Horowitch examines whether civilization can survive our postliterate era.
For The Atlantic’s August-issue cover story, “The Age of Reading Is Over,” staff writer Rose Horowitch argues that we are living in a “postliterate world” where fewer and fewer adults read books of any kind, and examines whether civilization can survive this era. Horowitch wrote the viral 2024 essay “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” and now explores the subject across American society, where the decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse in reading, while careers in letters, the humanities, and newspapers are in steep decline and are widely seen as an economic dead end.
The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of, Horowitch writes; she warns that the “decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.”
