The Harvard Student Who Needed ChatGPT to Read a Novel · Issue #169

Opening

Reader, let’s imagine a scene. A student at one of America’s most brilliant universities got stuck on a novel. It was Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), and the student reportedly mistook its prose for “Old English.” So they fed the whole thing into ChatGPT to “translate” it into simpler language before actually reading it. A Harvard student.

When I first came across this story, I figured it was just one person’s literacy problem. But the deeper I dug into the data, the clearer it became: this isn’t about individual skill — it’s a signal that the very act of “reading” is fracturing across society. Let me give you the conclusion up front. Reading isn’t disappearing. It’s polarizing into a minority who read and a majority who don’t. Today, let’s take that fracture apart, piece by piece.

📊 What’s Happening

Let’s start with the numbers. According to a survey by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), fewer than half of American adults read even a single book in 2022. Only 38% read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 records of how Americans spend their time found that the share of people reading for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. For context, 57% of Americans placed some kind of bet last year. Gambling has effectively become a more common pastime than reading a book.

The books people do read are getting simpler, too. Sentences in New York Times bestsellers are roughly a third shorter than they were 100 years ago. In 1958, the best-selling novel in America was Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago — a book that probes the human interior through long, intricate sentences. Last year’s top seller, by contrast, was a new installment in the young-adult series The Hunger Games. Line up sentences from the two side by side, and you can see exactly what’s missing between them.

There’s an important distinction here. America hasn’t become an illiterate country. UCLA cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf argues that people aren’t losing the ability to decode individual words — they’re losing the higher-order capacity to hold onto a long text, understand it deeply, and synthesize it. She calls this “postliteracy.”¹ We’re reading more words than ever — through emails, texts, and posts — but the capacity to sit with a single long piece of writing is draining away.

And here’s one more key number for today. More than 80% of the books read last year were read by just 20% of adults. Hold onto that number — we’ll come back to it.

Why Is This Happening

Reading was never a natural ability to begin with. The human brain has no circuitry purpose-built for reading letters — it borrows regions originally used for speech and object recognition. Writing first appeared in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago, and mass literacy didn’t arrive until after Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440. In the sweep of human history, an era in which “everyone reads” turns out to be a much shorter exception than we assume.

But that short era rewired human thought altogether. Media theorist Walter Ong argued in his 1982 book that writing created the conditions for logical, linear thought. Neuropsychologist Alexander Luria’s experiment is famous: in 1930s Uzbekistan, he asked illiterate farmers, “All bears in the Arctic are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Arctic. What color are the bears there?” Literate farmers solved the syllogism, but illiterate farmers refused to answer, saying, “I’ve never been there, so I don’t know.” Learning to read and write meant gaining more than word decoding — it meant gaining the capacity for abstract, logical thought.

The problem is that other media steadily stole away that reading time. Television came first; the internet and smartphones delivered the finishing blow. As early as 1962, McLuhan predicted the West was heading toward a “postliterate” era, and Neil Postman warned in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death that TV had turned the public square into entertainment. Things are worse now — there have even been reports that Netflix instructed writers to assume viewers aren’t really watching the screen, and to keep re-explaining the plot as it goes.

Schools, far from resisting this drift, actively fed it. A 2025 survey found that most American middle and high school English teachers assign only zero to four books a year. As exams shifted toward short passages, classroom instruction shifted too — from whole books to excerpt drills. Classrooms are now saturated with digital devices. Meanwhile, short-form video has come to dominate everything. According to psychologist Jean Twenge’s analysis, the average eighth grader (roughly age 13–14) spends four and a half hours a day on social media — much of it watching video at 2x speed.

The mark this has left on the brain is unmistakable. Average screen attention span has fallen from 2 minutes 30 seconds in 2004, to 75 seconds in 2012, to roughly 47 seconds recently. Pediatrician John Hutton scanned the brains of children aged 3 to 5 and found that watching animated video engaged the brain’s imagination-related regions at only half the level seen when children listened to audio narration over a still image. When the screen does the work for you, your brain does less of it. Research also shows that the “Flynn effect”² — the steady, generation-over-generation rise in IQ — has stalled or reversed in several countries over the past 20 years.

Now a new variable has been layered on top: AI. If earlier technologies got in the way of reading, generative AI is the first tool to threaten writing itself. Georgetown’s Cal Newport argues that writing is thinking. The process of turning thoughts into sentences exposes sloppy logic and generates new connections. But when AI does that labor for you, the ease comes at the cost of the learning. Undergraduates in Brazil who studied with AI scored significantly lower on exams than those who didn’t, and a UK study found frequent AI use negatively correlated with critical thinking ability.

History offers a clue here. The Library of Alexandria is popularly remembered as having burned down in some great fire, but modern historians point to a quieter cause: neglect. While damp and insects ate away at the papyrus, the will to keep copying and preserving it had already gone out. Classicist Roger Bagnall puts it chillingly: the very fact that the library was allowed to die is evidence that the dark age had already arrived. Today’s threat, too, wears the face not of a dramatic event, but of quiet indifference.

🔑 So What’s the Problem

First, our thinking is retreating. Ong called it “secondary orality”³ — the process by which literate societies revert to the habits of oral culture. Oral cultures lean on repetition, epithets, emotion, and conflict to aid memory. They grow numb to contradiction, and who is speaking matters more than what’s actually true.

This connects to politics, too. Media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz argued in 1985 that electronic media were shifting the criteria for choosing leaders from “résumé” to “dating profile.” Someone who looks good on screen gets an edge over someone who writes and argues well. Algorithms reward simple, stimulating, emotional content over complexity or nuance. The original article cites President Trump as an example of this dynamic. But I think it’s more accurate to read this as a problem of media structure than of any one figure. As the article itself concedes, politics built on short video and algorithms cuts across left and right alike.

Second, reading is becoming a marker of class. Recall the number I asked you to hold onto — 20% of adults reading 80% of all books. Carrying a book around now reads almost like a “declaration of identity.” It’s gotten to the point where the term “performative reading” has become an online taunt. Rutgers reading historian Leah Price says reading is turning into “a niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.”

Third, cultural power is shifting. Newspaper employment has dropped 75% over the past two decades, and humanities degrees have plummeted. In their place, the center of culture has moved to streamers, podcasters, and influencers. Joe Rogan’s audience dwarfs what most news organizations could ever dream of. In social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s phrase, knowledge once flowed vertically, from older generations down to younger ones — now it flows horizontally, from peer to peer. About 60% of Gen Z say they would become an influencer if they could.

To be fair, let me lay out the counter-argument, too. Every era has voiced similar anxieties about new media. Back in 1900, The Atlantic lamented that newspapers were crowding out books, and Thomas Jefferson believed novels corrupted people. Even today, print book sales are up from a decade ago, new bookstores are opening, and Substack and audiobooks are growing. After one Dallas school district banned phones in school, library checkouts rose nearly 25%. Still, one detail nags at me: even Harvard comparative-literature professor Martin Puchner — who has long argued that “doomsaying about reading is always wrong” — now concedes that this time, returning to text looks difficult.

Oswald’s Lens

Honestly, I think the headline “the end of reading” is only half right. Pull apart the data and what you find isn’t extinction — it’s polarization. A structure where 20% read 80% is a textbook Pareto distribution,⁴ and that gap is still widening.

There’s a pattern I’ve watched repeat, over and over, while building market-entry strategies. The moment a behavior shifts from “mandatory” to “optional,” the market splits into two, almost without exception: a small, high-intensity core, and a large, passive majority. It happened with exercise, it happened with cooking, and now reading is following the same path.

So the real question isn’t “will reading survive?” It’s “who stays in that reading 20%, and what power does that minority end up holding?” And here’s the twist. In the age of AI, the ability to read deeply and think for yourself becomes rarer (supply falls) even as it becomes more valuable (its worth rises). As Newport puts it, the scarcer deep thought becomes, the more it matters. No matter how fluent the prose AI produces, the work of judging what’s true and thinking for yourself ultimately stays with people. That’s the last premium the reading 20% gets to hold.

One thing I’ll add honestly: I’m wary of treating any of this as “the end of civilization.” A hundred years ago, people said newspapers were killing books, too. Still, the fact that even the skeptics have started saying this time is different isn’t something I can easily wave away.

Closing

Let me sum up today in three lines. First, reading isn’t disappearing — it’s splitting into a 20% who read and an 80% who don’t. Second, that fracture is quietly redrawing the landscape of our thinking, our politics, and our economy. Third, the more AI advances, the rarer and more valuable the ability to read deeply becomes.

The Library of Alexandria didn’t vanish in a fire — it vanished because no one protected it. The threat we face today may not be some grand event either, but quiet indifference. Fortunately, unlike that library, our books aren’t disappearing. Whether we read them, though, is entirely up to us.

If you’ve finished a book in the last six months, tell me the title in the comments. If you haven’t, tell me why you couldn’t pick one up. In the next issue, I’ll gather your answers and look for patterns in where we all get stuck.

💬 Tell me in the comments about a book you finished recently, or why you stopped reading one. I’ll fold it into the next issue. · 📨 If you know someone who can’t seem to pick up a book these days, send this their way.

References & Further Reading

Primary sources

The Atlantic, “The End of Reading Is Here”, 2026. : The source article for today’s issue. Its arc — opening with the Library of Alexandria and closing with AI — is striking.

Background

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 1982. : On how writing transformed human consciousness; this is where the concept of “secondary orality” comes from.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985. : On how TV turned the public square into entertainment. Read today, it feels like it’s describing smartphones.
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962. : The book that first coined the term “postliterate.”
Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, 1985. : On how electronic media reshapes the standards by which we judge political leadership.
Plato, Phaedrus. : Contains Socrates’s worry that writing would ruin memory. The same debate, 2,400 years earlier.

📝 Glossary

The author, Kwangseob Ahn, is a professor of business administration at Sejong University and lead consultant at OBF (Oswarld Boutique Consulting Firm). He teaches statistics and data analysis — business data management and business analytics — while leading GTM and AI strategy consulting in the field, designing the seam between technology and business. He has published academic research on a memory architecture for AI dialogue systems (HEMA) and runs Daily Arxiv, a daily curation of global AI papers. He holds a master’s from Korea University’s Graduate School of Technology Management and a KMBA. He is the author of Homo Brainless: The People Who Outsource Their Thinking.

Footnotes

Postliterate: Not an inability to read, but a state in which people can read yet have lost the capacity to deeply understand and synthesize long texts. It’s not the opposite of illiteracy — it names the stage that comes after literacy. ↩
Flynn effect: The steady, generation-over-generation rise in average IQ scores. Recent research suggests this rise has stalled or reversed in several countries over the past 20 years. ↩
Secondary orality: The phenomenon of literate societies reverting to the habits of oral culture — repetition, emotion, improvisation. Ong coined the term to describe the age of broadcast and electronic media. ↩
Pareto distribution (power law): A lopsided structure in which a small minority accounts for most of the total. “20% of people read 80% of books” is a textbook example. ↩