Three More on Reading
WARNING: For serious readers (and thinkers) only
“No matter its origin or form, all writing—poem, play, mathematical equation, arrest warrant, novel, headline, history, tax receipt, chemical formula, essay—is the telling of a story.”
— Lewis H. Lapham, 2017
“The Postliterate Heart” went out a few days ago, and it turns out half the internet had already been circling the same Atlantic essay, arguing about it from opposite ends of the table.
Two of the sharpest responses landed within a couple of days of each other — one confirming the diagnosis, one contesting it. Both worth walking through, because the disagreement is more useful than either piece alone.
Below, you’ll find a hot take from Adam Singer, a more optimistic take from a well-respected writer, and then I leave you with five books you can read in a weekend.
Singer, author of Hot Takes, clearly stated: “The post-literate age is here,” which doesn’t so much rebut the Atlantic piece as talk about its implications. The numbers he shares are a stark warning about the effects of less time spent reading: people who were read to more as children score meaningfully higher on IQ tests as adults, and the effect holds even after stripping out wealth and class.
The same dataset’s low scorers report more TV, more celebrity gossip, more lotto playing — and, the detail that stuck with me, they find it more boring to just sit and think. Singer’s conclusion is a K-shaped one: a widening gap between people who can still do the friction of reading a whole book and everyone else, with AI raising the value of the first group by the day.
Not everyone’s buying the K-shape, though. One rebuttal came from a writer I’ve long admired who has a book of her own coming out in February — which you might think factors into how you read her optimism) — but the argument turned out sturdier than the confluence of interest suggests.
She makes it from a gym, of all places, using her quads as a metaphor, and by the end I wasn’t sure Singer and I hadn’t both been a little too grim. That one’s for paid subscribers — along with the five books I’d actually hand you this weekend if you wanted to start proving Singer right.
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In addition to those two, one of which has been called the finest example of the novella, we have Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Machiavelli’s The Prince — none of them over 200 pages, all of them exactly the kind of friction Singer’s talking about.
Pick one. That’s the whole assignment. Let me know how you do.
There’s so much to learn,
