Why read anymore?

0:02Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of long-form text. I'm Jake Kastrzanakis, and today we're talking to The Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch. Rose just wrote a story with a very bold title, The End of Reading is Here, and in it she shares some pretty alarming statistics. She writes that fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. She shares that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell to just 16 % in 2023, and that gambling has now become a more common leisure activity than reading a book. This is all intimately intertwined with technology.

0:42Phones, notifications, devices in schools, TikTok, of course, and what that is all doing to our free time and our ability to pay attention to pretty much anything for an extended period of time. This is all stuff we cover closely at The Verge, So I really wanted to talk to Rose about how real these concerns are and how much we need to be thinking about what comes next. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Thursday, July 23rd, 2026. Today in RAMpocalypse, Framework is reducing the RAM in laptops that it already took pre-orders on. This is happening both because it couldn't get enough units and because the RAM became way too expensive.

1:26Framework writes that its latest RAM modules were delivered at a price that, quote, goes far beyond anything we had predicted and anything we're able to absorb without placing our ability to operate at real financial risk. Instead, Framework is lowering the RAM quantities on many pre-orders and raising the price on RAM upgrades. One laptop config went up by$800. Rampocalypse has hit everyone hard, and it has clearly been particularly tough on small companies like Framework. Next up, the European Commission is fining Google$1 billion for violating its digital markets law. The Commission said that Google has given preferential treatment to its own services within search.

2:08That included things like placing Google's own hotel and sports results at the top of the search page. The Commission also said that Google was too controlling over apps within the Play Store and that it should not have stopped developers from telling users about cheaper ways to make purchases. Google has to make changes within 60 days or face more fines. Finally, Lego has turned the original Donkey Kong arcade machine into a functional Lego set. This is cool. I'm sorry, I'm into it. It's$200. You can actually jump. The barrels roll down and automatically load back up to the top of the machine.

2:39It's very clever. It comes out next week. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Thursday, July 23rd, 2026.

2:47Nilay Patel:Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, Visit servicenow.com.

3:22Nilay Patel:Support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is still a bottleneck, what's the point? Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. It ships at the speed of AI, is ACID compliant, and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually, five words. It's a great frickin' database. Start building at mongodb.com slash AI. Rose Horwich, thanks so much for joining us.

4:05Thank you for having me. So, Rose, your story is called The End of Reading is Here. You spoke to a bunch of professors, media experts, researchers about the state of literacy in 2026. For those who, you know, haven't read it yet, tell us a little bit about what you found. So what I found was that, you know, in the data, there was this very convincing decline in reading in America. You know, the share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day has declined by 40 percent over the past two decades. and as of 2022, which is the last year that we have this really good data for, you know, fewer than half of all Americans read a book of any kind in the year.

4:48And so, you know, I just took that data, you know, to be very convincing and then was kind of trying to look at, okay, what are the implications? What happened when literacy first appeared in society 6 ,000 years ago? And how, you know, are people or these experts kind of thinking about what's happening to us now as it goes away? When I told people about this article, I kept hearing everyone say, you know, people are always declaring that reading is dead. My wife sent me a blue sky thread of like a dozen newspaper articles going back a century declaring reading dead. So I'm curious, after all this research, how convinced are you?

5:25How convinced are you that there's a real problem here and that reading is actually disappearing this time? No, it's so funny because in this story, I quote a bunch of these examples. And, you know, I quote Marshall McLuhan, who wrote in 1962 that we were entering an age of post-literacy where the electronic media would, you know, replace the written word. And then, you know, Neil Postman said the same thing in 1985. And so I think a lot of people look at those and say, OK, people have warned about this for a long time. And, you know, it wasn't the apocalypse. We didn't see reading rates go down to zero.

6:00you know we didn't even see maybe you know drops of like 10 percent in a year or something and so that means that it's not real the fact that people have been warning about it for so long and you know I find that argument somewhat convincing but what I tried to raise in the piece is an alternative argument is that you know people have been warning about this and in a way they've been right like reading rates have been declining and so it's just been a slower and slower transition, I think, than some of these people predicted a while ago. But that doesn't mean that it's not happening. It just means that it's more gradual than we think, but that the trend lines and the direction are very clear.

6:41So I found that to be a sort of convincing way to understand the evidence and data that, you know, was before me. And I do think that's really interesting because, you know, for very obvious reasons, right, the spread of alternate forms of media, reading has just been declining for decades at this point. And so when you're looking at, I think, some of the most recent declines, they might seem large, but there are large declines on what is already a diminished reading population. And so the numbers are maybe getting smaller and smaller. What are the demographics where this change is being seen?

7:18Is it just among the youth where you're seeing, you know, where you're hearing about this, you know, apparent death of reading, or is this kind of across the board? Yeah, it's definitely not just among the youth. You know, I note in the piece that even the groups that have kind of historically read the most, which are, you know, retirees and older people, you know, college graduates and women, that they've also seen a collapse in reading. So it's something that really cuts across demographics. And in a way, it would almost be comforting if it was confined just to one. But it is, you know, a real kind of wide, widespread shift.

7:58There's this very interesting caveat that you have in your story where you write, and I'm quoting here, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. So tell me how you're thinking about this, because you have this bold claim, the end of reading is here, but you also acknowledge like pretty much right away in the piece that in some ways we're reading more than ever. So how are you making that distinction in saying we're seeing more text than ever, we're communicating by text nonstop, but also there's this end to reading happening?

8:37Yeah, I'm so glad that you brought that up because I think it's a really important point that, you know, when you look around and think about how many emails you probably get for work every day or texts from your friends and everything, it's really hard to say that reading is over. And so I think it's important to think about what we are defining as reading when we're talking about it. And what I was arguing was that we are bombarded with so much text that what's taking away from is almost our kind of time and ability to really focus in on a rich and complex text and kind of read it for a sustained period of time and deeply.

9:18So I argued that that's kind of the type of reading that we're losing and that that's what I meant by saying that we're post-literate. It's not that we're illiterate. Like, people still know how to read, but it's a real change in what I think we mean when we talk about reading now. Well, that's one of the things that I found so interesting about this piece. In some ways, obviously, it is very much about people not reading deep, complex texts, but But I think just as much the story is about the end of attention spans. And one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you is that this phenomenon seems to be so deeply intertwined with technology and how tech is changing our habits.

9:57So this is a big question. You obviously have an entire article answering this. But what is your takeaway about the biggest drivers of reading's death? Is it phones? Is it TikTok? talk, you know, what is contributing to our inability to pay attention? Yeah, so I think, you know, it is really multi-causal. But when I was kind of looking and trying to trace, you know, the times, the timing of this decline, I think it really starts, you know, with television, we start to see it. And television just crowds out the time that people might have previously spent reading. You know, by 1985, I think the average American household watching seven hours of TV a day.

10:36So that just takes away a lot of time that you might previously have spent reading because you didn't have other sources of entertainment. And then, you know, we see with streaming and smartphones and broadband internet that just sort of makes it so much easier to not read. Like they're, you know, they never stop. Everything's kind of, you know, moves into the next show or you can just keep scrolling, you know, until infinity. and so you know we see it really I guess get supercharged kind of with you know these new technologies and you know when I was speaking with cognitive scientists they were saying you know there's nothing in our brain where that's like fundamentally changed to where we can no longer pay attention but what we do is what we become accustomed to and so the more we become used to kind of using these alternate forms of media to immediately switching which you know away from something if it doesn't grab our attention in the first 15 seconds, the harder it feels to pay attention to anything.

11:37And I think we do see that in the data. You know, I spoke with a researcher who found that 20 years ago, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes. And five years ago, that had dropped to 47 seconds. So we just see that we become accustomed to having things change really quickly and to, you know, moving away from something that that doesn't or that doesn't immediately grab our attention. It's so funny you say that. Like, as I was writing down questions that I wanted to ask you and reading this article, tweets kept flying in on my second monitor and I kept getting distracted.

12:11And it like, of course, this happens. There are so many things that we have to monitor at any given moment right now. And our devices are really designed to put all this stuff in front of us. You know, it's interesting to change the subject just slightly for a second. You actually had another story in January about how this attention span issue is showing up in some really odd ways. You talked to a bunch of film professors who were saying that feature-length movies are now too long for students. There's this part where you say, students arriving in college today have no memory of a world before the infinite scroll.

12:46As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours a day on social media, with much of that time used for flicking from one short-form video to the next. I'm interested in this thing where it's almost like this is not just the death of reading that you've kind of been circling around. It seems to be sort of anything that is meaty and requires a devoted attention span. So I think there is a real change in kind of the way we relate to media. and that shows up in movies, in books as well, that people are just so much more used to shifting their attention all the time. Netflix reportedly tells directors to constantly have people repeating the action that's happening or saying it again so that if someone's not paying attention, they still get what's going on.

13:35And, you know, one researcher who I spoke to compared us to like lab rats who, you know, get a hit of cocaine when we press a button. And so, yeah, I think we do find that, that we're just always switching between things and it makes it hard to do anything for a sustained period of time. Are you a phone in hand while watching TV person? Yes. Yeah. See, this is like sacrilegious to me. I like I'm like if I'm watching a movie, I'm like lights off, phone away. But it's hard. It's hard. Like it keeps buzzing. I know. No, I am. I mean, as I tried to make clear in this article, I was trying to be very transparent about the ways that I've fallen victim to a lot of these things.

14:19And I certainly am always like, you know, cleaning while I'm watching TV or cooking while I'm watching TV. And I often have my phone next to me while I'm reading and I like check my notifications every couple of pages. So it's a really difficult, I think, like habit to resist falling into.

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17:22I want to make sure I talk about the education side of this, too, because you are an education reporter. That's what your primary beat at The Atlantic. And your story kind of gets into the fact that, yes, there's technology, but there's also education is morphing around short form, too. Can you tell me a little bit about that? And I'm curious, is that a cause or an effect of what we're seeing here. Yeah, so it's a couple years ago, I had written this piece about students arriving to universities, even, you know, the top universities in the country, kind of unprepared to read full books. And what I found really interesting about that was that it didn't just seem like it was, you know, an issue of phones or something, as people often talk about.

18:03You know, what we were finding was that curricula had really changed in middle and high school. And so people were unprepared to read full books because they hadn't been asked to before. And so, you know, I think what I tried to then kind of follow up with here was looking at, okay, what is happening in elementary, middle, and high schools? And I think what we see is that kind of successive waves of education reform, even when they were very well-meaning, have just over time led teachers to assign a lot fewer full books. You know, a survey from last year found that most middle and high school teachers assigned between zero and four books a year.

18:41And, you know, instead, there's a lot more focus on excerpts and kind of doing reading comprehension drills to prepare for standardized tests. And so that is just a fundamentally different kind of way of teaching because school is usually where kind of kids were forced to read. Obviously, you know, there has also been, you know, a decline in interest in pleasure reading among young people. But it's really, you know, I spoke with some researchers who were like, when did kids ever really come home and like, you know, crack open a book? Or when did the majority of kids ever do that? But they would have been expected to do that in school.

19:16And now that's a real change. I think something else that's really interesting that's happening in schools is that, you know, we are seeing that as books have left the classroom, we're seeing a lot more like tablets and Chromebooks. And I think a lot of that can be sort of, you know, related to a COVID phenomenon. But, you know, in a recent survey, like 80 % of elementary school teachers said that students receive a digital device from school before kindergarten. So again, that's just a really fundamentally different way of teaching and learning. And it makes sense that that would change our habits and interests.

19:49That's so interesting. And it really sounds to me like these are sort of two separate things that are happening at the same time where technology exists outside of schools in a way that is perhaps hurting our ability to pay attention to one thing for a long time. And then in schools, they are separately deciding to optimize around short form. You kind of said it yourself, like kids were forced to read these long books and it's not necessarily, you know, that is a way that you instill those abilities. It is interesting though, you know, I think back to my time in college and, you know, I didn't always read all of the books.

20:28I'm curious, you spoke to a bunch of professors for these stories, and a lot seems to be pointed at the state of college students and these anecdotes about inattentive students. I'm curious what you're hearing and how the professors are kind of assessing the distinction from the days of kids who would just read Sparknotes to today where, you know, theoretically they can't get through a, you know, four-page paper. Yeah. No, and definitely in these pieces, you know, one thing that's come up is that, you know, oftentimes college students kind of have a changed relationship to university than they used to.

21:08You know, we know that they're spending a lot more time in extracurriculars. And so certainly that can be kind of cutting into time that they might have spent reading or pretending to do the reading in the past. But at the same time, you know, the professors that I spoke with, they were aware of all of this. They were aware that everyone, you know, professors have been complaining about kids not reading for a really long time. And yet they were still saying that there is really a fundamental change in the way students are relating to text. You know, I spoke with one professor at Brown who was saying that, you know, he's always had to, of course, you know, talk to students about the content of what they were reading.

21:46But now he really has to, he and his colleagues really have to teach them how they expect them to read and help them like identify, okay, what's the metaphor here? How do I approach this? You know, where's the author using irony? And that they have to kind of figure out how to read, how to think before they can even get the content. And another thing that I found really interesting as I was speaking to an administrative staff member at Harvard who supports the humanities and social sciences, she was saying that there's really a changed relationship to text among a lot of the students that she works with, where students kind of see reading as a kind of arbitrarily difficult way to get information and think that when professors are assigning them reading, they're kind of hiding something from them.

22:34And it's like, why can't you just give me the chat GPT, you know, cut down version, our cloud cut down version? Why are you like making me get it through this hard medium? And so that is a real shift, I think, in relationship to text, just because there weren't other alternatives before. You could read SparkNotes, but it wasn't going to be like as tailored to exactly what you wanted, any question you would ask. I mean, that's fascinating. And again, I think it just goes back to how much technology is shifting what is possible for our attention spans and for our ability to read. And how, right, it's interesting.

23:12SparkNotes is itself reading, even if it is simpler reading. I want to ask, and this is a very dumb question, but why is this a problem, right? Like intuitively, reading being dead feels very, very bad. But, you know, you can argue, okay, you can listen to fascinating conversations on podcasts. You can see world-class film from home. You can discover new cultures and perspectives with endless swipes on TikTok. So what is the argument for why reading is inherently better? So I think that's a great question. And, you know, it's interesting because definitely there is, you know, no problem with getting information from podcasts and you can learn a ton.

23:53Thank you. Thank you. Yes. It's important to note right now. But I think that what I was trying to argue in this piece was not that it was inherently a negative, but that this is a real shift, that the medium that we use to communicate with one another shapes the world that we live in. it shapes the way we think in our politics and our culture. And so as we see, you know, not just on a day-to-day level or minute-by-minute level that people are picking a podcast instead of picking up Dickens or something, but that we're seeing like a real shift in from text and the written word to these more oral forms of communication, I was arguing that that will fundamentally change society and it will change kind of our consciousness, you know, the candidates that we elect and how we choose them and what our culture values.

24:43And so that was really the case that I was trying to make that, yeah, that this will just be a fundamental shift. Speaking of fundamental shifts, there's this very funny moment, I think like two-thirds of the way into the piece where you go, I haven't even mentioned AI yet. What are you looking at as AI proliferates in schools and workplaces? You know, what is the concern about what happens next? Yeah. Yeah. So I think AI is really interesting because, you know, we've talked, you know, of course, about a lot of different technologies that have affected reading. But, you know, I talk about in the piece how AI is the first that can really, you know, write for you.