Rose Horowitch’s August 2026 Atlantic cover story, titled “The Age of Reading Is Over” and running online as “The End of Reading Is Here”, makes a point that is difficult to refute. It is not true that Americans are becoming illiterate; Americans are becoming post-literate. Horowitch argues that the Americans are surrounded by written text all day, and, therefore, have “quietly lost the habit” of reading “text (that is) long and hard” and caring enough to sit with it.
The statistics that Horowitch uses deserve a second, even a third, read. In 2020, only 50% of all adults had completed a book, and only 38% read a book in the form of a novel or short story. Reading for pleasure had a daily rate of 28% in 2004, and only 16% in 2023. 80% of the nation’s reading is done by 20% of the population. They left the book, and started gambling.
Horowitch is the author of the 2024 essay in which the inability of elite institutions’ undergraduate students to finish a book is discussed, and in this she is attempting to broaden the scope of the discussion. Reading is declining among all age and gender populations, and all educational levels. Reading is in decline among the most consistent readers—college educated women and retirees. Children show up to school less able to concentrate. Teenagers consider reading for pleasure an unusual pastime. College students have ChatGPT translate dense chapters.
To draw on prior thinkers, she cites Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and Walter Ong. These thinkers advanced the idea that the medium influences the mind. Print and its associated technologies facilitated the development of a relatively stable and enduring form of attention. Different media, different attention. She believes that society is moving back towards an oral culture. An oral culture is more favorable to the visual and the brief, than to argument and discourse. Perhaps already, and increasingly so, deep reading will be a hobby, and may become an activity that is reserved for specialists.
Here is my take.
’m getting the feeling global illiteracy is going up at an alarming rate. The number of people who read books is dwindling. The majority get their bites of news through social media posts and given their limited education, many of them just can’t read. Because of this, they trust social media posts over the news. This is what I find most alarming. Not that reading books is going away. It’s that checking what they’re told is going away.
Reading books is going away, and even most kids don’t read while at school. The number of kids able to read has dropped significantly, and many kids grow their self image based around the social media influencers and their posts. Whenever you look around a living room how many people do you actually see reading books compared to those on their phones in front of the TV? The TV lost once more; once on the wall and once in the hand.
I know this because I was one of them.
I had the horrible TV, social media, and scrolling obsession. I would tell myself staring at one screen while sitting in front of the other was a form of resting. No, it was not resting, it was just mindless noise.
Now, I’m doing things to combat my TV fascination. I revert my TV habits and replace my scrolling with a book each week.
I mean it when I say reading one book a week has changed my life Like, I mean it. And now, I want to help everyone I know get their sanity back too. I mean, one book gets my head in the game so much I don’t even look at my phone when I finish a chapter now, which is a drastic improvement. A year ago, I couldn’t finish a chapter without a phone break.
Reading is a lot easier than most people think. It’s just a skill some people have lost over time. I have lost reading skills. And so has most of America. From my own experience, I’ve felt the drift Horowitch described. I don’t think I even had to try to fix it in the first place, I just didn’t go on my phone as much, stuck to my reading schedule, and just read one book a week.
I’m not even trying to downplay the situation, the drift is awful, but the solution is super easy. Just put down your phone for a second, pick up a book, and when you’re done, read another one.
If you’ve been meaning to read, this is your sign…. just read one book and text me the title so I can cheer you on.
Source
- Rose Horowitch, “The Age of Reading Is Over” (online: “The End of Reading Is Here”), The Atlantic, August 2026: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/
- Statistics cross-checked against independent coverage of the piece by Newser (https://www.newser.com/story/392548/america-is-entering-a-postliterate-age.html) and NPR, “Are we living through the end of reading?” (https://www.npr.org/2026/07/11/nx-s1-5886268/are-we-living-through-the-end-of-reading). The Atlantic original is paywalled; the figures above are as reported across those outlets and were consistent.
