Not Post-Literate Yet

The written word is having a rough time in American public life. Consider the social media posts sent in the wee hours by the current resident of the White House: the outrageous capitals, wayward commas, and misspellings—“smocking gun,” “witch” for “which,” “Straight of Hormuz.” Donald Trump’s garbled missives, treated as policy announcements by a cowed press, often arrive with AI-generated images and videos: Trump as Superman, as the messiah bathed in the light of the lord healing the sick, or beating the prime minister of Canada at hockey. Deflecting any criticism of the president’s online adventures, his staffers invariably insist that Americans appreciate his “authenticity.”  

We have come a long way from Barack Obama’s summer reading lists, or from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 22,000-volume personal collection, available at his presidential library. What will Donald Trump’s library contain: Kennedy Center demolition doodles, Natalie Harp’s printouts, a signed copy of the ghostwritten Trump: The Art of the Deal? 

The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society
By James Marriott Doubleday, 208 pp.

We are becoming “post-literate,” warns Times of London columnist James Marriott, in his first book, The New Dark Ages. That Marriott, a former rare-book dealer, makes his case in so literate a format is one of the ironies of the present moment. By “post-literacy,” Marriott means a condition in which reading and writing have lost their importance, and human beings have lost the ability—or will—to use words consciously and responsibly.  

The son of an English teacher, Marriott has written both a history of our improbable arrival at this point and an elegy for what has been lost. A lover of books—he briefly conjures for us his cluttered London study—he recoils from a world in which readers disappear and politicians such as America’s first TikTok president Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele, the swaggering ruler of El Salvador, are allowed to thrive. Marriott has combed through Bukele’s TikTok feed: autocracy adapted to the smartphone. Guns, flags, men in handcuffs. “TikTok usage,” Marriott writes, “seems to correlate with an increased vote share for populist parties and the far right.” 

Trump is, according to Marriott, the American Louis XIV, our very own Sun King. The Queens-born developer’s crudeness might have puzzled Louis, but Marriott imagines that the king would have welcomed Trump’s eagerness to convert private obsession into public spectacle: the enormous ballroom, recalling Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors, or the proposed Arc de Trump, taller, inevitably, than its French progenitor.  

Humans, for sure, weren’t made to be readers; our brains, alert primarily to visual stimuli, evolved for life on the savannah. But savannahs aren’t ballrooms—and books, Marriott would argue, have since become indispensable for our survival, too. They certainly took a long time to reach our shelves. A medieval scribe spent months copying a manuscript; monastic libraries held only a few hundred volumes. Thomas à Kempis urged readers to handle each book as if it were “the Child Jesus,” which causes Marriott to look ruefully at the dog-eared, coffee-stained paperbacks around him. 

The printing press inaugurated the golden age of literacy. Its apotheosis was the bibliomaniac Dr. Johnson, author and compiler of A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Constantly dipping in and out of books, he was less interested in finishing them than in connecting them all—a vast web of correspondences and cross-references. Print also made room for a great deal of drivel, and it vastly widened the circle of readers and writers alike, a threat to the establishment. Just think of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s appalled complaint—not cited by Marriott—about the “damned mob of scribbling women” who were having more success in the literary marketplace than he did. 

Mass literacy, for Marriott, was among the great cultural achievements of the last few centuries. It produced the Victorian triple-decker novel and Agatha Christie’s whodunits, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and the radical newspapers of the 19th century. Yet this was a fragile triumph at best. Television drew readers from print; Steve Jobs’s iPhone placed a portable paradise of distractions in their pockets. “It is almost impossible to sustain nuance and complexity in a world of shattered attention,” sighs Marriott. In 2025, 40 percent of Americans reported reading no books at all. Literacy levels have declined as well. Surveys routinely put the average American adult at a reading level between the seventh and eighth grades—enough to understand the label on a medicine bottle, perhaps, but not enough for many titles on Obama’s summer reading list.  

To lose reading is also to lose writing. I was disturbed to discover in one of my recent classes that only one of 15 students had ever written a letter. Teaching an eighteenth-century epistolary novel such as Goethe’s once-popular The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) would be a losing battle. How to explain Werther’s passion for Charlotte to a student accustomed to “matching” on Hinge? Even stranger would be the novel’s form, as a series of letters. Today, in the age of Snapchat, the skill required for letter-writing is gone. In its place comes the cultivated informality of podcasts and YouTube videos, designed for distracted listening. One of Marriott’s funniest passages is his account of a segment from a Tucker Carlson show about Winston Churchill: “He strikes me as a psychopath,” Tucker blathers about the British statesman, “but he’s also a sort of … I mean, he was a drunk.”  

To keep AI at bay, many of my colleagues have returned to in-class assignments and blue books. But now a new obstacle has appeared: their students’ handwriting is often nearly illegible. (Marriott admits that his own has suffered.) During one such exercise, I watched my students grip their pens like broomsticks. Trump’s favored instrument, not coincidentally, is the Sharpie, ill-suited to anything longer than a Post-it note. 

Administrators at my university, hoping to overcome faculty resistance, have created a free online course assuring students that artificial intelligence is A-OK. Those who make it beyond the first unit learn how to use AI to do their homework for them. I tried it out, asking ChatGPT for an essay about the dangers of AI, written in the voice of a nineteen-year-old student. The result was entirely convincing, down to the sophomoric “literally,” the “way too” and “kind of,” and the wobbly syntax: “AI is getting way too smart, and honestly, it’s kind of terrifying. Walking around campus, literally everyone is using it.”  

I realize I am now slipping into Marriott’s own genre, the jeremiad. The New Dark Ages is among its most intelligent recent specimens, but it gives us clarity only about the problem we are facing. “Effective democracy requires an informed and reasonably critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length,” Marriott declares. People who read books, then, are necessary to democracy and, Marriott has just told us, are a dying breed. Marriott quips that the most voracious readers left today are the AI bots ingesting books to perfect their large language models.  

As if to cheer himself up, Marriott notes a growing awareness of social media’s dangers. Parents are taking smartphones from their children; a 2024 study found that some teenagers wished TikTok or Snapchat had never been invented. Yet Marriott overlooks other encouraging signs: the return of brick-and-mortar bookstores to American towns and the popularity of literary festivals, such as Bloomsday, the worldwide celebration of June 16, 1904, when Leopold Bloom made his way through Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In Genoa, for example, where literature professor Massimo Bacigalupo inaugurated Bloomsday twenty years ago, a hundred volunteers this year recited the novel’s eighteen episodes throughout the city’s old quarter, Joyce’s sentences ringing through alleys, bars, and churches. 

It is high time we embraced enthusiasm for reading wherever we find it. Marriott hesitates to defend reading because it is fun. But pleasure is not the same as mindless entertainment: A book may provide the imaginative premise of political action. Likewise, evidence of decline is not proof of imminent extinction. In fact, some of the media that seem destined to destroy reading may in fact be helping to revive it. Marriott does not mention Jack Edwards, whom his own newspaper has called “the internet’s resident librarian.” Edwards has millions of followers on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram and rarely appears without a book; in his “best books of the year” roundups, he sits beside a pile. Nor are his lists fluff: his 2025 roundup included reprints of William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and John Williams’s Stoner. If even a fraction of its 295,000 viewers bought one of these titles, one might forgive the occasional cliché—“jaw-dropping,” “knocked the air out of my lungs.” 

Discouraging surveys and a semi-illiterate president notwithstanding, reports of the book’s death remain exaggerated. No other product of human invention joins technology, craft, and imagination to let us hold another person’s world in our hands, lose ourselves in it, and return with our own ideas altered. “It must give pleasure,” Wallace Stevens said of poetry. Poetry may not change the things around us, but if it is good, it will allow us to “be shaken by them as if they were.”  

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