Reclaiming Reading

Is America transitioning to a “postliterate” society? The question has occasioned a flurry of commentary of late. In “The End of Reading Is Here,” Rose Horowitch cites the National Endowment for the Arts data that less than half of adults in 2022 read a book of any kind and only 16 percent of the population engage in daily pleasure reading. James Marriott reaches a similar conclusion, noting that “the average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen.” The result is, as David Wallace-Wells concludes, that traditional reading habits are increasingly cannibalized by smartphones and algorithmic feeds.