The Age of Reading Isn’t Over. It’s Just Not Happening to Everyone.

Sorry for the double post this week, but I’ve just finished reading the Atlantic’s cover essay by Rose Horowitch which is all over social media and I’m fizzing.

You see, every so often a magazine article comes along that nails an issue to the wall so perfectly, and puts it all so beautifully, that you just have to tip your hat and give kudos. As readers of this Substack will know, I’m slap-bang in the middle of a doctorate on exactly this subject and this essay is the best exploration of the problem I’ve read yet. And, crucially, Horowitch identifies a key difference between the illiterate and the postliterate and I’ll be citing the hell out of it. The article’s frame of reference is wide, the power in the author’s prose is undeniable, and the closing image of her mother’s signature inside a handed-down copy of Rabbit Hill is... chef’s kiss.

So, basically, this article is right about pretty much everything except...

… except she utterly whiffs who the collapse in reading is actually happening to!

Because here’s the sentence Horowitch’s entire essay balances on: ‘the decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels.’

That’s it. And that sentence is driving me mad, because in an essay about the societal collapse of reading, the author completely ignores one of the most stable gender differentials in all of social science. Because, sure, reading is starting to decline everywhere, but it’s a reasonably gentle dip for women and a cataclysmic death-dive from the top of the Library of Alexandria for men.

And the craziest of all things is that pretty much all the evidence she cites makes that point loud and clear. Almost every single dataset she uses in her, otherwise, superb essay is gendered top to bottom. She just never seems to get to the point of, you know, actually mentioning it.

Take the headline statistic, for example, that the NEA survey shows only 38 percent of adults read a novel or short story in 2022. Terrible stat. Awful stat. But here’s what the actual survey says, when focusing on sex. ‘Roughly one in four men read a novel or short story in 2022, compared with fewer than half of all women.’

Women, 46.9 percent. Men, 27.7.

And if we track that back a decade we see that same reading gap sitting at 19 points in 2012 too. This matters because the gap between men and women’s reading hasn’t narrowed, as people keep trying to tell me. What’s actually happened is that women’s reading has started falling towards the terrible levels of where men’s already was!

Or let’s take the time-use data Horowitch leans on, which is the study of 236,000 Americans showing daily reading falling from 28 percent to 16 percent. It’s another awful, awful statistic. However, the underlying time diaries show men reading 15 minutes a day to women’s 19, with men putting 43 minutes a day into games and computer leisure to women’s 26. The key is that men don’t have less leisure than women (they actually have more, and by nearly an hour a day), they just end up spending it somewhere other than reading books.

I don’t want to rag on an otherwise excellent piece, but my point, really, is that The End of Reading is not an epochal apocalyptic event that’s descending evenly on our poor, benighted species. It’s the utter collapse in male reading arriving a generation ahead of the female one that people are only now starting to notice. And I feel the need to side-eye that The Atlantic has only started to care now this collapse is beginning to affect women too. Well, that’s a choice, isn’t it?

And once you spot that choice in the article, it’s impossible to stop spotting it, because Horowitch makes it again and again, dataset after dataset. So much so that this isn’t a piece with just one gender-shaped hole in it. It’s a piece where it feels like every single quoted source had an important gender story inside it, and each and every time, she chooses to cut the gender issue out.

For example, the teenage screen-time evidence cited is Jean Twenge’s analysis, which is that ‘by eighth grade, the average kid spends four and a half hours a day on social media.’ I’d recommend you go and read Twenge’s actual post. The 4.5 hours is eighth and tenth graders combined, and the story it tells is about girls. Girls average five hours a day, with the screen time of one in three eighth-grade girls going past seven hours. Boys’ surplus hours, meanwhile, are sitting in the gaming column of those federal time diaries. Twenge published a gender story, but it arrives in the Atlantic as a story about ‘the average kid’.

And we see the same partial quoting in her school-scores evidence. The decline is real, with 32 percent of seniors scoring below Basic. But look at which groups NCES lists as declining since 2019. It’s girls on the list, and across the ability range. Boys aren’t! At grade twelve, right now, the aggregate collapse Horowitch cites is being driven by falling female scores, sliding down towards an appallingly low male baseline that flattened years ago when, it seems to me, absolutely nobody cared.

Boys have been the leading indicator of this issue for over two decades now and nobody ever seemed motivated to write cover essays about it. But as soon as girls started following them down into the trenches, it suddenly became the end of civilisation.

(There’s acutally a sloppier tier of sourcing under all this, if you’re interested. The century-of-shorter-sentences claim that isn’t in the study it traces to, a 47-second ‘attention span’ that actually measures office workers switching windows, and the study of English majors misreading Dickens that was conducted in 2015, before TikTok even existed. Don’t get me wrong, most of what Horowitch cites is real and genuinely alarming, and sourcing issues are an occupational hazard, but still...)

Now, we need to come to what this pattern of ignoring the gendered nature of the issue is protecting Horowitch’s essay from, because if we allow the problem for boys back in, her postliterate framing collapses. The same federal testing programme that supplies her adult-literacy alarm (the share of American adults at the lowest literacy level really did jump from 19 to 28 percent in six years, and it should terrify everyone) also reports this. In 2023, there were no statistically significant gender gaps in adult literacy scores. None. Nada. Nichts. Men can read exactly as well as women. They just don’t.

A quarter of men read fiction and a half of women do. But their measured skill is level. It’s not a competence crisis for males, it’s a desire crisis. Reading, for men, has stopped being a thing men do. And a desire crisis in one sex, arriving decades before the other, is not what an epoch-defining event looks like. Epochs don’t check your chromosomes at the door. But cultures do.

And this is why the erasure of male reading decline in this article matters, and why I’m fizzing. Calling this the End of Reading for the whole of society and it feels like there’s nothing we can do. But actually call it what the data shows (a gendered, cultural and motivational collapse) and suddenly it has handles that we should be trying to address!

Horowitch notes, in her own final act, that after Texas banned phones in schools one Dallas district’s library checkouts rose by 200,000 books. She files this under acts of defiance that may ‘seem futile’. But it strikes me that two hundred thousand books is a pretty strange kind of futility. Especially after, when television arrived, the best study of its era found children’s book-reading dipped and then recovered to its former level or higher. Likewise, in 2005, one Scottish council changed how it taught boys to read and the gender gap inverted. And right now, while the doorstop hardcover dies its death, romantasy is doing 610 million dollars a year because publishing finally learned to serve one half of the readership properly. And out on Royal Road and Kindle Unlimited there are men (young, algorithm-marinated, allegedly postliterate men) reading 700-page progression-fantasy serials at a book a week and complaining the chapters are too short.

And this is where my own thesis kicks in. Because reading didn’t stop being possible for men. It merely stopped being offered to them, modelled for them, and written at them. And roughly a generation before anyone cared. The vertical transmission of the reading habit Horowitch mourns broke for boys first. And her essay stands in a long queue. The 1900 Atlantic blamed newspapers. In 1932, Leavis blamed the bestseller. The panic about books and reading is always real, always eloquent, and always aimed at everyone. But underneath it is the unfashionable problem which sits unaddressed: what can we do about the boys?

So, I guess this is a fan letter to the piece, but with a sizeable complaint enclosed. Rose Horowitch has written a fantastic essay on the decline of reading, but the single most important variable goes unmentioned. The library that’s actually burning has a boys’ section, and everyone keeps walking past the smoke to mourn the building.

The Age of Reading isn’t over.

But the Age of Pretending its Decline is Everyone’s Problem needs to be.