The Atlantic’s August cover story, “The End of Reading Is Here” by Rose Horowitch, opens with the most famous catastrophe in intellectual history: the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. For two millennia we’ve told the story as a tragedy of fire and war. Julius Caesar’s siege, tens of thousands of scrolls in flames, a mob sacking the temple that held what remained.
But as Horowitch notes, contemporary historians have largely set aside the dramatic version. The library that housed Eratosthenes as he measured the circumference of the Earth, that preserved the earliest manuscripts of Homer, that may have trained Euclid himself, was not primarily destroyed. It was neglected. Copying scrolls before mice and humidity ate them was expensive, and eventually the will to preserve the collection ran out. The classicist Roger Bagnall draws the sharpest conclusion: the library’s abandonment didn’t cause a dark age. It proved the dark age had already arrived.
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That is the article’s real warning, and it should stop every parent, student, and citizen cold. A civilization’s knowledge rarely dies in a single blaze. It dies by degrees, through indifference, and the indifference itself is the diagnosis.
The Numbers of Neglect
The evidence Horowitch assembles is sobering. Fewer than half of American adults read even one book in 2022. The share of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day nearly halved between 2004 and 2023, from 28 percent to 16 percent. More Americans placed a bet last year than read a book. The average attention span on a screen has collapsed from two and a half minutes in 2004 to about 47 seconds today.
The reading that survives has thinned. In 1958, the year’s bestselling novel was Doctor Zhivago; last year it was a Hunger Games installment, and bestseller sentences are now roughly a third shorter than a century ago. In one 2024 study, English majors, students who chose to study literature, were asked to read the opening paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House with the entire internet at their disposal. Only 5 percent came away with an accurate understanding of what they had read. Some concluded that dinosaurs roamed the streets of Victorian London.
Meanwhile, in 2024 only 8 percent of college graduates earned a humanities degree, English and history departments awarded 40 percent fewer degrees than twelve years earlier, and nearly a third of American adults cannot paraphrase or draw inferences from a multipage text. Reading has become so rare that carrying a book in public now gets mocked as “performative.” We have reached the point where the act that built the modern mind is treated as an affectation.
Reading Built the Reasoning Mind
The article’s deepest material explains why this matters more than nostalgia. Reading is not natural to the brain; it is a technology humanity invented, and it rewired us. Horowitch draws on the historian Walter Ong, who argued that literacy created the very conditions for concentration, extended focus, and logical deduction. In the 1930s, the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria found that newly literate peasants in Central Asia could complete simple logical syllogisms while their illiterate neighbors refused even to attempt reasoning beyond their direct experience. Philosophy, science, history, and law all rest on minds trained by sustained engagement with text.
Which means the decline of reading is not merely a change in entertainment habits. It is the erosion of reasoning itself. America is not becoming illiterate, Horowitch stresses; it is becoming postliterate, retaining the ability to decode words while losing the higher-order powers of comprehension, synthesis, and judgment. The data agree: adult reasoning scores have declined, and the century-long generational rise in IQ has reversed. When we stop reading, the library of the mind falls into disrepair too.
The World Turned Sideways
For centuries, books were the vertical transmission of culture: the accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and moral experience of older generations, passed carefully down to the young. Homer to Aristotle to Aquinas to Locke to us, each generation inheriting the hardest-won lessons of every generation before it. Now, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt observes in the piece, culture moves horizontally, from young person to young person, through streamers and influencers whose audiences dwarf anything a newspaper ever commanded. The result, in Horowitch’s memorable phrase, is a world “turned sideways.” The young are no longer primarily inheriting civilization. They are improvising it among themselves, in real time, guided by whoever is loudest this week.
No one needs to ban books to end a literate civilization. You just stop handing them down.
The Other Half of the Story
Here is what the mourning misses. When reading becomes rare, it does not become worthless. It becomes precious.
The article notes that just 20 percent of adults now account for more than 80 percent of the books read in America. Deep readers have become a small minority, and everything we know about human achievement says that minority will think more clearly, judge more independently, and understand the world more deeply than those around them. Horowitch’s discussion of artificial intelligence sharpens the point: as AI floods the world with plausible, machine-written text, and as reliance on it erodes people’s ability to reason for themselves, the capacity to think deeply and judge independently becomes both rarer and more valuable at once. It is no coincidence that, as we wrote recently, the world’s leading AI companies are urgently hiring philosophers: people trained by long, careful engagement with the greatest texts.
But the deepest reason to read has never been advantage. The great books are the record of humanity’s best attempts to answer the questions every one of us must face: What is true? What is right? How should I live? James Baldwin credited Dostoevsky and Dickens with teaching him that his own deepest struggles connected him to every human being who had ever lived. A person cut off from that inheritance isn’t merely less employable. He is left to face the hardest questions of existence alone, with only the horizontal chatter of his own moment to guide him.
A Modern Mouseion
The postliterate future is not inevitable, and Horowitch documents the resistance: states banning phones in schools, teachers restoring whole books to their classrooms, one Dallas district’s library checkouts jumping 25% the year its phone ban took effect. The holdouts are real. What they need is an institution.
Reliance College exists to be one. Our students read the classics, really read them, and reason through them together in small seminars using our Guided Collaborative Discussion method, with tutors devoted to each student’s growth. Our nine-month Leap Year immerses high school graduates in exactly the vertical inheritance the modern world has stopped transmitting, while our AI Proof U™ certificate program builds the deep reading and independent judgment that an AI-saturated economy now rewards above all else.
Horowitch closes her essay with the observation that our inheritance, unlike Alexandria’s, is not physically at risk. Every great text ever digitized sits a few keystrokes away. What is at risk is the ability and the will to read them. The Library of Alexandria was lost because no one thought maintaining it was their job. We think it is ours.
The age of reading may be ending for the many. For our students, it is just beginning.
