So the People With the Books, They Went and Stood Up On the Mountain to Get Away From the People With No Books

Joel Miller: Smartphones deliver near infinite options that appeal to unliterary people more than books. They have music, podcasts, streaming, short videos, long videos, social feeds, and AI to generate whatever else they want. I’ve spent the last two weeks in a hospital caring for my mom. I’ve seen a hundred people waiting for one thing or another—all of them with their phones, not one with a book. (I’ve been looking.) But can you blame an unliterary person if they prefer TikTok to Cormac McCarthy and YouTube to Toni Morrison? That’s like blaming someone for liking tacos more than pho. All of this points us to an interesting and perhaps uncomfortable reality: The mass of unliterary readers has been padding the reading statistics for a century. After all, “it’s no big deal. It’s just a book.” The unliterary are now abandoning reading because, for them, they’ve got better alternatives for passing time. It’s an interesting essay, and I tend to be more sanguine about the issue myself,…