Atlantic Rose, All Thorns

Rose, the age of reading is far from over!

A young Yale graduate declares that the age of reading is ending. History—and some of her own evidence—suggest otherwise.

Not to be confused the famous “Liebowitz” in American popular culture, that was Fawn Liebowitz, the fictional Animal House student from Fort Wayne who supposedly died in a kiln explosion, and at time when reading seemed dead before.

Today, it’s “Horowitz” that is attracting all the attention.

She is Rose Horowitch, the very young Yale graduate and Atlantic staff writer whose August 2026 cover story, “The End of Reading Is Here,” declares that America is entering a post-literate age.

Horowitch’s article is handsomely written, dramatically packaged and covered in thorns. It presents legitimate concerns about declining attention spans, simplified books, classroom shortcuts and artificial intelligence, but then stretches them into a sweeping declaration that the age of reading may be ending.

She’s been rebutted by the NY Times and literally everyone who can write. So why not the Hoosier Enquirer too?

We have heard this story before.

The 2026 Edition of “Why Johnny Can’t Read”

Rudolf Flesch published Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955, blaming ineffective teaching methods for a national literacy crisis. Parents, teachers and politicians have been warning about the intellectual collapse of the next generation ever since.

The sequel in 1981 was why still can’t little Johney read?

Radio was supposedly destroying conversation. Comic books were corrupting children. Television was turning Americans into passive spectators. Calculators would eliminate mathematical ability, video games would destroy concentration, and the internet would finish whatever television had left standing.

Now TikTok, smartphones and artificial intelligence have been placed in the dock. Some of the charges are justified, but the apocalyptic verdict is not.

Horowitch reports that the percentage of Americans reading for pleasure on a typical day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. That is concerning, but it does not prove that reading is ending. Daily participation and annual readership are different measurements. Pew surveys have found that roughly three-quarters of American adults continue to read at least one book annually, a figure that remained comparatively stable through much of the smartphone era.

The more skeptical analysis from New York Times writer David Wallace-Wells also found that much of the decline in daily reading time was concentrated among older Americans. Young adults did not account for the entire collapse suggested by The Atlantic’s ominous presentation.

Americans were never a nation in which everyone spent the evening reading Dickens beside the fireplace. Long before smartphones, millions preferred television, sports, movies, card games, gossip and almost anything else to a difficult novel. Screens were consuming several hours of the average American day by the 1960s.

The golden age of universal serious reading exists largely in the imagination.

Yale Nostalgia Without Much History

Horowitch graduated from Yale in 2023 with a degree in history. Her youth does not disqualify her from examining American literacy, but it makes the article’s nostalgia unusual. She describes the disappearance of a broad reading culture she is too young to have personally experienced.

Her earlier article about elite college students who allegedly could not finish entire books relied heavily on interviews with professors. Horowitch acknowledged that comprehensive data did not exist, yet the experiences of several instructors became evidence of a sweeping national trend.

Professors complaining that students arrive unprepared is hardly new. In 1991, Daniel J. Singal wrote in The Atlantic that high-school reading lists had been reduced to four or five titles annually and that students were encountering fewer works by Dickens, Twain, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickinson, Milton, Melville and Steinbeck.

That was 35 years before Horowitch announced the end of reading.

The more defensible argument is not that Americans have stopped reading. It is that people increasingly consume fragmented writing—texts, captions, posts, summaries, emails and short articles—while spending less time with sustained, complicated works. That change may weaken concentration and make ambiguity, metaphor and long arguments more difficult to process.

It deserves attention without pretending civilization has reached its closing chapter.

Schools Should Examine Their Own Role

Smartphones make an easy villain because they cannot defend themselves. Schools, however, made consequential decisions long before TikTok arrived.

Standardized testing encouraged teachers to use isolated passages followed by multiple-choice questions. Full novels were displaced by excerpts, worksheets and lessons designed around measurable skills. Schools distributed tablets and laptops, sometimes beginning in kindergarten, while printed textbooks and sustained writing assignments steadily retreated.

Artificial intelligence now allows students to summarize books, generate essays and bypass the intellectual struggle through which comprehension develops. That is a genuine danger. A student who repeatedly asks a machine to read, organize and write may never develop those abilities independently.

The answer is not to announce the death of reading. It is to restore phonics, vocabulary, handwriting, complete books, classroom discussion and serious writing. Students should encounter technology, but they should also be expected to sit quietly with material that cannot be mastered in a 30-second video.

A Dark Age—or Another American Reinvention?

Horowitch sees a civilization sliding toward a new Dark Age. That conclusion reflects the fashionable pessimism of a generation raised on institutional failure, climate catastrophe, pandemic disruption and algorithmic panic. Every problem becomes existential; every trend signals the end of something.

America may instead be entering another period of reinvention. Technology that can shorten attention spans can also place the Library of Congress, historic newspapers, university lectures and the world’s literature into a device carried in a pocket. Artificial intelligence can become an intellectual crutch, but it can also tutor struggling readers and open difficult material to people previously excluded from it.

President Donald Trump calls this the beginning of a new American golden age and has proposed a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” for every adult citizen if Republicans retain Congress. The proposal is not yet an enacted payment: it would likely require congressional authorization, lacks a completed funding mechanism and could cost more than $1 trillion. Americans should therefore distinguish an ambitious political promise from money already approved for distribution. The White House announced the proposal on September 10, 2026⁠, while House Speaker Mike Johnson said congressional approval would be necessary, according to the Associated Press⁠.

Still, the larger contrast matters. One vision sees Americans as exhausted victims shuffling helplessly toward intellectual darkness. The other sees a country capable of restoring prosperity, education and confidence through better choices.

Reading is not ending. Bad educational policies can be reversed. Phones can be put down. Books can be reopened. Teachers can assign complete works, and parents can read with their children.

The Atlantic planted a Rose on its cover, but readers should be careful of the thorns.

America does not need another fashionable obituary for its culture. It needs the confidence and discipline to improve it.