The Long-Form Content Boom No One’s Talking About

The latest moral panic among the chattering classes and online intelligentsia is the so-called “end of reading.” Two weeks ago, The Atlantic proclaimed that we are entering a “post-literate age.” NPR similarly asked, “Are we living through the end of reading?” Or from the New York Times, “Is This What a Post-Literate Era Looks Like?” And then there’s reading. In The Atlantic, Horowitch cites an analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey — often described as the gold standard measure of how the country spends its days — which shows that fewer Americans report reading for pleasure on a given day, but those who do are spending more time doing so. Overall, the underlying survey tells us, average Americans over the age of 15 read 21.9 minutes on a given day in 2003. They read 18.3 minutes a day in 2010. In 2025, the number was 16.2 minutes a day. AI or smartphones are often blamed for shrinking attention spans and hence fewer people reading. But I posit…