The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic

According to this piece, reading rates in America have collapsed - fewer than half of adults read a book in 2022 (which - eh - I feel like this is hard to assess), daily pleasure reading fell from 28% to 16% (which is both real and wild; if reading is dead then folks are going to be just told what to think) across (and this hurts me to repeat) every age, gender, and education level, even as total words consumed explode via texts, posts, and feeds. Reading built and freed the modern mind (logic, sustained attention, rational analysis), and its erosion is reshaping cognition, politics (Trump as the first "postliterate president," whose rhetorical style suits oral culture and yet challenges a truly democratic one, even those with a farce of an existence as that of America), and democratic institutions that assumed informed, literate citizens. Generative AI now threatens writing itself - which is how people figure out what they think - risking the loss of deep thinking and independent judgment, making the literate era look like a brief anomaly between the oral and digital ages. This has been hard for me to assess with even my own heavy use of generative AI but damn does the prospect of folks just not giving a fuck anymore is scaring me.