Save the book

…Literacy rates are the highest in the history of the world. Still, the world that Huxley imagined, and Postman prophesied, is upon us. That's because people consume Facebook updates, Instagram captions, and X posts throughout the day. Rarely do they pick up a book. A recent Atlantic story, citing the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, said that just 48 percent of Americans had read a single book in 2022, a 6 percent decline from a decade earlier. According to a study released in August, over the past two decades the number of Americans who read for pleasure daily has fallen from 28 percent to 16 percent. The slide among young people is even more pronounced. 

Turns out, reading a book is a lost art—and the demise of book reading might have dire consequences. "Perhaps this plague of illiteracy has played a role in the disappearance of truth and, with it, liberal democracy," George Packer wrote in The Atlantic this fall.

By that account, I suppose I shouldn't feel too bad about my early morning in Rome. The least insidious manifestation of a postliterate age is wasting time scrolling through Instagram; the worst is the most powerful country in the world being led by a cadre of egomaniacal, antidemocratic morons...'

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a69920140/lost-art-of-reading-a-book/?link_source=ta_thread_link&taid=696029224bc2970001396128&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=threads