Atlantic's Horowitch: America has entered a postliterate age

There is a mid-summer cover story from The Atlantic that lands harder than the usual 'kids these days' essay, because the numbers behind it are unusually blunt. In The Age of Reading Is Over, staff writer Rose Horowitch argues the country has crossed into a 'postliterate world,' and she brings receipts. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. A separate analysis of 236,000 American Time Use Survey responses found the share of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. The collapse, she reports, cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels.

The AI angle is what makes this a story for this newsletter rather than just another literacy lament. Horowitch's argument is that generative models now let people instantly summarize a book or draft an essay they have not actually written, which she frames as a shortcut around the cognitive work that reading was for. She quotes philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah warning that if we abandoned deep reading, 'we'd stop being the kind of humans that we are. We'd be very different creatures.' She also, more provocatively, labels Donald Trump America's 'first postliterate president.'

Take the specifics as reported, not settled. The 28-to-16 pleasure-reading number is one study of one behaviour, and 'postliterate' is a framing choice as much as a data point. What the piece does not really give you is a clean isolation of AI's contribution from the smartphones, social feeds, and shortened attention spans that were already dragging the line down before ChatGPT existed. Horowitch had already staked out this beat in her 2024 essay on elite college students who could not finish a book; the AI overlay is the update, not a fresh baseline.

The forward-looking bit worth watching is who benefits from a postliterate reader. Any product whose value is compressing long text into a paragraph, a chart, or a spoken briefing gets a friendlier customer as the muscle for the long version atrophies. That is a decent quarter for summarizer tools and a harder one for anyone still selling attention: publishers, universities that assign chapters instead of prompts, and the kind of long journalism The Atlantic is itself trying to defend.