Have We Reached the End of Reading?
City Lights Bookstore's chief book buyer Paul Yamazaki won the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community in 2023. His new book is "Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale.” (Robert Alexander via Getty Images)
Airdate: Monday, July 27 at 10 AM
Reading used to be the main way Americans got information, but most of us now turn to our phones, the internet, social media or television for news and entertainment. The share of Americans reading an article daily has plunged by about 40 percent, and according to the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than half of all adults read a book in 2022. In a new article from The Atlantic, staff writer Rose Horowitch considers the consequences of our shortened attention spans and asks whether the age of reading will ultimately prove a short anomaly in human history. She joins us to talk about the “end of reading.”
Guests:
- Rose Horowitch, staff writer at The Atlantic
- Benjamin Powers, director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub