The Death of Reading (with James Marriott)

Are we living in the new Dark Ages? Despite vast technological advances, our societies are increasingly looking like those that preceded the advent of literacy. So argues journalist James Marriott, who sees in our abandonment of reading a threat to democracy and a reversal of many of the Enlightenment's gains. He and EconTalk's Russ Roberts trace literacy from its fragile first days in ancient Mesopotamia through to the printing press and the "Reading Revolution" of the mid-to-late 18th century, exploring how--and whether--its spread shaped major historical events. They analyze Marriott's claim that reading grounds politics in rationality, consider the role of the Republic of Letters in driving Europe's Industrial Revolution, and debate whether a book or a movie is better at conveying complexity. Marriott ends with a consolation: Just as fast food gave rise to the gym, informational junk food may give rise to reading as an intentional discipline.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is August 16, 2026, and my guest is author James Marriott of The Times of London, where he is a columnist. His Substack is Cultural Capital. It was first here in July

• 0:47Speaker 00

  of 2025, talking about reading. Today, we're going to talk about his new book, The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. James, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me. It's actually amazingly, I talked to you last in the middle of a sweltering London heatwave, and I'm in the middle of another sweltering London heatwave, although it's less hot. When I looked back at that video, I'm completely pink in the last time I talked to you.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Well, we'll have to do this more often, or it's a tradition. It's pretty dark to call a book The New Dark Ages. Is the situation really that bleak?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a funny one. It's a title that my publisher said, what are you calling this book? And you know, something just springs into your into your mind, and you say it before you've thought about it. And I just said, well, The New Dark Ages. And then it got attached to the project. And then people have asked me, well, do you think we're literally returning to the Dark Ages? Is it really true that a society with self-driving cars and world-beating research universities is remotely comparable to the situation of Europe in, you know, the fifth or sixth century, whatever? That's that's not the argument of the book. I guess, I mean, the other objection people make is, aren't you caricaturing the Dark Ages, which historians now tell us we're a time of great technological innovation,

• 2:09Speaker 01

  and which I think is a little, which I think is a bit overdone at the moment. But no, that's not what I'm doing either. I guess the the thought behind the title comes from a fairly common idea among the sort of the kinds of media theorists who've written about the implications of moving from a society based on literacy and reading to one that abandons literacy and reading and begins to look a little bit more, in some ways, like the kinds of societies that preceded the advent of literacy. We owe Marshall McLuhan this idea that a that a post-literate society will resemble in some ways a pre-literate society. The things that, you know, the things I sort of say in my book and the things people

• 2:50Speaker 01

  like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong would say is, you know, more mystical, more emotional, more face-to-face interaction, not mediated by the written word. So I guess the thing that my, I guess the thing the title is pointing is pointing at is this, you know, sort of well-known thought in media theoretical circles, that a society after literacy, in some ways, resembles a society before literacy. And I try not to press too hard on the historical parallels. You may think I've overdone it, but I guess the sort of, if the book has two themes, it's the idea that the decline of literacy may push us back through a kind of reversal of many of the gains of the Enlightenment, which I think was a, which

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I think was a sort of phenomenon symptom of literacy, and also that it may push us back to a political situation that resembles one that existed before literacy. So I guess the theme is sort of slightly going back in time to a time before literacy.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  I'm not sure I agree or disagree. I think it's a really interesting idea to think about. And your book starts with a really interesting, it's a very short book, by the way, I want to tell listeners. It's about 170 pages on my Kindle. I ironically read it on my phone. We'll talk about that later, maybe. But your book starts off with really a history of reading. And I've never thought about the question of when did reading become common? When did literacy become common? So when did reading take off?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  It's a really good question. And I think this is something I really wanted to to hammer home in the book, which is that I think we're so used to reading, we're so used to literacy, and it's so ubiquitous in our society, and we spend our entire lives reading, that we very easily forget to think about how unusual it is and how recent it is. So the statistics of literacy rates in ancient societies are fascinating. By some estimates, in ancient Mesopotamia, I think in Mesopotamia, city-state, you might have had 20 people alive who could who could read and write. The early history of literacy for thousands and thousands of years is incredibly fragile, and it's not at all a cultural phenomenon.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  It's a kind of esoteric, elite code or secret that's passed down among the very, a wealthy scribal elite. And some, some, some rulers and some societies would have learned to read, some wouldn't. That's the that's the situation that prevails. I mean, in ancient Rome, the literacy rate's probably about 10%. It goes up, it's edging up a little bit by the end of the Middle Ages. The obvious big event for literacy is the invention of the printing press, which means that books can proliferate enormously. When people have more access to books, more people want, more people can read, books become useful for more things, driven by Protestantism, a strand of Christianity which places a huge emphasis

• 5:41Speaker 01

  on on the written word, more people become literate to read the Bible. And one story of literacy is that these things interrelate and feed each other up until the middle to the end of the 18th century, when there's this phenomenon that's called the reading revolution by some historians, which is this idea that reading has sort of been increasing steadily since the printing press. And you reach this point in the middle to the end of the 18th century, where it suddenly seems as numerous journalists and authors were writing at the time, but absolutely everybody is reading. And there are all these wonderful accounts of people complaining that you can be walking in the street, and the people walking down bumping into you because they're reading a novel. Or you go to the pub, and there are just loads of peasants sitting there reading almanacs. Or, you know, you

• 6:24Speaker 01

  go and see what on earth your servant girl is doing, and she's in the kitchen reading a newspaper. And, you know, journalists always print to exaggeration, but it really did seem to strike people at the time that there was this point in the middle to the end of the 18th century, when it seemed like not many people had been reading, and then suddenly everybody was reading, and books were everywhere, and magazines were everywhere, and newspapers were everywhere. And if you're going to find an inflection point, that's not mass literacy. But I think that is the beginning of this modern literate world that we know.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  And we did an episode with Janine Barkus on inexpensive paperbacks, and Jane Austen, and how the widespread availability of affordable books launched the popularity of a whole bunch of people, one of whom was was Jane Austen. One of the challenges, I think, with this claim that reading is important, but by the way, you and I share something in common. We love books. We read an enormous, I think, an enormous amount. We spend an enormous amount of our life, I'm older than you, but I've spent a huge part of my life immersed in a book, reading in times where I should have been watching where I was going. So

• 7:33Speaker 00

  I totally, we're on the same page there. But the question that's hovering in the background of this book, and that comes forward in the last part, is whether it matters to civilization, whether it matters to our political process. Certainly, it should, on paper, it should be the case that a literate population should make better decisions, you would think, you would hope. But I'd have to say that if I think back to this revolution, which was a big deal, it wasn't like a 20% increase in people reading books, or a 10% increase. It was an enormous increase, again, mainly through the printing press and the fall in

• 8:18Speaker 00

  the price of owning a book, and access to books. Shouldn't the world have looked radically different? And you try to make the case that it did, but I'm skeptical. So make that case again. It should have been a revolution in how the world turned out. It should have been almost visible in political outcomes. And I'm not sure it is. So give me your best shot.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I would, I wouldn't go, I wouldn't go so far as to claim that literacy is the only factor that matters in the history of politics. I think, I think, I think, I think it does look pretty radical. For instance, I don't think, I think the important thing to say about literacy, perhaps, is that I think the more literacy spreads through a society, the more of a democratizing effect that has on the society, the more people who can access information and ideas, the more people can become politically involved, and the more people are thinking critically about power. And, you know, it used to be the case, the historians would claim that the French Revolution was basically a consequence of philosophers like Rousseau publishing their anti-monarchical and, you know, sort

• 9:25Speaker 01

  of proto-republican ideas in books like The Social Contract. That's probably overstated. But I think if you look at the history of, in Britain, perhaps more, you're talking about the end of the 17th century. In Europe, you're talking about the 18th century. You begin the 18th century in which Europe is a society, you know, run to a very large degree by absolutist monarchs, who have total power of their populations, surrounded by ministers, political affairs are basically palace secrets, discussed by a small minority of a political elite. When you get to the end of the 18th century, into the beginning of the 19th century, society is looking a lot more democratic. You have newspapers. Most, the phenomenon of the absolutist monarch has radically waned. In France, you have

• 10:09Speaker 01

  a republic. In England, the monarch is much less the sole authority in the country than they were at the beginning of the century. You have reports of parliament being written, ordinary people are involved in politics. Public affairs are no longer just debated in in state rooms. There's a kind of collective decision made by this, made by the public sphere. And I do think politics really looks radically different. I think that's that a, that sort of end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century, is a great age of democratic revolution and democratic reform. And I think that is directly linked to the spread of literacy through society.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Well, it could be, there's a sweet spot. It could be, it's a U-shaped or an inverted U-shaped function. So, for example, I, you know, you mentioned Social Contract, you know, Thomas Paine gets a lot of credit for influencing the American Revolution. We could think of many, many books, Uncle Tom's Cabin, that electrified the public and led to important movements, although it's hard to know whether those claims are true. But there, it's certainly, there's a plausibility to it. The problem I have, and this is a

• 11:21Speaker 00

  You know, it's the same issue with the internet. The internet has democratized information beyond imagining and beyond what books could be. And of course, the problem is, is that half of what's on the internet is wrong. You just don't know which half. And the same would be true of books. And you concede this. And by the way, I don't want to make have listeners think this book is a it is a bit of a screed, although I don't think James Meredith is capable of a real screed. It's a meaning it's a you're making the case for something is what I would put it. But the problem, of course, is that there's a lot of bad books and there's a lot of books that are lies and they're books that encourage people to do awful things. So I can imagine that in the early days of literacy, when there was limited access

• 12:05Speaker 00

  to the publishing books, some of the best books got published, we would hope, and they were very provocative and influential. Eventually, it got so democratized, and I'm not criticizing democracy, I'm just being that there was a lot more available to a lot more people. It's pretty mixed bag. I mean, I think you'd have trouble defending the idea that the internet is leading to better political outcomes because people have more information. They do have more information, just not so reliable.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I agree. And I think, I mean, this book is a bit of a polemic. I guess my argument would not be that.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  That's a nice word. That's a better word.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, polemic is not.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  It's not a screed.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Well, Jeremiah is the thing that is also being called. I guess, I guess my argument there would be not at all saying that books are perfect and not at all saying that every book has, you know, benign influence. My argument would be that the way that books structure information and present us with a picture of the world is fundamentally more rational and more coherent and more intelligent than the picture information that you get if you are just talking to someone or if you're watching a video or a TikTok or, you know, God forbid, even listen to a podcast. And I mean, there are sort of various, I mean, there are various arguments that are made about this. When we write, we're forced to consider our ideas more carefully. You can go back and refine your ideas until you can until you've thought of the best version of what you want to say.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Writing allows you to externalize a part of your mind. So you put your idea on the paper, you see how it stands up, you go back and you refine it. Readers, when you're given a written text, you have the ideas of the author fixed in front of you so you can submit them to greater critical analysis. You can think about them more, you can reread them more. I think all this stuff is harder to do in in conversation or over video. Writers, writers can't bypass logical argument through things like charm or shouting at somebody you disagree with or crying to persuade someone that, you know, you're being so horrifically mistreated, you should believe me, even though my argument isn't logical. So the range of illogical appeals is much more restricted in a book than it is than it is in person or on a video.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  And I think these things don't make books perfect, but they mean that books tend to make more rational arguments about the world. I guess my other point would be, I think every, every argument has to stand up to its reductio ad Hitler. You know, there's someone will inevitably bring the.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  I was thinking about it, you know, I was thinking about my comp.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. I mean, my, my, my, my, my argument there would be that, you know, you could say there are two, two very famous arguments made for, made for Nazism, perhaps, in, in, you know, in very, in different forms of media. One is Mein Kampf, the book that Hitler wrote, the sort of semi-autobiographical, mad, illogical, rambling, deranged book that he wrote. And the other is the Lenny Riefenstahl film, The Triumph of the Will. Mein Kampf was found unreadable even by senior Nazis. You have letters from sort of senior Nazis saying, oh, my God, this book is awful. I can't be bothered to read it. And although millions of copies were sold of Mein Kampf, there's good evidence that very few Germans ever managed to get through that book to the end because Nazism, when you attempt to present it coherently in a written, in the form of a written text, makes

• 15:22Speaker 01

  no sense at all and nobody wants to hear about it. And it's just hard to fit that terrible idea into the logical argument that's required of a book, I would say. The other argument for Nazism, Lenny Riefenstahl's film, The Triumph of the Will, is, you know, we wouldn't, we wouldn't agree with it politically, but it's often regarded as an artistic masterpiece. And it's shown on university film courses. And that's a film that is thought to make a very powerful argument for, for fascism. And I guess the comparison there would be that a bad idea translates much better into a, into a film than it does into a book. A book requires you to fit the idea into a logical form. And if you can't explain it logically, it all begins to fall apart. In a film, you have music, you have dramatic imagery.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Logic and argument are much less important and therefore Nazism can be much more effectively expressed over a film than in a book. And I think that goes for all bad ideas. They can, you can, you can sort of launder a bad, a bad idea better through a screen than you can through a book, would be my case.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think that's true. And I think a lot of what I loved about your book is its attempt to put into words, which is not easy, but would only really be effective in a book, to put into words what reading does to your brain and your, your ideas and your view of yourself and your view of the world. And by the way, just for inside joke here, I refrain from making a reference to Succession, the, the TV series and Tom's interview of a journalist. But anybody wants to find out about that, Kent, let's move on.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  I want to talk about the point you just made, though, which is the limitations of the visual arts, which I happen to love and you love much of it as well, you confess as much, but it's limitations. And you say something I think quite deep here. Quote, "A philosophy of Kant is an achievement inseparable from literacy and understanding this kind of philosophy is probably an achievement inseparable from literacy. To properly get your head around a difficult concept about the ultimate nature of reality or the meaning of life, you have to be able to see the words in front of you. You can reread bits you don't understand, check logical connections and meditate on important passages until you really take them in."

• 17:45Speaker 00

  And I think, close quote, and I think the, you know, people will say to me, you know, I have a great idea, but I'm not, it's not worth writing a book because nobody reads anymore. Now, that's an interesting, practical question. But the reason you write the book isn't to get the idea out in the world because the idea is a sentence. You can describe many great books in a sentence or two, a paragraph at most, but you don't read the book to absorb the paragraph. You read the book to have an intellectual experience, hanging out with an intellectual figure, a thoughtful person. And through the process of grappling with that person's ideas, ideally, something happens

• 18:29Speaker 00

  other than that you're informed of something. And I think this distinction between information and knowledge or information and wisdom is strike surprisingly misunderstood and under and unappreciated.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  I remember, I remember you making this point brilliantly, I thought, the last time I spoke to you. I think you talked about, we were talking about the difference between memorizing a list of, a list of facts about a person and having read, I think we're using the example of Churchill, the example of having read a long biography of Winston Churchill, you know, 700 page book. And when you do that, I think you've gained much more than just a series of fact, a series of isolated facts about Churchill. You've gained a sort of holistic, inexpressible understanding of a person with all their contradictions. And it would be something you simply couldn't summarize and it would be something you'd probably be hard pressed to regurgitate into your own words, but you just have in your head, you know, I think reading a long book on a subject gives you this very rich picture

• 19:28Speaker 01

  of reality that is much more, as you say, is just much more than, is much more than a list of bullet points, is composed of emotions and connections that you yourself have made. And I think only books offer that rich intellectual experience.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  That wasn't my example, but I don't think, but we can check it, but I appreciate it. And I think it makes, it's an example, I think, that's useful. A distinction that's useful to think about between a biography and a hagiography. A hagiography means treating the subject of the biography as a saint, right? If you, if you, a hagiography of Churchill is probably a little bit misleading. He was a very flawed man. But a savaging of Churchill would also be uninformative. I recently heard about this reaction that John le Carré had when his, his biography of him came out and he had been promised that it would be an honest biography, it would be warts and all.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  He said, well, where was, there was no all. It was just the warts. That's an anti-hagiography. And that's also uninformative. But a serious biographer gives you, like you say, a feeling of having known the person in some way.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, my, my, my case would be that although not all books are perfect, the length and detail that a book requires, I think, tends to push an author towards a progressively more complex picture of a subject. I think, you know, we know that, I think the longer you're writing, the more boring polemic becomes. You know, I'm a newspaper columnist and I know that, you know, get, get much beyond 900 words and a one-sided argument becomes pretty tedious.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  You can listen to a podcast in which someone sort of presents their point of view. And I think it's probably another point for literacy, that if someone's presenting their point of view in person, it's quite, you know, it's quite compelling. You've got their emotions behind it, you know how much it means to them personally, you can hear their voice, you can watch them getting animated about something. In a, in a, in a, in a book, being ranted at for 400 pages quickly becomes boring. And I think, I think books, books almost create complexity of thought in, in their authors. I mean, that is far from the only instance of a biographer who I think is set out to be nicer about their subject than they want it to be. I just think the more detail you go into, and the book just demands detail, the picture of reality just becomes more and more complex that the, you know, the more you write. And a 500 page biography saying that John le Carré was a wonderful person would just

• 21:50Speaker 01

  be, you know, would be unreadable, apart from perhaps by John le Carré.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, his complaint was, it was that he's a horrible person, but let's talk about the Republic of Letters, which I thought was a fascinating insight into the history of science and, and knowledge generally. This is the idea that in the 18th century in particular, and I guess some of the 19th as well, people wrote lots of letters to each other and they were very wise people, some of these folks, Benjamin Franklin, Leibniz, and many, many, many, many others. But they basically had a community, a social network. It's.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  An enormous part of what allowed science to advance at that time. Talk about that.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I find this fascinating. So the Republic of Letters is, I mean, it was a, is this, as you say, this community of writers, thinkers, philosophers and scientists that grew up in Europe in the 17th century and existed into the 18th century, who are writing to each other about their ideas, publishing journals, publishing magazine articles. It used to be, it used to, in that sort of old fashioned wig view of history, in which we view history as continually progressing towards greater progress and greater democracy and a better future. This used to be something that people talked about a lot. It went out of fashion a bit, and I think the Republic of Letters was all viewed as a bit romanticized and idealized, but it's been very interestingly revived as an idea recently by, Stephen Pincar talks about it very compellingly in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. The economist

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Joel Mokier probably has done more than anyone to revive the idea that this community of intellectuals writing to each other in Europe was immensely important in driving scientific innovation, economic growth, and ultimately the Industrial Revolution. I mean, Joel Mokier goes so far as to say, it's the single cultural fact that explains the Industrial Revolution is this community of idea sharing that grew up in Europe. That sounds extravagant, but I think we need to, you know, the understanding of the importance of literacy requires us to stick our heads around the world that existed before literacy. And if you have intelligent people alone in a village and they can't explain their ideas to anyone other than their immediate neighbors, scientific innovation is very hard to accumulate. The

• 24:06Speaker 01

  more literacy spreads, the more people are able to spread their ideas and the more people, and then they can spread, you know, ideas can spread further and further, more people are drawn into the conversation. And you get this really, you get this crescendo effect, more and more people are joining the conversation, more ideas are shared. Joining ideas together becomes easier. People have a pool of ideas to draw on and thought about science, thought about philosophy, thought about literature just becomes progressively more complex. As more and more people are pouring their ideas into this, into this central pool. I guess the other point to make is that, you know, we might think that superficially sounds a little bit like Twitter, everybody tweeting their ideas out in this sort of, in this kind of crazed, crazed chaos. The other point to make is that this was a literate community

• 24:51Speaker 01

  and their, their conduct and their exchange of information was, was structured in, in ways that we associate with the written word. So it wasn't just people shouting over each other and yelling at each other and whoever shouts loudest gets their idea heard, or whoever's got the funniest meme gets their idea heard. Literacy tends to make, literacy, as we were saying, forces a more logical and a more rational, evidence-based mode of, mode of expression. So you have this huge community of people who are communicating via writing, which tends to demand standards of evidence, standards of logical argument, written text, promote, promote analysis and readers. And I don't think it's an exaggeration

• 25:34Speaker 01

  to say this huge community of, of ideas pouring together through the medium of writing was, as Joel Mokier says, a major driver in, in scientific and technological innovation in, in Europe.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd say two things about it. One, it was a conversation among a whole group of people, but it was done in writing. So there was the thoughtfulness that you talked about earlier, which is not unimportant. It would be tempting to say that the other important thing about it is that it was private. You weren't waving it about the way social media is to gain attention or so on. But I think that would probably be wrong. I think in the 17th and 18th and 19th century, great men, and they're usually men, there weren't so many women in this republic, knew that their letters would, might stand the test

• 26:27Speaker 00

  of time and be read by others. So there was probably some posing and preening and taking down of people that was very modern in these correspondences. I think the difference is who was doing it. And this kind of goes against your point in a certain way. It was a very elite group who were in this community. It wasn't as democratized as social media. You know, when you're, when you're interacting with Adam Smith, David Hume and, and Newton, the standards are high. And so I think what the, I think what's missing from our current

• 27:07Speaker 00

  spread of information that was there is norms. I think the norms that these folks labored under were probably, you know, they were self-imposed, they were obedience to the unforceable in Lord Milton's phrase. And that kept this community in the direction of producing knowledge and not just rage or, you know, silliness.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think that's, I think that's definitely true. I mean, I think compared, compared to the social world that had existed before literacy, it was a Republic of Letters, it was called the Republic of Letters, not the Kingdom of Letters or the Dictation of Letters for a reason.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  Fair enough.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  One of, one of, one of, one of the points that people like Joel Mokier would make is that if you are a scientist and you walk into a room of scientists in a London scientific institution, or you walk into a court where scientific ideas are being discussed in the court, and you're a bit shabby, and you come from a slightly lower class, and you have a poor accent, and you have a brilliant idea about thermodynamics or hydraulics, you're very likely to be looked down upon and your ideas are very likely to be, the seriousness of which your ideas are accepted is very likely to be influenced by your personal appearance and your social background. When you write those ideas down in, in, in, in a letter or you print them in a journal, the test of your ideas is much more, are they good ideas than are they being pervaded by somebody who is wearing a fabulous jacket and a wonderful wig, as people like people to, as people wanted in the, in the 17th

• 28:32Speaker 01

  century. So there's definitely democratizing effect there. I guess, I guess, I mean, I, maybe I am a little bit of a, maybe I'm a little bit of an elitist. Now, I guess, to your point about the kind of, the norms and the standard of conversation demanded by that community, writing, unfortunately, expressing, expressing ideas coherently in language is actually, I think, quite a minority skill. I think a lot of people, we live in a world where everybody does it, and we find it easy to forget that not, not, not everybody is capable of it. And there is perhaps a little bit of an element of benign elitism, that if the, if the standard, standard of admission to this community is, can you express your ideas logically in writing? There's already a bar that probably restricts you to talented,

• 29:16Speaker 01

  thoughtful, intellectual people. And maybe the sort of, it's democratizing and a creator of elitism in a way that is perhaps quite a benign combination of those qualities. That might sound a bit snobbish, but I imagine that probably was, you know, you couldn't turn up into the Republic of Letters, you know, like a sort of a troll on Elon Musk's axe and just start screaming at everybody incoherently, because no one would take you seriously.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  They'd block you, yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you just couldn't communicate. You wouldn't be able to, those ideas wouldn't work in writing, or you wouldn't be able to write them. And therefore, therefore you just wouldn't participate in it. So I think there probably is a little bit of benign, literacy probably does, you know, there's an element of benign elitism to the restrictions of literacy.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  I want to talk about a purely aesthetic concern. And you, I think you talk about it implicitly. I don't remember if it's explicit. But, you know, when I think about, well, the great works of literature that, some of which I have read, and as you point out a number of times, the sentence structure in, say, Henry James is very off-putting. I personally think that's for the best, but that's just a difference. De Gustavus, non est disputandum. But, but certainly much of the great writing of the past is more complicated than, than what is expected now. Adam Smith's a good example. You can read Adam Smith with, with

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Prophet, either his, The Wealth of Nations or The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It's accessible, but it's a little challenging compared to a modern writing that you'd find on Substack, say. And what will the world be like if the greatest works of the past are not accessible to people, not because they're illiterate, but they don't have the patience, they don't have the practice, they don't have the sit, flash, the, the patience to actually work through them. And that just makes me sad. I don't think, I don't think the world's a poorer place in any practical way if, say, Shakespeare is inaccessible to modern readers, which it in many ways is, of course, for all kinds of reasons. But it just, there's

• 31:25Speaker 00

  something, there's something terribly lost, some, a real tragedy there for me aesthetically, that great works are not accessible. You know, to the flip side, many of the movies that I, that my parents loved and they wanted me to love, I couldn't stand because they were so slow from their time. And similarly, I discovered that my children could barely sit through High Noon, which I consider one of the greatest movies of all time. And I suspect I'd have trouble sitting through it these days. So many, many things are lost for all kinds of reasons as culture and, and as modernity, as the world moves on. But does this aspect of, of our current world sadden you?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does immensely. And, you know, if we, I agree, if we all stop reading Shakespeare, that's not the thing that will make our politics fall apart or make scientific innovation come to an end. But I think we're, we're alive in this fascinating, rich, diverse and interesting world. And I think if you're, if you're a thoughtful, intelligent human being, the thing that you want to do with your time on earth, one of them is probably to understand it as well as you can, understand as much of what's going on here as you can, get your head around as much of the diversity as the human experience you can, inhabit as many different points of view as you can. I mean, this, to, to, to me, would seem almost one of the great purposes of life, to, to understand this world. We've been dropped from this bizarre planet out of nowhere. We want to see as much, as much of it as possible, want to

• 32:49Speaker 01

  understand as much of it as possible. It's true that some very important things can be expressed simply, you know, in slogans, and I could tell you something important in a, you know, 16 second TikTok video. But there is a whole range of human experience and a whole range of information about the world and understanding about the world that can only be accessed in books, that can only be accessed through the increased complexity of books.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  The richness of the world is only available in books. I mean, if you're Walter Augen, you go so far as to say there are kinds of human knowledge that have basically been created by literacy. Things like history and philosophy, as we know them today, only exist in books. If you want the entire rich history of Prussia, say, your only option is to read a book. If you want all the detail, if you want all the stories, if you want all the philosophical thoughts, all woven through about what this state of Prussia means, to pick a slightly random example, all you can do is read a book. That is a kind of information and knowledge about the world that you can't access in any other way. You couldn't, you know, there's no podcast that can explain 600 pages worth of the history of Prussia to you.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  And it just seems terribly sad to me because the book, in inventing writing, in inventing literacy, in inventing the book, we have expanded what we can understand about the world. If you're literate and if you're reading long books, there is a whole sphere of understanding about the world that is richer, more subtle, more detailed. And if you don't read it, you're just losing that. And that seems to me to be, you know, to be a terrible shame. And I'm not saying that literacy is the only way that we can understand the world. You can go traveling or, you know, you have relationships and you have friends and you see the world through those things. But we have this amazing other sphere of experience which happens in books and it would seem terribly sad to lose that. And our experience of the world, I think, really would just be impoverished without it.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Well, I think you could learn a lot about Prussia from a really good podcast series. It might take 20 or 30 episodes, but of course, that podcast couldn't be created without reading a bunch of books about Prussia. So it would be an illusion. I think the deeper point which you make, which I think is quite profound and moving, is the following. You say, quote, "I believe there was a kind of truth about life which is only accessible through prose fiction. With its capacity to show us the inside of other minds, this recreation of human consciousness through words is one of our species' most remarkable inventions. The strange empathetic hallucination induced by the novel, the feeling we have that we

• 35:19Speaker 00

  might know what it is to be Elizabeth Bennet or David Copperfield, is perhaps the closest we can ever come, the experience of being a person other than ourselves." End of quote. I mean, that's a really beautiful idea I've never thought about. I mean, it's obvious you can learn something from fiction. It's not, even though it's not true, there's truth in it. But I think the deeper point is that this idea that you can, through the wisdom of an author, access what it means to be a human being, that is not a small thing.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I quite agree. And I think other art forms can show us bits of this. A film can show you something about life. But I think there was something special about the way that when you read a novel, one of the things people say about reading is that it's an active and not a passive process. You are at work when you read a novel. Your imagination is at work. You are creating images in your mind based on the words of the page. And this is why reading is so immersive. And we all have the feeling of reading books and feeling like we've lived another life and seen the world through different eyes. And I think you only get that through fiction. Films can't give it to you because you see the exterior world. You're not, a film can't give you direct access to the mind of somebody else.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  But writing is the medium we use to set out what's in our minds. It's the medium that we communicate with mind to mind. And through extended, concentrated reading of a novel, you do see the world through other eyes. And I think that is something special and unique to novels. And it doesn't exist in, for instance, oral poetry. Oral poetry is much less interested in the subtleties of human consciousness and the fine differences of human experience. It's a way of, yeah, this way of inhabiting other minds, I think, only comes to us, only comes to us in prose fiction. And that, to me, is just an extraordinary thing. And again, something else that we would not want to lose.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  I don't completely agree with that. I think, I think a great film, through dialogue, not through action, but through dialogue, can give us insight in the same, similar way to a book. It's just that it's shorter. And when people complain that, oh, the movie wasn't as good as the book, there are many things about the movie that are often much better than the book. But what always, almost always fails is the inner workings of the mind that is not merely communicated by dialogue. You can't have a character say, gee, I'm deceiving myself. But you can let the reader, the viewer, start to suspect as much. So I just think it's just limited in its expanse.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  And I guess, to be fair to the visual medium, a really great, truly great series on television that stretches, and there aren't very many, but there are some, that stretches for over a number of seasons. And so for hours and hours, I think approximates the understanding of the human condition the way a great work of fiction does. I'm thinking of series like Schtesel or The Americans, Crash Landing on You While We're On It. These are lengthy looks into human beings. Now, you don't get the speculation that the author has can provide, but I think a great

• 38:47Speaker 00

  dialogue writer can get close.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  I do take your point, and there are plenty of, I agree, there are plenty of long TV series I like. I guess for me, I still think, you know, this is not, you know, there's no shade on film or TV, you know, there are many masterpieces in those mediums. It's just an argument for, there really is something special about novels. Even a great film or TV show is constantly confronting you with the difference between you, the watcher, and the person on screen. You're continually confronted with difference because you can see it. And the experience that I have reading sometimes is that where I end and the book begins is almost impossible to say. You feel like you're incorporating this experience into yourself. And it's not only that, you know, a book can tell you about thoughts and an inner monologue

• 39:34Speaker 01

  in a way that often, almost always looks extremely clunky on film, it's that the active process of reading means that we incorporate a book, I think, into our lives and into our minds in a way that we just can't in a film. And I don't know about you, but I just feel like, there are many films I love, no film feels to me quite the, quite part of my life in a way that, say, reading Anna Karenina has. You know, that, almost my experience of life and my experience of reading Anna Karenina, there's a kind of blurring at the edges that I never have quite found watching a film. Or do you think I'm just being overly romantic?

• 40:07Speaker 00

  Well, I wouldn't have picked Anna Karenina, but that's just me. I think, I think it's a fair point in the, this is the way I would say it, and tell me if you agree. When I watch, I just happened to re-watch Bridge of Spies, which I think is a masterpiece and underappreciated, really superb, superb film. And I'll watch, you know, you see Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance having a conversation of a lot in the background that we're aware of because we know a lot about them already. But I'm watching a conversation and it's true, I can have the suspension disbelief and it feels real. This happens to be an historical incident, but we don't have these actual dialogues

• 40:51Speaker 00

  between these two people. One was an accused spy and one was a lawyer, American lawyer. But there's something different about reading a dialogue. I just finished The Rudetsky March last night, which is a pretty obscure novel. It's by Joseph Roth. And there's many, many extraordinary scenes in that book. Not much happens. I don't think it would make a very good movie. There's very little action. Most of the effect of that book is to make you feel like you're living in 1914 Austro-Hungarian, the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1914, before the First World War. That's quite an achievement.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  And in that sense, it does become part of your life because you, it's not like, oh, I'm listening to these people talk. I feel like I'm in the room with a great author. And that's, I don't feel like I'm in the room with a great movie. I'm watching through a one-way glass. It might feel vivid and real to me, but not the way a book does because of that process, I think, of having to use your imagination.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I entirely agree. And I think it's a good example because I think if you were to film The Rudetsky March, I mean, as you said, it'd be pretty slow. But watching, you'd be continually confronted with the alienness of the world.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  The costumes people were wearing, the way they walked, the houses they were living in, would be continually confronted with the alienness of that human experience. The, you know, the visual world confronts us with difference. I can see that I'm a different person to you. When you, when you read a, when you read a book, the extraneous stuff and the stuff that separates us as human beings, I mean, this is one of the points that's made about the importance of literacy as a force for human rights, is that when we look at each other face to face, we see our difference. When we experience someone else's thoughts and feelings through a book, the thing that strikes is our similarity. So, you know, an example that's often made is slave memoirs in the, were quite commonly, it was quite common for abolitionists to ask freed slaves to write their memoirs for

• 42:55Speaker 01

  publication in the late 18th, 19th centuries. And the idea was that in a memoir, if you're a white reader and you're, you know, very racist and prejudiced, as most people were at that time, to speak face to face to a slave would just confront you with the human difference. And you might find it hard to get over that, that this person had different gut color skin to you. To experience someone's thoughts and feelings through a book, the thing that's before is the similarity, not the difference. And I think that allows us to access other minds. And I think it's the exact, and that's why these memoirs are an important force for the abolitionist movement, because they allowed people to see the human similarity between themselves and people who are different to them. And it's why reading The Rudetsky March is a more powerful experience to both of us than to watching the film, because a book shows us human similarity and allows us

• 43:40Speaker 01

  into a world through that similarity in a way that the visual world is just always confronting us with difference, I think.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Somebody give another example from that book, from the Rudetsky March, because, you know, I don't know if this is true, but there's a lot of birds in that book. The characters are listening to birds a lot in the, at dawn, at dusk, at night. And if you had, you have, it'll be a scene where a character's walking along a dusty road. And that kind of page, and it could go on for a page or more, instead of saying so and so walked from here to there, which is a, which is, you can do, and sometimes that's what you do. But to give you all the things that are happening in the world around the characters, they're walking, the birds, and the sky, and the rain, and the mud, and the dust, gives you

• 44:31Speaker 00

  a chance as a reader to immerse yourself in that. And we talked about this when we talked about Tolstoy's Master and Man. You get cold reading that story. It's, you have to inhabit the characters. And of course, there are modern films that do that. You know, there'll be a minute long, two minutes, it's eternal in a film where nothing happens, and a character's walking along and you hear the different birds. And in the case of the book, you can mention what's on the character's mind, you know, what happened before, you know, what they're thinking about, you're forced to think about what they're thinking about. And that's that process you're talking about of getting into the other person's head. Very hard to do that in a movie. Maybe it's just our different expectations.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  I tend not to like movies that, where nothing happens, and I can tolerate a book where nothing happens. And I think it's partly due to the difference between the media.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's, I think that's actually, I think that's a brilliant point, and put very well, that in a way, there's almost something slightly less truthful about the way that a film depicts the world for us. Because our entire experience of the world is not, we don't experience the world over there on a screen happening to other people. Our entire experience of the world is colored by our internal states and our internal emotions, our internal feelings. And, you know, my experience, my experience of the world at the moment is a sort of vibrating haze of anxiety as I, as I wait for my book to come out. And everything that happens to me is colored by this, by this nervousness. And this is a way of depicting the world that comes very, you know, that comes very easily to an author who can depict our attention.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  And, you know, if you're describing my state of mind as an author now, I could imagine how you'd describe the world colored by this sort of slightly, everything is slightly shimmering at the edges with this sort of nervousness. It's very hard to show us that in a film in the same way, because a film director can't direct our attention. How do you color birdsong with anxiety, or emotion, or rage when you're filming it? You're in this sort of, in a way, a position that's in some ways more objective, but in some ways less truthful. As you say, if you, you know, if you have a character in the Rudetsky March, walking down a road in the film, and they hear birdsong, you can't explain the meaning, the internal meaning of that birdsong to a film audience. I mean, and you're so right, and that's even, that's only just a fraction of the richness of, and truthfulness of a novel's depiction of the world, I think.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. Maybe we'll do a book club on the Rudetsky March. I'm not sure it'll be very popular, but it's, it's quite an unusual novel. The writing is quite extraordinary. So I encourage people to take a look at it. It starts very slowly. It doesn't get much faster, by the way. Because, I'll just say one other thing about it, then we'll move on. It's trying to capture something that's even harder to capture on screen than what we've been talking about so far, which is the slow, steady sense that the world is unmoored,

• 47:28Speaker 00

  that all the things that you believed in and thought were true are fading away. And in this case, it has to do with the norms and authority of the emperor and the Austro-Garian Empire. And you can't show that in a film directly, or even indirectly, as Roth does in this book. It's, the last thing I'll say is that, in a way, the main character is the Austro-Garian Empire, not Carl Joseph Trotta, I think that's his name. Anyway, I want to go to a different insight of yours that I really thought was interesting. I'm sure you and I are alarmed at the state of discourse on, on social media in many ways.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  And you say the following, "It's not that Tucker Carlson is the next Homer, God forbid, but sometimes it seems that post-literate commentators like him behave less like print era public intellectuals explaining and analyzing the world, and more like oral storytellers weaving extraordinary memorable stories for their enraptured audiences." Close quote. And I think that's an incredibly deep insight, because we don't have to go into the names. I just mentioned Tucker Carlson because you happen to have used that as an example. But there's so many people on the internet who say so many things that are inane, indefensible,

• 48:51Speaker 00

  not true, absurd, and you, and there's a tendency to treat them as if they were authors, and say, "Well, that doesn't make any sense, or that's not logical, or what's the evidence for that?" And your point, which I think is frighteningly appropriate, is that I don't think they see them. You're saying you don't, they don't see themselves in that role. Their role is to entertain their audience. Truth is not what's so important. What's important is memorable stories for enraptured audiences. And I think that's a really brilliant way of describing what's wrong with our current level of discourse on, on social media.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  And, you know, people say these ridiculous things, and of course, people on the other side raise, rear up, and, "Oh, it's not true, and what is the evidence for that?" And, and they don't say, "Oh, my gosh, I guess I made a lot of that up. I shouldn't have said that." They never say that, because that's not the business they're in. They don't care.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's, we're so easily at risk of forgetting that things like presenting an argument logically, supplying evidence for it, and working it out to its rational conclusions, these things, I think, are not actually natural to human communication. A lot of the points that are made about communication in, in pre-literate societies by Marshall, people like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, is that things that we value in the exchange of information are created, are created by literacy. So, you know, in this, in this, in this, in this pre-literate, in this pre-literate world, if you're trying to, if you're trying to talk to somebody and persuade somebody of

• 50:37Speaker 01

  something, it makes much more sense to entertain them, to move them, to charm them, to get really angry, and to bring someone along with your, with your rage. These things all make complete sense in person-to-person communication. And if I were to just dryly talk to you like a book, you would find that a weird and inhuman way for me to, an inhuman way for me to speak to you. Books impose these impersonal, and, you know, not completely rational, but I think more rational, forms of communication. And I just think we completely miss how our entire public discourse and the things that we value in it are the product of literacy. They're not at all inevitable to human communication. And, you know, one of the fascinating things about these books, this great Walter Ong

• 51:20Speaker 01

  book, A Relate to Literacy, is the similarities that he, that jump out at you as a, as a modern reader between oral discourse and, and, and internet discourse. So, for instance, Walter Ong would say that some of the characteristics of discourse in society without writing are, it's more emotional. You live in a much more emotionally heightened world, because everything is face-to-face. You, you have people's voices, you have their personalities. It's this emotionally heightened world in which logic takes a backseat. And to come from an oral culture to a, to a literate culture is, in some ways, Marshall McLuhan says, this kind of uncanny experience. If you come from the, the warmth and emotional dynamism, and the anger, and the squabbling,

• 52:05Speaker 01

  and the, and the face-to-face nature of communication in a, in a traditional village, the world of literacy in which we're not communicating face-to-face, or, you know, we weren't before TV and the internet, and every piece of information arrived to you in the form of a, you know, a completely impersonal, humans reduced to just pages of text, that can in some ways seem quite a chilly and impersonal environment. And it's unnatural, it's unnatural to communicate through text, but the chilly impersonality of text, I think, to me, this is perhaps the crucial point about what print does for our public discourse, is that it just cools it. It's very fun to hear someone becoming angry in person. It's very, you know, we love watching, you know, we love watching arguments, and we love watching debates, and we love watching rhetorical showmanship, and people flinging insults at one another.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  That's really boring to read, that's really boring to read in a book eventually. You know, as I say with an opinion column, 900 words of, what 900 words of invective might be interesting. If I just ranted at you for the length of a book, it would be really, it would be really tedious, and therefore, we tend not to do it. And, yeah, as I say, we just mustn't forget how much of what we value in our public discourse and have valued is almost unnatural to human communication. And what we value is this strange impersonal thing that writing gave us and that we're now losing.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  So I want to digress for a second, or what seems like a digression's not, but...

• 53:24Speaker 00

  There's an extraordinary podcast called The History of Rock and Roll and 500 Songs. It's produced by Andrew Hickey. If you don't know it or haven't heard it, and you care about music from popular music, anytime from the 50s on, you will find it extraordinary. And he says something in there that blew me away, that you also say, which is, there's a four-part series that goes for seven or eight hours, I think, on Sympathy for the Devil, the Rolling Stones song. And he says, well, Mick Jagger was reading this book called The Master Margarita by Bulgakov. And if you've read The Master Margarita, it opens with two Russian intellectuals poo-pooing the existence of God and making fun of belief

• 54:09Speaker 00

  and faith. And suddenly, this suave gentleman shows up, and we come to realize, they think he's crazy at first, but we come to realize it's Satan. It's the devil. And he knows some things they don't know, and they have a comeuppance. It's a brilliant opening of the book. But that's the opening of Sympathy for the Devil, where Jagger sings, "Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste." And he took that right out of The Master Margarita, which is a pretty obscure novel. And you argue that Paul McCartney and many other great songwriters were great readers. They were influenced by, and Andrew

• 54:53Speaker 00

  Hickey in his podcast has many, many examples, and some of the great lyrics of a very different medium, popular music, were influenced by reading books. And if we lose that, it's going to, our songs will be less interesting.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  That's an annoyingly good example that I wish I'd managed to put in my book. Maybe this later edition, we can include it. Yeah, I mean, I guess this is another point that I make of what literacy gives us as a culture, which is, I think, all the things that we've spoken about, the richness of books, the detail of books, the complexity of books, I think informs a whole society. And it's not always immediately apparent that it's doing that, but it's often there, providing, I think, a level of richness and nuance to all other kinds of cultural media that we might not think of. I mean, I gave the example of pop music specifically, because it's so unlikely. And I mean, it can be taken too far. As I say in the book, I'm not suggesting that if you want to be in a boy band, take

• 55:53Speaker 01

  your pile of Penguin classics down to the British Library and get reading. But I think it is very striking that so many great popular musicians and so many great popular songs are informed by books and informed by reading. Bob Dylan, the obvious example of a great reader. Paul McCartney, the obvious example of a great reader. And I just think any art that is rooted in the richness and complexity of reading will tend to give you a richer, deeper, more complex understanding of the world. And I use the example of pop music, as I say, because no one really thinks of pop music as a particularly literate genre. And those musicians are probably also singing for a more literate population that was more

• 56:34Speaker 01

  accustomed to thinking, more accustomed to enduring complex thoughts and complex ideas and complex feelings. And this is amazing research. I'm not going to be able to remember the figure off the top of my head that finds that in the last 20 years, pop songs have become less lyrically complex and less melodically complex. And that's not entirely just because everybody has stopped reading books. It's also because the environment that we are entering is one that favors simplicity, immediacy, isn't very good at following a long and unfailing idea. Nowadays, if you want a pop song to go viral on TikTok, it has to grab you within three or four seconds. And that's how a lot of music spreads nowadays. And I think with

• 57:18Speaker 01

  the death of literacy and the move into this more visual smartphone-based culture, we're moving from a culture that was much more able to handle nuance and complexity, because it was rooted in literacy, to one that is increasingly hostile to those things. And as you said, that point about the human experience of the world, if you're listening, there's a kind of, a long Bob Dylan song can paint you a picture of reality and its complexity and the complexity of human beings, that is very hard to do if you have a two-minute-long, much less complex, much less rich song. There's room for both, but I just fear that we're losing more complex cultural forms.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Early one Sunday morning, I was laying in bed, wondering if she changed all of her hair, it was still red, to pick one of the one.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then on TikTok, you swipe past, you're like, what the hell are you going on about? Next thing, I had to tune. Harmonica solos. I don't think they would last on TikTok.

• 58:17Speaker 00

  So one of the other parts of the book we didn't talk about, which I very much appreciated, was the realization that this is not such a new phenomenon, that we're focused on the smartphone, but television really was the beginning of the screen, the visual attractiveness of time sync for us, and that the remote control was the original scrolling. And I think that's very true. Anybody who's been in a hotel room late at night, as I have in the old days, when you didn't have a cellphone and there were 200 channels on the TV, you just found yourself, sometimes, I was going to say often, mindlessly scrolling across

• 58:57Speaker 00

  channels. I remember when I would complain about television, and I have a scene in one of my books where I really go off against TV, which is funny now, because it's so unimportant relative to the cellphone. I remember telling my dad, I was worried about the attractiveness of television. He said, well, let's see how it holds up. Books have been around for centuries, and TV is 20 years old as a mass medium, maybe. But I think he should have been more worried. And I think there's an inevitability about this trend.

• 59:35Speaker 00

  You're Sisyphus here. You're doing something that is unlikely to succeed. We're seeing a much longer trend that it's going to be, reading is either going to be something, the people who can read, say, Henry James or Middle Marge by George Eliot, or who choose to, forget whether they can or they can't, people who choose to, is going to be probably a pretty small number. I don't know what that means for the future of the world. There is something incredibly sad about it to me. But I think that's a reality that's going to be unlikely to change. You can make all the arguments you want, oh, this is going

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  to be bad for democracy, or reading's really fun, you should try it. It's a tough sell in our world. And I worry that that sell is just going to get even more and more difficult. So I hate to be pessimistic, and I hate to end on such a pessimistic note. So you got anything positive for me?

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  No, well, you've just, I am by profession something of a pessimist, and unfortunately by inclination and temperament. I think the point about TV is important, because it reminds us that this is a long, it's not just, I'm sure it is perhaps slightly this, but I hope it's more than just newspaper columnist comes along and yells about this very recent thing that's appeared in the world that's unsettling everybody. And actually, we'll look back and think, oh, that was just a flash in the pan. TikTok existed for 15 years and never moved on to something else. We're living perhaps towards the end of a very long revolution in our culture, that, as you say, begins with television, begins in the 50s and 60s. The first statistics for serious declines in reading come from

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  the 50s and 60s. And we are moving into a world in which these things are much less important. And that's a very long story. And I think the length of the story should remind us of its seriousness. It's been happening for such a long time, that this is not just something that, oh, we can all switch TikTok, we'll all just switch TikTok off, oh, we'll just get a handle on smartphones, and then it'll be all right. This is a very long-term trend in our culture. And I think that perhaps should make us a bit less hopeful. This is not a recent thing. This is like a long direction that, very soon, it'll be 100 years old. I guess the argument I try and make at the end of my book, and your publisher always says, what about solutions? What's your solution to this problem? And you kind

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  of think, oh, my God, I'm a horrible pessimist. From the earth have I got to say this positive? The analogy that's often made, and I'm far from the first person to make that analogy, is between the rise of junk food and the culture of exercise in the 60s and 70s. So McDonald's comes along, the world is flooded with burgers and chicken nuggets and chips, and a lot of people get much fatter. A smaller proportion of the population decide that they want to, they've understood that being healthy and skinny is no longer something that you can just do by absorbing the ambient nutritional environment around you. It's going to require effort. And these people begin to concentrate on working hard at

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  their fitness. They start running marathons. They start going to the gym. They start lifting weights. And people realize that physical fitness will require a conscious effort. And I kind of wonder, and I think probably this is already happening, is that in our current sort of informational environment, people will begin to decide that cognitive fitness will require a conscious effort, and that if we want to be cognitively fit, we can't just sit around absorbing the kind of informational junk food that's flying in at us from every angle. We'll have to sit down and really concentrate on reading difficult books, exercising our brains. And I think if there is a future for reading,

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  it will be something that feels a lot more, to use a kind of horrible phrase, intentional, and a lot less just like, I'm sitting at home or in the airport, I'm bored, what will I do? I will read a book, because that's the most obvious entertainment available to me. I think it'd be much more, I need, I want to read a book, because I think this is a sort of experience that I value, and that the world is not giving to me naturally. Therefore, I'm going to make sure that every evening, I sit down for half an hour and an hour to really try, to really make sure that I read. I mean, in some ways, that's the kind of future, I think that probably is the future of reading. In some ways, it's good that I think probably that it does have some kind of future. I guess it does still make me sad that it has to be, I think it's slightly more artificial, and it will be less part of our inevitable lives in the way that it once was.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  My guest today has been James Marriott. His book is The New Dark Ages. James, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Thanks very much for having me.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.