In the post-literate society ... Look! A meme!

The End of Reading is Here, writes Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic. Everyone's reading less -- if you don't count Instagram captions -- and people who do read are choosing shorter and shallower books.

The best-selling novel of 1958 was the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, she writes. Last year, the top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series.

Adults are choosing young-adult fiction and romantasy (romance and fantasy). School librarians are stocking graphic novels and manga to match students' lower reading levels and shorter attention spans.

In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument.

"Americans are probably reading more words than ever before," she writes, but it comes in the form of brief "emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions."

Children are reading less than their parents' generation, Horowitch reports. "Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales."

Some Harvard students see reading as unnecessarily burdensome, Margaret Rennix, assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told Horowitch. A student told her he used Chat GPT to "translate" Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange from "Old English" to easier language.

In 2004, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes, Gloria Mark, a psychologist at UC Irvine, told Horowitch. "By 2012, it had dropped to 75 seconds. Five years ago, it fell to about 47 seconds."

Changes in reading and viewing habits is changing brains. Children watching an animated video show less activity than readers in the part of the brain associated with imagination, researchers say. "Children who had more screen time and spent less time reading had less well-developed white matter in areas associated with executive function and language," other studies show.

Elementary students have trouble focusing and don't have much tolerance for mental exertion, Benjamin Powers, at the Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told her. “In classrooms, this shows up as students who can decode or retrieve information but struggle with comprehension that requires inference, synthesis, or holding ideas in mind across longer texts.”

More than 80 percent of third-to-eighth-grade teachers said their students’ reading stamina had declined since 2019 in a 2024 survey, writes Horowitch. "Scores on the ACT’s reading and English sections have been falling for the past seven years" and have sunk to the lowest level in more than three decades. "SAT reading and writing scores have declined too, even as administrators have shortened and simplified the passages assessing reading-comprehension skills."

About 20 percent of Americans read books, she writes. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told her. Someone reading a book on the subway may be accused of "performantive reading."

There are a few glimmers of hope, Horowitch writes. Nearly half the states have banned cellphones during the school day. "After Texas’s ban went into effect at the start of this past academic year, a Dallas school district saw 200,000 more library books checked out compared with the year before, a nearly 25 percent increase," she writes. Some English teachers are putting whole books -- not just excerpts -- back into their curriculum.