replace them with an e-reader app.
Now, when I have a few idle moments away from my computer, instead of checking something like reddit, I read a few pages from a book. It's great, I recommend it! I'm back to reading a couple of novels per month, and I don't have so much of that queasy wasted-time feeling that social media tends to give me. I've even learned how to pause reading mid-paragraph and resume easily later; that part took some practice.
One thing that helped my friends and I really enjoy reading again is book clubs! Since the start of Covid, I've personally run ~3 books clubs with different people where we all vote on a book together, set a pace (usually a few chapters a week), and a time to meet weekly on discord and then discuss.
It's been a great way to solidify friendships, broaden my interests (Not every book that's been voted on was one I'd have picked alone), and cultivate a habit of reading and enjoying meaningful time with people.
I highly recommend anybody with friends who might be interested to reach out and give it a shot! It's been a delight! I've even branched off into hosting a movie club now with the same idea, just pick a movie weekly and watch it asynchronously, then hop on a call to discuss :)
I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person.
Reading is definitely a skill that needs to be learned and maintained. Going from reading a couple of hundred words, to even a longer 30 - 60 min article can be tough if you’re out of shape. Same with writing.
It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.
A good idea to consider might be what Hans Magnus Enzensberger referred to as "second-order illiteracy".
> [The second-order illiterate] has come a long way: his loss of memory causes him no suffering; his lack of will makes life easy for him; he values his inability to concentrate; he considers it an advantage that he neither knows nor understands what is happening to him. He is mobile. He is adaptive. He has a talent for getting things done. We need have no worries about him. It contributes to the second-order illiterate's sense of well-being that he has no idea that he is a second-order illiterate. He considers himself well-informed; he can decipher instructions on appliances and tools; he can decode pictograms and checks. And he moves within an environment hermetically sealed against anything that might infect his consciousness. That he might come to grief in this environment is unthinkable. After all, it produced and educated him in order to guarantee its undisturbed continuation.
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/IN+PRAISE+OF+ILLITERACY.-a062...
I recently argued with someone in their 60s who argued, in total sincerity, that nobody should ever need to read or write more than 500 words at a time. I asked about Terms of Service agreements, hospital paperwork, etc, and she insisted that it was not a useful skill. I think she might qualify as illiterate.
(For reference, your comment and my reply combined make for about 180 words.)
The UNESCO/World Bank literacy rate is basically defined how you thought. But high income countries don't usually report this because literacy by this measure is nearly universal. So they often report at higher thresholds (e.g. how many people can read at a grade 9 level), and news headlines often don't make it clear that this is not the same as the UNESCO definition.
> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate,
Under normal circumstances for a healthy human, I'd say no, at least directly. Not a scientific analysis of course, but I don't feel reading ability in a language that you use regularly is going to degrade that significantly. A very similar problem might come about through a drop in attention span which is definitely an issue for many these days, but I wouldn't count this as a literacy problem: the written letters/words/sentences/… are not the issue and other things are going to be equally impacted.
For a second+ language, especially if you never got to a particularly fluent state, this is probably quite different - for anecdata I did pretty well at Spanish GCSE then never spoke a word the 32 years before starting to relearn last year. But again I would not really call this a general literacy problem.
One place where you do see literacy fall precipitously is due to mental degradation due to common complications of old age, if you have relatives with dementia you will have seen this first hand. While literacy is only part of a massive problem here, reading and writing abilities are things that fall away relatively quickly for many (presumably due to them being relatively complex operations, and needing conscious concentration rather than being autonomic life-preserving functions).
> I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person.
Indeed, and this is the source of the discrepancy in the reddit-style gotcha that gets repeated about Americans being illiterate. It's not that they can't read, it's that illiteracy (as measured by whichever agency in the US does the measuring) means something more than just "can't read at all."
I think that literate people can recover from a period of not reading (books) at all.
I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading.
In my case reading books is a kind of fever that I get every year or so.
Unfortunately there really aren't any other books like the culture series. You might enjoy Banks' "The Algebraist" and the completely unrelated though similarly named "The Alchemist".
As I like how Banks writes and they are not directly related to The Culture they won't have to meet the expectations of the others I tried.
Thanks, will read them.
Only the first is written by Banks, to clear up any ambiguity. They're very different books, just similarly named.
> I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum.
It's a very recent redefinition, pushed by people looking to make money from a panic. They're trying to make people who are simply incurious (through stupidity, fear, boredom or whatever) into illiterates. More people are literate than ever before because of the internet. Before the internet, there were an enormous number (up to a quarter of the US population) of actual illiterates.
The new definition of illiteracy is (manipulatively) somehow including people who wouldn't be able to understand something that is being read to them.
I suspect that a lot of middle-class people are illiteracy truthers, because they've never met someone who actually couldn't read. I'm from poor, black, uneducated, working people, and before the internet there were plenty who simply couldn't read. If you asked them to write the word "STOP" they would make a good attempt to copy what they remembered from a stop sign, and draw it like a picture. They're normal people, though, and if you didn't know them well, the strategies that they've developed over a lifetime would keep you from noticing.
It's going to be back again - technology has removed the need to read and write because of voice recognition and interfaces. We're calling it too early.
> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.
I think it's too easy to be exposed to words. To fall into illiteracy through atrophy would be like forgetting Spanish while living in Mexico. The good thing about comprehension-type skills is that they put you into a virtuous circle passively. Once your French gets to a certain point, it takes an effort not to understand French; and every piece of French you fail to fail to understand makes you better at understanding French. If you're in Paris, riding the bus, and somebody is babbling into a cellphone, you'll wish you didn't understand French.
English (like French) is just an absurdly hard language to read and write. Of course there are people who can't, at all. French, although absurd, is probably easier to read than English (though a bit harder to write.)
This is not a fair comparison:
> Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.
It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".
Yeah, at least it should be over the same time period!
Your selective quote left off the part that made it a fairer comparison. "Only 38 read a novel or short story" was a follow-up to "fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022." That's a year-long stat.
Reading an entire book takes much more time than placing an online bet.
> Reading an entire book takes much more time than placing an online bet.
Yes, but do you only do things for pleasure if they're done quickly? Is your sex always over in a minute?
Also, I was responding to this:
> Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".
Yes, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a different measure than "placed a bet last year", but "read a book of any kind in 2022" is the same length of time, though not the exact same year.
This is a nit-pick, and I agree with the long arc of this article. (And it is very well-written, to boot). But, on this phenomenon,
> 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.
I wonder to what extent this can be attributed to decades-long release windows for some of these novels. I find myself alienated by the dominance of simple and childrens media among my age group peers, but I read Eragon as a child, kept up with the series, and have the 2023 release in the Eragon series on my books-to-read list. The Hunger Games started in 2008; I couldn't bemoan someone who was captivated at 13 then for enjoying the occasional release in 2025.
> Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.
Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.
I don't think I learned this skill from the sat.
I think the point is that the design of the SAT influences what is taught in schools.
If the SAT stops testing the ability to deal with multi-paragraph text, then schools will spend less time teaching those skills.
For better or worse, testing was used as an assortative matching between students and universities they applied for. Though far from perfect, a university that set their acceptance bar at a certain level could expect incoming students to at least be at or around that level.
The less rigorous the filtering, the more you have to accommodate the lower ends of the incoming students’ abilities. So as standardized testing is softened, so too is the curriculum that students are exposed to.
There is a movement against standardized testing that gained traction in the past decade, arguing that because it’s flawed and imperfect we should abandon it. The movement never had a good replacement for it, though, so the shift was toward looser standards and judging students based on vibes and non-academic measures. Many of the universities that went this direction are reversing course and adding standardized testing back now because the reality of higher education is that you need to filter incoming students by some academic measurements if you want to be able raise the bar for your curriculum.
The effects cascade everywhere. In a perfect utopia everyone would get individualized perfect tutoring and we wouldn’t have to worry about testing, but in the world we inhabit a lot of the education decisions and realities are downstream of what we can test for.
The implication is not that people learned this skill from the SAT, but rather that not requiring it to score well on the SAT further lowers the baseline.
Doing well on the SAT used to require some measure of reading stamina. It no longer does, so some students who would have been prompted to increase their stamina in order to do well on the SAT will no longer feel that pressure.
Hmm. If someone knew the number of graduates from 2017 to 2026, they could estimate what fraction of them could paraphrase and make inferences.
My stab at it: Looks like about 36 million high school graduates from 2017 to 2026. The US population is about 350 million.
20% of 350 million is 70 million, so 70 million people couldn't paraphrase in 2017. 30% is 105 million, so 105 million people couldn't in 2026. That means that of the 36 million high school graduates from 2017 to 2026, only one million of them could paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text?
I know the US educational system is a mess, but I find it hard to believe that it's quite that much of a mess. Can anyone point out flaws in the math?
That assumes the shift was entirely due to high school students becoming adults. There are also people who haven't read much over those years and have had their skills declined to the point of failure. Or, also likely, sample size issues.
You're making the assumption that the change in absolute terms is entirely driven by deficient additions to the population. It's just as possible that some portion of the population lost their skill by allowing it to atrophy from underuse.
Humans tend to reflexively shift their learning to their environment.
We often judge those changes but we are notoriously bad at consciously predicting the future our collective unconscious often does.
Ursula K. Le Guin on this in 2008: https://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/staying-awake/
GenX here... I thought this was a great read. I still hope for a young rebellion against the forces the presented in the article. And the author does point out some reasons to hope.
Personally, I read and write every day. I usually have 2-3 books I'm going through at any one time.
I've noticed that on long-haul flights, the movies typically hold no interest and I just read for hours—what a luxury to have nothing else to do!
We gave away our TV. The shows were just less compelling, we found. We don't miss it.
I feel like we tried to catch the wave, and almost did, but we were unable. It rolled out from under us and now we're floating once again in the calm sea beyond.
I have Moonreader installed on my phone, so I can reach for a book any time. This morning I was hypothesizing that since I use my phone for reading books, I'm fooling my brain into that association and maybe that's helpful in consuming long-form content online...?
I also read paper books, a Kobo, my computer, and an Xteink x4. Really anything, I guess!
That hardest part is knowing that more has been written than I will ever have time to enjoy.
No offense, but this comes off as incredibly smug... Glad you're able to find the time to read and write every day, but not not everyone has that luxury.
It's true that I'm in a place of privilege in the world. But it's amazing how much time gets freed up of one doesn't watch TV or read social media. Like the numbers show, it's hours per day.
I sympathize with people who truly do not have the time, but that's different from most people who simply choose not to spend their time reading or writing.
Are you sincerely suggesting, as you write a digital comment on Hacker News, that some people don't have 10-15 minutes in their day to read or write?
Who are these people? Why do they not have the same 24 hours you and I do?
It must be nice, using Hacker News for education and entertainment, instead of cynically exploiting it as another online marketing opportunity.
For me, reading used to be a way to enjoy part of my free time.
Nowadays is still that but it’s also a way to relax. Even though I don’t have accounts in the main social media networks (instagram, fb, twitter, youtube, etc) I still consume them indirectly on a weekly basis (e.g., i like to watch videoclips in YT, a friend sends me a twitter link, etc). It makes me anxious. I’ve realised that consuming in tiny bits (short videos, ads, stories, tweets, private messages, even going to those stores where everything is under $5) doesn’t suit me well, therefore reading regular books for at least 1-2h per day (plus other activities like working out alone, or going for a walk to a park) is becoming essential for my wellbeing.
I realized this recently as well, on how much social media has started affected me. I've made some changes to how I use my phone now but haven't seen a lot of improvement overall, basically because I've found that there is "Social Media" everywhere I go. I removed all the Meta apps from my phone and found myself spending more time on LinkedIn. Removed that and I end up on Reddit. I do feel better about not being on FB and Instagram anymore though which I found were the biggest source of my wasted time. I'm not able to fully limit all the apps, and that may just come over time with better habits.
The positive upside to all of this has been that I've been reading more in general. Finished 2 books last month, and almost done with a 3rd one. Not having any of the main apps on my phone just has meant that I end up reaching for a book or something physical to occupy my time, which in general has been a better use of my time.
I'm afraid I am addicted to short-form video and wish I could go back to spending more of my free-time reading books.
It's funny, I signed up for tiktok when I was curious about the hype, explored a bit for the science / history / educational content I normally watch on youtube and found there was almost nothing, and what little there was was of much lower quality.
I deleted my account after about 15m of looking, and hilariously enough, a tiktok researcher reached out, and actually paid me ~ $200 to understand why I bounced off the platform.
I suggest blocking all platforms that provide short-form video and firmly deciding not to consume such content for a set period of time (e.g., 2 weeks). For me, this is the only way to stop once I fall back into the habit.
Doing this enabled me to spend more time developing and pursuing my own ideas, which is invigorating.
Or even just setting up a timer, I've set up a 20 min timer for myself recently, once it's done I do stick to it, I did get to do some things I've been pushing away, I still get some value out of these but... I get a lot more by not spending an hour on them.
Have you also run into the attention deficit effect of all these short forms of media? Overriding my brain's desire to put a book down after a couple pages is certainly not my favorite pastime.
Part of that might be your book choice.
I found that when trying to rekindle my reading habit, book choice had a big effect. Some books are like vegetables you know you should eat but really don't want to and other books are junk food. Empty calories that you love.
Pick from the latter pile at first and rebuild the muscle.
The Brick has been helping me with phone overuse. getbrick.com (I have no association with the company)
On your laptop, route those sites to localhost.
very cool, probably gonna get one, ty!
It's been my impression that classic literature is going the same way as painting and other forms of high art.
It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Many people still read novels. I live in NYC and see numerous people read books and Kindles every day on the train.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much
It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series. Stories that used to be told in an hour and a half are now being told in 8 hour-long segments
which could, for the most part, be boiled down to 2 hour-long segments. so much is stretched out for the sake of padding. the good news is that scrubbing through shows is possible — it is usually painfully clear when to stop & watch at double speed — & time otherwise lost is recovered in this way.
If you were watching quality material, you wouldn't be scrubbing through it...
Eg I've just finished watching Andor for the 3rd time, normal speed.
Not really.
Movies are good for plot oriented stories, with clear beginning, middle, and end.
But they are not ideal for more character driven or lore oriented content.
Long slow burning stories told over many episodes let you really show many facets of characters and also opportunities to hint at a much larger world than what can be shown within 2 hours.
TV has always been about characters - they couldn't do a plot well because they well knew regular viewers would once in a while not be able to watch an episode and so they can't found on your knowing what happened last time - people would miss. TV needed a way to get people to watch as many shows as possible, and that meant getting you involved in the characters, and write stories that could be watched in any order.
Movies meanwhile had a long time between the next one and so you couldn't get people deeply involved in the characters. However you had enough to pull off a slightly complex plot and so that is what movies did.
I miss when episodes were episodic. Watched Deep Space 9 recently, and it was such a blast: Characters developed and had arches, but there were no episodes where nothing happened! In more recently produced tv series there are so many episodes where nothing happens. There is no story, just vibes. In DS9 every episode was a story with a beginning, middle and end, exploring some idea.
> It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series
Short form video on YouTube, TikTok, and various AI short form video apps are also spiking in popularity.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Cinema is dying from mostly self-inflicted wounds though. They keep making movies (or re-making movies) with bad writing, bad stories, and unrealistic character development arcs that not many people want to watch.
Good movies have been rewarded in theatres. Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, etc. all had great box office sales when other movies around them flopped.
'Movies' at Blockbuster level pivoted to ersatz carnival rides post-'Pirates of the Caribbean', focusing on safe IPs and simple plots designed to aid comprehension of the major story beats in the SEA markets without the need to resort to subtitles or dubbing.
'True' Cinema has been going from strength to strength the last decade, with even Netflix putting out Fincher spectacles like 'Mank' on streaming, and A24 bringing introducing a new audience to phenomenal Korean Cinema like 'Parasite' and 'Minari'.
Even in the traditional studio system we have been spoilt in recent years by a succession of Palm D'Or and Oscar winners like Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle of Sadness, Zone of Interest, The Brutalist, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Cinema traditionally has meant movies like, À bout de souffle and Citizen Kane.
Definitions vary for sure. I just mentioned them because they did well at the box office, which is what will keep "cinema" alive.
No True Cinephile would enjoy a movie like Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession or Project Hail Mary.
/s
A friend at the gym raved about Top Gun: Maverick when it came out, and against my better judgement I watched it on a streaming service. It was essentially Top Gun, again. Absolutely uninteresting and completely predictable. And I rather enjoyed the original.
I liked Maverick a lot, but I've never seen the original or any of its other sequels :P
Even accepting that Project Hail Mary, Obsession, and Top Gun are "good movies" (which I completely reject), you're cherry-picking. The top three films of the year are Super Mario Galaxy, Michael, and The Devil Wears Prada 2.
Energy is more difficult to gauge, but the average American has over 5 hours of leisure time daily. When there was more of a time crunch in the past, Americans read more.
Cinema is dying? Hollywood is on track to have its best year since 2019. Where do people come up with this stuff?
Is that inflation adjusted?
Apparently the peak year for Hollywood was 2002, with $9.2b domestic box office (16.1b inflation adjusted).
Inflation adjusted outcomes and overall ticket sales down 30-40%
Overall ticket sales Globally are down 46% since 2000.
Please learn to tell financial engineering headlines from reality.
Ticket prices seem to have increased slower than general inflation
I'd suggest you do the same. You may want to believe that cinema is "dying", but none of the numbers support that argument.
Buddy, I just laid out the exact numbers that show less people go to cinema by almost half. The defintion of dying.
And beyond that if you go deeper, the revenue growth is almost entirely attribured to higher prices in ticket sales while attendance in real terms continues to decline.
What are you struggling with here?
The number of people who buy tickets to sit in theater to watch movies is not a good measure of people's interest in watching movies or the success of the medium. Most people are streaming films and while streaming services continue to suck at very basic things you'd expect from a media player they're still very popular.
So what? Revenue is price times quantity. One can offset the other, in fact, you just explained how.
I think it's mostly due to mobile phones. Most people seem to spend a substantial amount of their free time staring at their phone screen rather than engaging with books or other forms of entertainment. Phones being bite sized entertainment orientated is probably changing the way people feel about longer forms.
I read novels voraciously, all of them on my phone. I haven't bought a paper book for myself in maybe a decade.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Ever since cinema got reduced to the next Marvel superhero movie, I stopped caring about it.
> who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
>> who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
> Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
Most of those are passive entertainments, suitable for people who've been drained of the energy to do anything else.
I read while lying on the couch, my head resting on a pillow. Is that not passive enough?
You are good at reading so it is passive. Someone who doesn't read much is not good at it, and so no reading is passive. Get that person to read some more and eventually they get good and it can become passive, but for most it is not.
I could watch TV passively (I don't watch TV, but I could). However if you switched my TV for one that received only Spanish - I have enough Spanish that I could understand, but it wouldn't be passive for me, it would be hard work to understand.
> Someone who doesn't read much is not good at it, and so no reading is passive.
How did people get worse at reading, other than choosing to spend time on the alternative activities that I listed? You may be reversing cause and effect.
> I read while lying on the couch, my head resting on a pillow. Is that not passive enough?
Obviously I meant mentally passive, not physically passive.
I wouldn't call social media relaxing. After all, it's known as doomscrolling. I think reading is actually more relaxing. Social media is addictive, like a drug. Nobody calls cocaine relaxing.
> I wouldn't call social media relaxing.
Neither did I.
What exactly does "mentally passive" mean? I doubt cocaine is that either.
Anyway, I don't buy the "energy" story, that doomscrolling is somehow low-energy, or even that people can't muster the energy for any activity other than doomscrolling.
> bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Capitalism is "fixing the glitch" of workers having space energy. I hope soon we'll achieve the ideal bimodal distribution of labor: work intensified to the point where workers that have the energy for nothing but work, and the impoverished totally unemployed that we can just corral and forget about.
This is one of those very common ideas that cannot survive a ten second encounter with the facts: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
How does this viewpoint account for the times when "capitalism" was, by all objective measures, worse for laborers? I.E. the early industrialization period when laborers worked 14-16 hour days alongside children in factories and mines, risking life and limb?
The brief nightmare where workers had enough power to demand better conditions is thankfully ending, and we can return the happy days where workers would slave away for just enough compensation to sustain themselves, and they'd be happy to do it because they had no better options.
We're even bringing child labor back https://fortune.com/2023/05/25/labor-shortage-child-teenage-...
> Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book
I feel like if it took me 20hr to place a bet I'm probably not doing much of that either.
Anecdotal, but my 7y/o loves reading. She's flying through series' and it's getting pricey. I guess she falls in the 16% of people who enjoy it.
Same with my girls (parents of boys seem to mostly have a different experience). Hopefully your kid gets access to digital libraries like Epic or Sora at school. There are also public libraries with ebook lending that can make the habit cheaper.
My mother taught me how to read, I'm male. Incidentally, I scored higher than my peers in reading.
I still read, but it has taken the form of social media which have no more length than a blurb.
It does. People who bet on sports sink hundreds of hours into forums and consuming visual content. Placing a bet takes 30 seconds, deciding what to bet on takes people a very long time. As long as reading a book.
I think you're vastly overestimating the amount of time people put into researching. A very small minority, sure, but most sports bettors look at the lines and pick.
Possibly. The only people I know that gamble are sports bets, and they consume sports at a near constant rate.
Social media and nearly all news articles covering the past decade or so have made me want to forget how to read entirely.
I refuse to believe that the decline of our education system is some inevitable, intractable problem.
I'm inclined to believe that the decline of our education system is intentional. Certain people don't want the masses to be capable of critical thinking.
Decline since when? A few hundred years ago most people were illiterate farmers.
Within the last 30 years? Last 20? We had a high point, and we're not there any longer – certainly not in my state (Iowa).
Were they though? Or were they only illiterate because literacy was measured in Latin not their native language? We know that historically that did happen, and it is hard to figure out what was done.
Even today, most talking about literacy rates are using a very high level read skills to make things look bad, when most people can read just fine for the normal level things are written in. I'm near illiterate if you only test me on medical papers.
Literacy doesn't mean your ability to speak, it means your ability to read/write. Formal schooling for the masses is a very recent invention.
It isn't hard to learn how to read at a basic level.
Sure, if you have books in your house and parents who are also literate and encouraging of it.
Even in the 1800s the literacy rate in the US was over 50% (the highest in the world), because it was founded by "sola scriptura" Protestants for whom Bible reading was a religious duty.
That merely shows that a very basic education is more widespread. One thing that's always struck me, listening to letters read aloud in history shows, is the eloquence and mastery of the language they possessed.
TLDR: fewer people may have been literate, but the ones who were, were damned good writers.
“A Clockwork Orange” as “Old English” is an amusing anecdote, but it might be worth noting that the novel is written in deliberately nonstandard English mixing in Russian words, so it might be nontrivial to read for people lacking interpolation skills.
In the first paragraph, e.g., there is:
> There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
It's also New Wave science fiction, and once you get past the conlang and the genre conventions, it's still incredibly violent! Kubrick iirc even once said in an interview that he removed some book scenes from his (initially X-rated) film adaptation, because he thought the invented language helped make them less disturbing to read, but audiences watching them dramatized would just give up and walk out. Anyway I sure do see some of the trends described in the article with my younger students and relatives, but such a strange unforced error makes me suspicious of the strength of the research.
Just wait till they open Trainspotting.
I could handle that, but reached my limit with Feersum Endjinn.
My kids are active, voracious readers. At least one book (500-700 pages) a week. It feels like one of the only things that I've really done right as a parent.
How did you do it?
This is one of those questions non-parents ask.
Kids come out as a person, with strong opinions and desires. You can shave off some rough edges, and maybe bend a few branches of their experience.
But if you present a kid with the opportunity to read, and they read, you can’t take much credit. That’s just who they are. Others are given the opportunity and don’t.
You can fail to provide the opportunity, but after that, it’s pretty much up to the kid.
As a life long reader, on my own, and to my kid, including many a night time baby -> toddler -> easy chapter -> harder chapter read, my kid doesn’t read books. Certainly competent to do so, but just doesn’t. Possibly we could have continued to deny access to Netflix until later (it was 1 hour a week until about 10). No YouTube allowed. Still, didn’t read. Other kids do, and I’m jealous.
Make it joyful
Read books yourself
Make book an important part of your life
Read to the kids
Teach them to read early
Little to no phone use early on
> Read books yourself
Not a parent, but I'm guessing this part is very important :)
I read non-fiction all day long. I'm sure you do too. Even as a kid I was never really interested in fiction. I'd rather read the encyclopedia.
I know there are a number of us who read encyclopedias over our breakfast cereal as kids. Ours were World Book.
> The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.
Uhm, what about Facebook, web-based news articles, and internet message boards? What about video games that involve significant reading?
The above statement is just so biased about what reading is, that I discarded the article as alarmist!
Just because someone isn't reading what you want them to, doesn't make them illiterate.
People do read more than ever. But we don't recognize it as such. We read on our phone while intermittently reading subtitles of Netflix in the background. We read every time we look at a computer, phone, advertisement etc. But we only count reading paper as "real reading".
The shape of reading is changing yes. I think the "deep" thinking associated with reading has always been a bit of an elitist idea. Why would reading 1000 words of a great philosopher be any different from reading 1000 words of smut online. In some way losing this kind of stigma will make reading more accessible.
Writing and publishing is dying first. And that has to go long before reading dies anyway.
"the "deep" thinking associated with reading has always been a bit of an elitist idea" - precisely. This is all about massaging the categories such that consuming or producing a given type of media in a particular style is "good" and everything else is inadequate.
So if I read a bunch of tech manuals, I'm not a reader because it's not fine literature?
What if I read them as PDFs? What if I print them? Where's the line?
I think we ought to call it something other than simply "reading", because the author seems to be leveraging the dual-meaning of that word to make their point more strongly. But "consuming literature for enjoyment" doesn't come off quite as spicy as pretending that others that don't are illiterate.
Some random thoughts:
It is very odd, I do more deep reading then ever before but its curated through llms.
I do the exploration then the dive on papers.
Many novels we love were released as serials.
I haven't gotten stuck trying to understand an idea because its poorly explained in a book in a while.
I think humans have been very inefficient at finding gaps in logical progression in explanations because anyone who already knows it subconsciously skips steps in the explanation.
That said, llms, woof. Still so much misunderstood.
>Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do.
Most of the news are not worth reading. I listen to news when eating, and I am very glad I don't have to waste my reading span on this crap.
I wish there was a local news paper around me. There are national news papers with a local edition, but they don't have local reporters digging into local stories and so are not worth reading.
You're not reading the right news sources then. I find reuters, the AP and such still worthwhile.
Long read. But this has been known for over 20 years.
> Reading has always been associated with education and more generally with urban social elites. Although contemporary commentators deplore the decline of “the reading habit” or “literary reading,” historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly.
"Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century"
https://sociology.northwestern.edu/documents/faculty-docs/fa...
I wonder if someone educated in this could provide the neurological benefits of reading, outside of communication. They are numerous, are they not? Memory, neuroplasticity, focus, stress relief—I'm sure there are many other benefits too.
If you want people to read, you have to be willing to accept a population that does not feel harassed and hurried. You have to give them a raise when they say they can't afford shelter and food. You have to stop gatekeeping education as a scarce credential rather than giving it freely as a public good. You have to build systems that allow them to access their needs without movement or seeking help being difficult or even a death trap. You have to rein in the forces that wish to monopolize their attention.
People read when they feel secure. We don't live in a particularly secure society.
Even as the author points out people are reading more, he continues to conflate books with reading - and not just that but reading specifically physical books (referring to his stats around book ownership).
The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.
The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.
I still read books sometimes. It’s a different experience. But it’s only a dumbing down of society, if the things you’re reading are dumb.
> The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.
> The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.
You're in good company. Sam Bankman-Freid:
You do actually need to read huge swaths of information to understand the relevant information. A good nonfiction book isn't long because of low information density: it's because the ideas are so complicated that it takes an entire book to explain it. Your approach is emblematic of a modern trend where people know a bunch of smart factoids but have no broader wisdom or understanding.Not reading books because of "information denisty" is a lazy rationalization for dumbing yourself down. Wikipedia is good as a quick reference if you already understand something, but a disaster for learning.
I do read huge swaths of information, just directly relevant to the questions that I have, and the things required to understand that information.
Don’t have to read a book on every US president to understand what happened during the Reagan administration. And if I’m primarily interested in the Cold War, I can focus on that subject and skip out on when Reagan was governor of California, or how he met his wife.
More than that I can get information from a variety of sources, including ones that disagree with each other and have different perspectives. That has absolutely enormous value when trying to comprehend something new…and isn’t often available in a single book.
You still can’t be lazy. Laziness is antithetical to truly acquiring knowledge. But it definitely can’t only come from a book.
There are very few non-fiction books that actually need their space to communicate their idea, instead of doing it in a chapter and filling the rest of it to reach some word-count target.
I've read plenty of scientific articles that read like the author is trying to fulfill a word count. There's definitely something to be said for brevity.
I read all day, every day. I read email. I read news. I read HN.
I don't read books though. I've probably read one novel in the past five years. I used to read more books, newspapers, and magazines and can't really say why I don't anymore other than the news and magazine content is all online now, and it just doesn't seem like there is time left in the day to sit down with a book.
> > London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
> The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage. “So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London.
It's less that we've forgotten to read and more that technology has made maintaining the historical pretense of mass intellectualism non-viable. The mass bulk of humanity has always been this stupid. Curiosity, epistemic discipline, critical thinking, and counterfactual evaluation have always been the privilege and burden of a few. We've only pretended otherwise to flatter our sense of fair-mindedness, which itself is sparsely distributed among the primate biomass of humanity.
Reality punishes you for refusing to model it properly. A non-predictive theory is worthless. An anti-predictive theory is a hazard. Let's remediate the epistemic toxic waste that is the idea that everyone is capable of the highest level of thought if only properly trained. If you're out in public, look around. A good chunk of the people you see can't understand, having had breakfast, that if they hadn't, they'd be hungry. When you're selected into an environment of concentrated rigor, you lose track of just how dumb most people are. The article is sad yet unsurprising.
The issue with this stance is that it folds under immediate scrutiny. It posits that there are intellectually-capable elites and dull, leaden-eyed masses, and uses literacy levels as evidence of that.
Except the people our society views as intellectual elites can't read that well. Every tech billionaire demonstrates a fatal lack of meaningful literacy, and everyone who shares your opinion disqualifies themselves. It's a running joke [1].
Either our elites aren't that elite, and we should ignore their vicious misanthropy, or they are, but their evidence is faulty (and so we should ignore their vicious misanthropy). More succinctly, Preacher points out that the people with the strongest superiority complexes tend to be the worst examples of the relevant trait [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/guckwf/life_imi...
Intellectual and economic accomplishment aren't exactly parallel vectors, but you can't expect me to believe they're orthogonal. A mediocre tech CEO is going to run intellectual circles around some random guy you pick out of the DMV ticket queue.
And, yes, some people are smarter than others. Some people are a lot smarter than others. Also, smart people are rare. Very smart people are very rare. These are basic facts of life that continue to exist whether or not you believe in them. Ignore them at your own risk.
> A mediocre tech CEO is going to run intellectual circles around some random guy you pick out of the DMV ticket queue.
There is literally no reason to believe this; having money is no proxy for intelligence, and tech CEOs specifically--the ones who fell hook line and sinker for craze after craze after craze--really aren't a solid argument here. We can be confident that a randomly selected person is unlikely to believe that an LLM loves them, or that there will be settlements on Mars in two years, or that they can live forever with blood transfusions. We cannot say the same of tech CEOs.
More importantly, we don't have to use money as a proxy at all here--we started with literature understanding, and at that we know the tech CEOs are not running circles around anybody. Here's just one example of Musk not understanding art [1].
I'd agree that highly intelligent people are rare, but I don't think that's as important as another fact: none of the actually highly intelligent people share your opinion. The belief that everyone without money is a dull-eyed serf is exclusively the province of cranks.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/jun/19/elon...
Books have their advantages, but I don't think you necessarily need to read books—in fact, I think books can sometimes be worse. One strength of books is that their structure, starting with the table of contents, trains you in logical composition.
But books also have drawbacks:
1.If there's incorrect information at the time of writing, it becomes fixed at that point.
2.The author's worldview can become overly authoritative, and the messiness of reality is smoothed over for the sake of a neat narrative.
3.Counterexamples and recent debates are often missing.
There are also bad papers that manipulate data to get results, and books are no different. I think books are not bad for introductory maps and mental training.
If you look at programming books from about 10 years ago, they're like historical relics—hard to apply today.
In a rapidly changing world, if you only read books, you'll easily fall behind. Information is pouring in, and books are static media, slow to adapt. Training yourself to read text is important, but it doesn't have to be through books.
Books help build a mental structure of tables of contents and conceptual sequences, but I question whether that structure can only be formed through books.
And realistically, there's a lot of bad content in books too. Self-help books are full of nonsense and scams that exploit people's desire for success. But they're venerated simply because they come in the form of a 'book.'
What we should venerate is not the 'form of a book,' but the 'way of reading that builds a mental framework.'
So I question whether reading only books is really the right approach. I think of this as 'form over substance.' The core is training logical thinking—that doesn't have to come in the form of a book.
I sometimes think it's worth recalling what Socrates said in Plato's Phaedrus: 'Writing is not a remedy for memory, but a means of making it external, leading to forgetfulness.
Once you write something down, you no longer try to remember it within yourself. You come to trust the external symbols.
Writing doesn't give people true wisdom—it only gives them the appearance of wisdom. What matters is not what's written in a book, but what knowledge you internalize. I don't understand the obsession with the form itself.
There's a quote from Marcus Aurelius: "Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers". People who just believe whatever they read in books don't actually learn to think, just to regurgitate, and often become out of touch with how the world actually works (although this happens to heavy consumers of any kind of fiction).
I read more than ever, but Substack is taking a sizable share of the pie whereas lit and non-fiction is now my late evening. I don't do the audiobook thing, though I understand that has become increasingly popular yet not really given much credence.
Desire might be theoretically limitless, but time and attention is not. Time I spend reading is time I'm not consuming endless short-form videos. People have gotten hooked on phones and the medium dictates what they consume.
There could be boom and bust cycles for this. Trends lose lustre and people are always looking for ways to signal status/competence. It's probably why "booktok" is a thing.
Reading is declining because of computers, which are a much more fragile and dependent technology than text on paper.
I would like to argue against the common opinion that Reading Is Good. I don't believe that reading pulp is good in any way. I don't believe that reading an airport novel is any better than watching TV.
Books have the potential to better the mind, but they don't do so simply by being written words. The books must be of a certain artistic caliber. The push to get people reading in general cannot be the end goal. The end goal is to get people to read quality books, to better the mind, affirm life, practice empathy, experience pathos, feel the grace of God. Too many forget this is the end goal and just think reading words on paper is somehow intrinsically a noble endeavor.
I think the common advice to get people into books is wrong and misses the point. "Find a fun trashy book and just read it" is maybe not productive advice unless attention rehabilitation is needed. Sure, some of those people might eventually stumble upon a good book, but advice can be much more efficient than that.
Here's what I would recommend to a burgeoning reader: There are many easy and fun books that have artistic merit; read those. Find them via Booktok lists from pretentious looking people, or common school reading lists, or wherever; generally only read things you have heard of or that you saw on a list somewhere; don't randomly pick off the shelf. Teenager classics like 1984, Book of the New Sun, Kafka on the Shore, American Psycho, Lord of the Rings are fun and easy reads that have meat on the bone. Ignore the airport novel and anything published recently. The average book has the same lack of value as the average TV show, just less entertaining, more boring, and more effortful to experience. Why would you waste time and effort consuming boring, less entertaining media when the phone and the TV are right there? But when you find good books, there is no replacement; you are doing an entirely different thing than mindlessly entertaining yourself. That is what we're trying to do.
> Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
What dreadful hyperbole. If reading is in decline, it’s just that we are in a crisis of widespread ignorance and broken education system, but good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read.
The anomaly might in fact be that we are regressing in human general intelligence compared to the rest of history.
Not "the rest of history," but relative to the ~1800-2000 period of steadily increasing literacy and educational attainment.
The European Dark Ages after the fall of Western Rome was a real thing. Many people regressed to the Stone Age for hundreds of years, and we lost almost every written work from ancient Greece and Rome. That can absolutely happen with the US and EU by 2200, especially considering digital information is far more fragile over centuries than papyrus and parchment.
> good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read
Literacy isn't usually evaluated as a binary thing.
Here's how one organization ranks reading levels:
https://nces.ed.gov/naal/perf_levels.asp
I think the optimists in the article once believed proficiency was inevitable but maybe basic is the best they should hope for now.
that and the middle class
Whether or not people are reading long or complex works for pleasure - what does this trend do to hiring for jobs which require serious comprehension of long, complex documents?
Will we see in-person-only "interviews", where candidates drop their smart phones & glasses into a box, spend hours reading documents, then have to answer questions about 'em?
It's very telling about myself that the length of the article troubled me... I really gotta read more ffs (if I had the time)
(then again, if I have the time to write an unnecessary comment, then I also have the time to read something)
very long winded this article
The United States has made literacy into a Holy Grail of education, and our systems have reduced illiteracy levels to record lows. However, in the real world, there are so many basic jobs, unskilled labor jobs, that should not require literacy at all, and for thousands of years there were all kinds of workers who were never required to achieve literacy at all. So there may be a lot of wasted investment in education trying to make people literate when it's not actually required.
Even if the foregoing is completely false and abhorrent to you, we must also come to terms with a "new literacy" in terms of ideograms and emoji. I am learning how to type emoji, and replace many textual expressions with singular emoji and symbols. Computers and electronic devices, as well as our own garments, are frequently labeled with ideograms that transcend human language, but must be interpreted for proper use.
I have noticed some people around me who aren't really good at reading at all, and this is a real handicap to them when paperwork, and computer readouts, and just signs posted all over, are full of words, and our world surrounds us in words to read and comprehend, and if we can't read at lightning-speed levels, and comprehend what we read, we find ourselves at distinct evolutionary/legal/financial/social disadvantages.
So I contend that future literacy will increasingly involve non-English emoji and symbology, and that not every human in the world needs to be literate in a particular written language, and while a majority of society can afford such an education, nothing of value may be lost.
> there are so many basic jobs, unskilled labor jobs, that should not require literacy at all
> So there may be a lot of wasted investment in education trying to make people literate when it's not actually required.
Our society doesn't warrant its own existence if the only considered criterion is how much value we can extract from each other.
Written communication serves separable purposes:
* Replicating speech, Archiving speech, and separating the acts of speaking and listening from each other. There are alternatives to written format.
* Speech that can be edited easily, until it is perfected.
* Speech that be sped up, slowed down, and jumped around with random access and search.
* Silent speech.
These features can be achieved with alternative technologies.
Written communication also has drawbacks. It is a lossy compression of spoken speech.
Oh well we had a good run of 5000 years! See you on the next planet.
i got xelink ereader few months ago and i've been reading a ton more. i have all sorts of kindle but i stopped reading but xelink attached to my phone got me back.
I would love a phone where this is a standard feature. dont care about fancy cameras and stuff.
I couldn't attach my xteink to my phone because of a standoff around the camera on my phone case. I just now realized that the standoff could be removed and now the magnet works! :)
Did you install Crosspoint on it? I absolutely recommend it.
For reading on my phone Moon Reader is my go-to.
i want to but it came with usba charing cable pogo pin
to put it politely it's demographic changes
Are you reading this? Consider yourself a reader. I quit reading The Atlantic a decade ago due to their hot takes. Slate and Salon a decade before that. If you read Reddit and romance, you’re literate.
Jerry ”I read,” Elaine “Books, Jerry. Books.”
I’ve flagged the article and I would suggest others do the same. The Atlantic never posts things that satisfy the hacker spirit in any way. It is almost always puffery and melodrama meant to attract clicks and views, but the subject matter itself is trite and not worth discussing on a hacker forum.
As a CS instructor, I find this article extremely interesting, FWIW.
I would think that the decline of reading would be relevant to discuss on a hacker forum.
Interesting phenomens are often discussed here so I personally do not perceive it as offtopic. Yet as you said, I have the same feeling from this article. Click bait grievance posting.
Who cares about reading? Take a step back - humans don’t exist to read, reading is a tool, a means to an end. It’s to transmit information from one to another. If we can do that with more information-dense, less lossy methods, all the better.
Lamenting the end of reading is like lamenting the end of manual farm work: the goal isn’t to work in fields, it’s to harvest. We found ways to harvest more than ever for less effort and time than ever, let’s celebrate it.
Half joke: If I had to bet, I would guess that reading will exist for as long as civilization does.
More seriously: I am less certain that it will exist in its current form (mass media, publishing houses, etc), but I am certain that textual information will be a standard means of communication and that people will read it. I do think that computer-assisted cognition (including computer-assisted reading) are eventualities at this point. This sort of thing fundamentally challenges the concept of reading: is your brain (by computer-assistance) scanning a hard drive reading? Even though it's alien to us now, I think the answer is yes.
I'm trying really hard not to be judgemental about this...
Until we invent some sort of matrixesq knowledge transfer, the printed word is hands down the best technology we have to transfer knowledge from one human to another. If a student finishes their education, and is so uncomfortable with reading that they never read another book, we have failed them.
Images / Video can be useful to convey something which is hard to describe in words, but books give an author the ability to dive in much deeper depth on a subject than a video ever could.
What method do you suggest is more information-dense and less lossy?
What people are lamenting is that reading is being replaced with less information-dense, less accurate, less effective mechanisms, like Tiktok shorts and TV news.
If you can’t read, you can’t write, and if you can’t write, you can’t think.
Depending on your place in the class hierarchy, and the orientation of your moral compass, this may or may not be a good thing.
Culture is "a tool, a means to an end. It’s to transmit information from one to another"?