Hi, friend.
And anyway I'm at the gym, where the conversation turns to what everyone is reading this summer.
Normally conversation there is fragmented (kids, work schedules, how loud our thigh muscles are screaming from Bulgarian split squats). But this day we talk
authors and stories. It was animated. People have Opinions. So someone starts a text thread, and now I have a group text with book-loving friends and a list of new recs. It's like an asynchronous book club.
Maybe you saw The Atlantic's August cover story that cannonballed right into the middle of summer beach-reading season in the US: "The End of Reading Is Here," the magazine declared. We're past any literary "crisis"; we're now at a new stage of complete disaster the magazine calls "postliterate."
It's not that we can't read words. (Which—you're not wrong—is how I initially interpreted
"postliterate," too.) But what's slipping beneath the water are the deeper cognitive capacities that long-form reading builds in our brains, like Bulgarians build my quads.
We're losing sustained attention and focus: the ability to sit quietly with a book for a period of time, and then to both comprehend and internalize what we've read.
Bulgarians, by the way,
are single-leg, rear-foot elevated lunges. They are actually the worst/best... I love when I see them scrawled on the day's class whiteboard. They strengthen the larger muscles of your quads and glutes like no one's business.
The Atlantic article is long (5,500 words arguing that no one reads lol). There's a LOT to unpack.
Some of it we might nod
vigorously along with. Like short-form video DOES train us for passive viewing. Our jumpy attention DOES bounce away when we aren't immediately dopa-delighted. And AI DOES tempt us to outsource our thinking at alarming rates. (SHOUTY-CAPS for emphasis, so you know how spot-on I believe those things are.)
BUT (here's where I stopped nodding): The conclusion is waaaay overstated. Things seem just so black and white. So
certain, in part because the piece treats all this as something happening to us, when a lot of it is something we're choosing. And (this is the part I keep coming back to), we can choose differently. A lot of us already are.
So I want to talk about 2 major points, because I think they have relevance to the future of you and me as readers, writers, creatives.
#1: Reading "is becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids."
MmMmm, okay. Let's look at the data:
- Print-book sales are higher than a decade ago.
- Barnes & Noble opened 60+ new stores last year.
- Nearly 400 independent bookstores opened in 2025.
- Substack subscriptions for long-form content have surged.
- Readers
spend more time reading per day than they did two decades ago.
- Celebrity book clubs are a thing (Dua Lipa, Reese Witherspoon, John Mulaney, Jenna Bush Hager, and (of course) Oprah) that actually do drive sales.
The Atlantic acknowledges all those bullets. But then waves them away as "niche" like stamp collecting and orchid-growing.
There's
plenty of evidence that reading is declining. There's also plenty of evidence it is deepening. Only one of those gets called data in The Atlantic piece; the other gets lumped in with orchid growing. (No disrespect to the orchid growers; you're great.)
Said another way... the piece acknowledges evidence that complicates the End of Reading thesis, then interprets it in the most apocalyptic, dire direction. It
doesn't exactly cherry-pick... but it does move the harvesting machinery in that direction.
#2: "Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how."
Right now, you're reading this on your phone or your computer. Between online news, social feeds, captions, articles, inboxes, texts.... we
are reading more words than ever. Our days are literally STUFFED with words.
But the piece then treats the short-form stuff as evidence of diminished capacity. And sure, capacities we don't practice can weaken: I took a few weeks off from the gym and wow I felt it. But the piece reads as if reading more non-book text proves people can no longer think deeply. Those are two different claims, and as I read it I
think: Does the evidence for one automatically prove the other?
We could look at it another way, supported in part by the article's own numbers I bulleted above. Look at that data point about how readers are spending more time with books daily than they did 20 years ago. Is that really what collapse looks like? Or is that what a more intentional and concentrated habit looks like? Is this a verdict... or an
opportunity?
I see long-form reading as more selective and intentional. But not "over" and not even niche. (I'm pretty sure it's bigger than orchid growers, anyway.)
So: yes to "we read differently now..." No to "...therefore books are dead." A format shift does not equal utter cognitive collapse.
Not automatically, anyway.
* * *
Together, those points show something more nuanced than The End of Reading: Faster formats don't automatically destroy reading. They change it.
But here's the deal: You and I can change, too. We can
choose differently. We can choose what we want to strengthen.
Maybe another way to look at the data is that some readers are being more intentional with what they read; and that writers and creatives need to up their game and create truly exceptional reading experiences.
Those of us reading aren't holdouts; we're deliberately choosing to read long-form, on
purpose. We recognize what it does for us that social scrolling does not. We are choosing Bulgarian Brain Squats, because they build large muscles like no one's business.
Ah, of course, you say... you are a writer publishing a new book in February 2027. Of course you'd say that.
Fair enough. I don't want my book to enter a postliterate
apocalyptic world populated by stumbling zombies locked in on TikTok (Apocalyptiktok?). I don't want any of us living there, either.
But what drives me bananas about articles like The Atlantic's is that they predict a future they insist is so (waving spritzer toward exposed aerial roots of non-existent orchids) inevitable.
It's not. The
future never is.
When everything else gets faster and cheaper, the stuff that requires real-time and attention becomes more important, more valuable. It becomes a choice—that (the data shows) many of us are already making.
Reading is not dead. Not dying. But we do have to consciously build the habit.
Once you get into the routine of it, your muscles feel so good.
* * *
At the gym, a woman named Elle is talking about a book she's been loving—"devouring" was the word she used. She's reading it on her Kindle app, because, she said, she can read it on her phone while she's standing in line at Market
Basket or waiting in the carpool line for camp pickup.
So do with that what you will. But to me, Elle is like a lot of us: a little tired of the social scroll and very aware of how regularly consuming it feels like a diet of Cheez Doodles. We aren't abandoning our phones entirely. But we also know that there's another way. We deliberately choose that way when it matters. Or we can.
That conversation at the gym was truly a delight. People love recommending books. People love talking about them. And a lot of us love reading them.
I left the gym feeling stronger, in every way: The larger muscles were on fire—glutes, quads, AND brain.
