Utterly Avoidable Calamity
Most can, many should, few do. Read, that is. More than half of all adults in our country do not read a book of any kind over the course of an entire year. That’s according to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits.
Reading is no longer a mainstream hobby. In less than two decades, the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% to 16%. Gambling is now a more common leisure activity than reading. Let that sink in. Coming across sobering statistics like these led The Atlantic to splash an ominous warning across the cover of its just-issued August edition in faded, smudged lettering, all caps: THE AGE OF READING IS OVER.
A fair amount of hyperbole, to be sure. The Atlantic is a damn good journal, but this isn’t the first time its editors have gone overboard to grab the attention of a distracted public. A little over two and a half years ago, the magazine published a meticulously researched and intricately detailed report under the headline, “It Will Never Be a Good Time to Buy a House.” Never is a long time. The story’s subtitle went on to hedge a bit: “Maybe in 2030?”
Just last month, another Atlantic article urged readers to “Assume You Will Be Hacked” because “AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before.” Perhaps not wanting to be too much of a buzzkill, the magazine did not draw a through line between AI’s empowerment of cybercriminality and its culpability for the demise of reading.
As August’s cover article correctly observes, for most of history the biggest reading problem was illiteracy. People didn’t know how to read books. Today, the biggest problem is what the report’s author calls post-literacy. People know how to read books, but don’t.
The decline in book reading cuts across age groups, gender and education levels. Even those who traditionally did the most reading—retirees, women and college graduates—have largely abandoned the practice. Kids too are drifting away from reading. From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who say they rarely or never read for fun nearly quadrupled. The bookworm is an endangered species.
Authors and publishers are responding to society-wide attention deficits, condensed AI-generated information summaries and leisure-time competitors—gaming, online gambling, compulsive scrolling, binge-watching video streams, to name a few—by making books simpler and shorter. Sentences in New York Times best sellers today are roughly one-third shorter than they were a century ago. I’ve personally experienced the shortening and sweetening of literature on the author’s side of things, encountering numerous agents and publishers who said up front they would not consider manuscripts over 100,000 words and an editor who pushed me to reduce the length of my novel by 20%, giving me a formula for doing so.
A society that stops reading loses more than books. Reading, writing and thinking are joined at the hip. That symbiosis is gravely threatened by the large language models of artificial intelligence. When we let AI synthesize information for us rather than plowing through it ourselves, we sacrifice some capacity for diving into a subject deeply and distinguishing between what is trivial and what is important. When we ask AI to write for us, the product we get in return isn’t really writing, for there is no underlying vision, no originality, no heart, no soul, just a bunch of random sentence fragments spliced together in a way calculated to give us what we are seeking.
Gloria Caulfield, a commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida’s graduation ceremony in May called AI the next industrial revolution and was promptly booed lustily. She clearly was taken aback by the reaction and shouldn’t have been. She must’ve thought that young people who’ve done all their growing up during the digital age naturally would be warm to the latest tech innovations, but she thought wrong. They’re not sold on this one, nor should they be. They see fledgling careers potentially evaporating before they can manage to establish themselves professionally.
Future employment prospects are understandably a primary concern for new entrants into the job market, but it is hardly the only worry concerning artificial intelligence. Caulfield does have cause to consider this new fad an industrial revolution, just not the cause she had in mind as she spoke. AI is industrialized plagiarism. Instead of lifting entire passages from one or two books or some journal as human plagiarists do, it combs through millions or even billions of sources in milliseconds, picks a few needles out of haystacks the size of mountain ranges, the ones most pertinent to the question we’ve asked or the task we’ve assigned. Our wish is AI’s command, but each time we rub that genie’s lamp, we grow a little less able to read, write and think for ourselves.
Writing is hard. Sometimes the words don’t come, you get stuck, it takes patience and perseverance to work through that blockage. Writing involves the drudgery of painstaking research, relies heavily on imagination and creativity that always seem to arrive in fits and starts. It is hard, that is why it’s so worthwhile and rewarding. Puts reading in a whole new light, too, a bonus benefit.
America is troubled. Our social fabric is fraying. We stand at the precipice of disaster, an utterly avoidable calamity. Thoughtlessness and cruelty threaten to push us over the edge. More than any other single factor, pulling back from the brink depends on our ability to see life from more than just the narrow perspective of our own lived experience. There’s always been great value in walking in another’s shoes. That journey is at a premium these days. The trek is a long one, involving many steps, but cannot be made without these three: Read, write, think.
