Rose Horowitch, staff writer at The Atlantic, draws on her reporting to argue that the United States is moving toward a post-literate society, a condition defined not by the absence of words but by the erosion of sustained, deep reading. Drawing on cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf and media theorist Walter Ong’s work on orality and literacy, Horowitch traces how the constant fragmentation of attention through smartphones and social media has crowded out the kind of focused engagement that complex texts require. Research she cites found that the average on-screen attention span fell from 2.5 minutes two decades ago to 47 seconds five years ago. She connects this to political communication, noting that Marshall McLuhan predicted a more emotional and tribal politics as literacy declined, a shift she sees reflected in how candidates now craft messaging for short-form video rather than sustained argument. The conversation also addresses math, with data from UC San Diego showing 900 incoming freshmen performing at middle or high school level, up from 30 just five years prior. Horowitch points to grade inflation, rollback of accountability standards, and instructional shifts away from foundational math as contributing factors, with declines that predate the pandemic and appear across OECD countries starting around 2012.
The second half of the conversation turns to what can be done. On K-12 education, Horowitch notes that most middle and high school teachers now assign between zero and four books per year, and that 80 percent of elementary schools issue devices before kindergarten. She points to Mississippi’s reading gains as a model, crediting phonics instruction, retention policies, and a return to full texts. For parents, she recommends reading aloud to young children and sharing favorite books across generations. Universities, she argues, need to rebuild scaffolding for deep reading while staying alert to AI offloading. The conversation closes on the question of what reading means personally, with Horowitch describing it as a form of inherited knowledge and Seth Green framing sustained literacy as a condition for the kind of evidence-based civic life the country’s founders assumed.
Lecturer bio:
Rose Horowitch is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes about education, technology, and American culture. She graduated from Yale University with a degree in history and previously worked at NBC News and Reuters.
