Storygram

A quarter of a century later, did he—did we—manage to salvage the wreck? Or have Birkerts’s worst fears come to pass? It’s hard to tell from the numbers. More independent bookstores are opening than closing, and sales of print books are up—but authors’ earnings are down. Fewer Americans read for pleasure than they once did. A major house’s... See more

Our phones and computers deliver unto each of us a personalized—or rather, algorithm-realized—distillation of headlines, anecdotes, jokes, and photographs. Even the ads we scroll past are not the same as our neighbor’s: a pair of boots has followed me from site to site for weeks. We call this endless, immaterial material a feed , though there’s... See more

Without literacy, democracy may not survive.

Maryanne Wolf introduces a subtle but urgent concept into the discourse on reading: cognitive patience. It is, at heart, the willingness to linger in difficulty. The capacity to stay with a complex sentence, a knotty idea, a layered argument long enough for meaning to emerge.

Wolf’s concept of cognitive patience helps name a phenomenon central to the decline of meaningful discourse. We are not merely losing our capacity for deep reading, we are losing our tolerance for the conditions under which deep thought becomes possible.

In its place, we are cultivating habits of skimming, scanning, and superficial intake. Modes better suited to consuming than to understanding. This is not merely a shift in preference; it is a rewiring of cognition. The reading brain, once forged by sustained attention and deep engagement, is now adapting to an environment built for speed,... See more

According to US federal data analysed by Sunil Iyengar of the National Endowment for the Arts, reading for pleasure is in steep decline across every age group in the United States. Most dramatically, the drop is concentrated among young adults, a generation being raised on infinite scroll and ambient distraction. This is not a gentle tapering, but... See more

That, to many observers, is the original sin of the reading problem: the nation’s uneven commitment to teaching reading in ways we now know are more effective, such as explicit phonics instruction, which systematically teaches students the relationships between letters and sounds. Other, less effective methods, such as “whole language” instruction,... See more