26 July 2026

Reader,

On "The End of Reading is Here"

I promised a response to Rose Horowitch's Atlantic article that has been stirring up all kind of literacy apocalypse screams across social media.

First, I have nothing against its writer Horowitch, a younger journalist who is splashing her way to a successful career by tracing a number of cultural shifts in technology and academia. It's important work, and I admire much of what she has written, even in this article which I think misses the mark.

Additionally, I have much less respect for The Atlantic's choices in the essay's publication, and likely what I perceive to be its editorial changes. It is a semi-annual tradition for them to raise a hue and cry over something (usually the state of reading) which alarms its "intellectual" subscribers and stirs the pot in social media to attract more of them. Hence how quickly the essay went behind a paywall.

Neither of these observations is insignificant. They're part of what we must consider when reading critically, frictionally: context. It's also clear to me that the article is making its most explosive rounds among the most sensitive of readers, English teachers, protective of their beloved craft. And, not altogether ironically, the furor is generated in communities who have themselves not fully read the long essay, else they would not be quite so insensate.

So to Horowitch's points . . .

Horowitch is largely correct to be concerned about a massive cultural shift in our conceptions of literacy. It is more than upon us. Teachers, at least, have seen it for more than 20 years and probably 50.

But this is hardly a simple shift, one which supposedly moves us cleanly from something we call "reading" to something else we might call "consuming." The problem with The Atlantic article is that nearly all of its most critical terminology is tossed about too casually, slipping its academic definitions to popular ones to specialized ones to outrightly incorrect ones. In particular, I'm talking about the words "reading," "literacy," "post-literacy," "thinking," "critical thinking," and all the conceptions of various reading mediums and technologies.

More cleanly: Reading =/= Books. And Horowitch makes this clear at several points in the essay; even so, other sentences continue to cite 'evidence' of lower reading in book sales and readers laboring over print. We see the highly-problematic measures from standardized testing announced without critical inquiry about them. And where real connections between a "literate mind" and failed physical book reading arise, they are exclusively told in anecdotes of single students who cannot, for instance, read a passage from Dickens. (To be sure, if I was asked to fill 50 notebooks of such incidents from my classrooms . . . and I could do it without insulting curious students struggling to understand.)

Horowitch makes much of this "lower standard" of inferior reading which is so popular today, whether it's YA and manga reading or (something she cannot admit to) YouTube chats and social media interactions. She does not care to remind us that Dickens (and Shakespeare and Homer and . . . ) were also considered popular culture and thus beneath the respect of that same elite and "literate mind."
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In fact, this holds true of a number of nostalgic and romantic claims about what reading represents. Horowitch worries, for instance, about how the loss of the Library of Alexandria due to negligence was a signal of the Dark Ages (itself quite a misnomer of history). She does not, however, offer us the literacy rates of Ptolemaic Egypt, or of the colonial United States, or of a time when "Americans [were] once members of a proudly literate society." Pray, tell.

The same for claims about the benefits of reading the printed word: that it "forces people to think in an orderly, linear fashion." That it does. And . . . are these the primary desirable qualities of thought, imagination, critical analysis, and problem-solving? School essays accomplish a particular kind of critical thought, but by now surely we understand that these are products of a very specialized Western methodology, honed for ease in public school assessment, responsible in part for the alienation of so many who still do not succeed in schooling?

These broader contexts are almost never questioned. Why are parents more seldom reading to their children? Why are kids turning away from newspapers as sources of news? Why is there a larger anti-intellectualism movement in this country? And more to this point, why are we decrying the 'End of Reading' and examining only the United States?

I could continue in this vein for some time (my copy of the article is full of such annotations). However, I will here make only two more points:

1. The reckless use of terms clouds the argument, coupled with far too much intentionally-provocative rhetoric in the use of student/youth anecdotes of poor reading.
2. Horowitch acknowledges many of the larger complications to her points, but most of these are quickly mentioned and, more safely, buried in the back of the essay, a tactic I suspect her editors suggested in their own elite cynicism.

But as I said at first, Horowitch is right to be concerned. We are moving from one form of literacy to another (and with it a number of real cognitive changes), and it is not any smaller than that which she discusses in the movement from orality to written literacies. And it's happening more quickly.

Unfortunately, she misrepresents the power of thinking which did (and does) exist in oral cultures, offering only slices of Walter Ong's work and nothing from Eric Havelock or, for that matter, indigenous scholars like Jo-ann Archibald, Neal McLeod, or Noelani Arista. Community, reciprocity, and responsibility, for instance, are all values inherent in the working of orality. As a consequence, writing for Horowitch is the only space where "people figure out what they think." Dialogue is not considered; oral narrative as culture-carrier is omitted; and the role of ceremony is apparently irrelevant. As importantly, she also therefore worries about the absence of cognition in digital literacies.

For me, the most important failure of the essay (not withstanding its sensationalist publication work by The Atlantic), is exactly this: the crisis is not about reading the printed word but about the addictive and accelerating democratization of the new media. Young people cannot compose as well on a written page, but they now have access to become fully literate (and published!) in image composition and spoken word, for instance. It's a form of literacy I admittedly cannot equal.

Does this kind of literacy have its hazards, as the essay enjoins? It's a move (in too-general terms) from a 'deep' vertical kind of critical inquiry into a lateral or associative literacy, of juxtaposition and pattern-making, of irony and criticism, of networking and activism, of a rejection of elite and guarded static academia literacies for a dynamic and scoffing freedom. The unbending institution, caught in its own canon and myth, is its author and fertilizer.

Yes, uncritical adoption of digital literacy (which includes the corporate role which foments it) is highly dangerous for a society which values reflection and nuanced inquiry, for a culture which depends upon complex systems of knowledge in every field to operate sustainably, for a society which at least pretends to cultivate critical democracies.

And now, I think, you can see why I, too, was fired up to write however briefly about this article. It's why the acceleration of culture and magical thinking are dangerous, and why I have, after so many years working with these very issues, have adopted the term Frictional Reading to respond.

From behind the paywalled towers of ink and inflated university tuitions, the intellectuals are screaming that the peasants are revolting. But we don't need to accept their fear, itself based on a nostalgia based in no history. Instead, we (as educators, readers, participants in democracy) need to engage everyone we meet in dialogue and reflection, deliberately slowing to ask and explore hard questions, learning from each other's literacies and ways of knowing, ways of making meaning.

This is what the fulfilled human brain does.

Literary Nomads: Author Footprints

The paradox lies in us, I think:

On the one hand, we want to travel in some degree of comfort, in expectation of safety, relaxation, and entertainment. On the other, we want to meet the "real" experience of the author's home, workspace, lifestyle, characters, creative moment.

And in between these, playing on this very tension, an industry produces the former at the price of simulating the latter. And what a price! Hidden behind the simulations are the real histories of exploitation, evictions, and even wholesale slaughter.

As I explore in these past two episodes, the movement between Heidegger's conceptions of human-produced World and physical Earth is similar to the very practice of reading itself. We unravel and expose tensions and contradictions, falsehoods and threads of meaning. How do we account for the magical narratives of Montgomery or Marquez and reconcile them with the real world we meet---or choose to ignore?

​​​Journey 7​

Episodes ahead:

• 7.07 (7.31) Mapping Dreams: Calvino's Invisible Cities
• 7.08 (7/31) Ghost in the Garden, Pt. 1: Dark Montgomery
• 7.09 (8/7) Ghost in the Garden, Pt. 2: Dark Montgomery Readings
• 7.10 (8.14) Book Towns: Timbuktu

Calendar: Why is July Already Over?

...because in Michigan we've been trapped in heat waves, smoke hazards, and "explosive" lettuce.

• July 30: Paperback Book Day
• July 30: International Day of Friendship
• Aug 4: National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day (US)
• Aug 9: International Day of the World's Indigenous People
• Aug 9: National Book Lover's Day (US)
• Aug 9: International Youth Day

Blackhawk: The Re-Discovery of America - Chapter 6: Colonialism's Constitution

As the infant US creates its founding documents, the indigenous nations find the first embedded language to define their status, even though much of the motivation for our Constitution was to deter rogue states and settlers from seizing lands the wealthier had "dibs" on.

Even Thomas Jefferson worries about what is to come. He sees in the country's expansion an embodiment of "Liberty," but he cannot help but also witness our methods, the most vicious and duplicitous work of "Empire."​
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Book Recommendation

Timbuktu by Paul Auster (1998)

I've read a number of works which work more or less successfully to tell a story from the perspective of an animal. A number of works by Richard Adams, of course: Watership Down, Traveller, The Plague Dogs. London's Call of the Wild and Sewell's Black Beauty. Gowdy's The White Bone and the bizarrely funny Sheep Detectives film which began as the book Three Bags Full.

And so, when one of my all-time favorites Paul Auster does it, I'm there. The good news is that Auster is still Auster here: the disorientated sensibility, the messiness of relationships and choices, the lyric compassion beneath. But then he runs into the practical challenges of "doggy-ness," I think: missing are the surreal truisms and allegorical surmises which could never emerge from the cognitive incapacity of our hero, Mr. Bones. The resolution? One which satisfies on a level of "dog." It's a quick read. Would love to know what you think!

And No, I Haven't See The Odyssey, Yet

But I will. And probably soon. And probably in IMAX if I can afford it.

And no, even though several have asked me my opinion about any of the various "controversies" around the new film or Nolan or foretold Grok versions, I have not waded in.

Except this. Stories are told and re-told, visioned and re-visioned; characters imagined and re-imagined; plots reversed and subverted; themes examined and overthrown; and audience sentiment and repugnance forever piqued. This is the power of story. Homer was a personal revisionist, too.

(Ignore the "inaccurate information" signs outside the museum door.)

All kinds of tech problems over here at Waywords. If you notice any web functions or podcast feeds broken, give me a shout-out so I can correct them. (I think this signals some upgrades needed!)

What ideas, questions, thoughts, or projects would you like to share?

Steve

What's Still Ahead?

• How I Read
• Excerpts from Frictional Reading
• Reflection: Muses or Misconceptions

​​​ ​​​​ ​Podcasts​ ​Fiction & Verse​ ​Education​ Copyright (C) 2026 Waywords Studio LLC. All rights reserved. Thank you for being part of our growing community!

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