I read Rose Horowitch’s essay in the Atlantic about “the end of reading.” As I’ve said many times, I think the class of people I refer to as the writer’s guild are prone to acting like Chicken Little about this issue, but Horowitch’s essay is fine as far as it goes. She surveys the grim statistics and concludes, rightly in my view, that it is ultimately up to us to choose whether we value reading books as an activity for its own sake. We haven’t been brainwashed by gadgets and evil tech-bros; we’ve done what people have always done — taken the path of least resistance, chosen easy pleasures over demanding ones. In that sense, the diminishment of reading as a leisure activity is a reversion to the mean. There will always be readers, but they may not command such high status as they once did. I can live with that.

But there’s being sanguine, and then there’s being glib. Jonathan Minnema offers a remarkably bad rebuttal to Horowitch. His opening analogy is confused from the start. Barnes & Noble created the Nook, not the Kindle. But more importantly, e-readers never posed the same threat Horowitch is describing. A Nook still asks you to read a book. TikTok does not. The transition from paper to screen changed the container; the transition from books to algorithmic fragments changes the activity itself. Personally, I don’t care for e-books or audiobooks, but they’re infinitely preferable to this garbage.

Then comes the central contradiction:

I actually see it as flourishing.

A few paragraphs later:

As fewer and fewer people read, it will become increasingly important to read.

And later still:

As reading disappears, it will start becoming cool again.

So reading is flourishing, fewer people are reading, and reading is disappearing — but its disappearance will eventually reverse itself because human beings naturally do unpopular things. Does this argument require psilocybin for maximum clarity?

His YouTube audience is the purest possible example of selection bias. A man who runs several book channels reports that the people who deliberately seek out his book channels are interested in books. That is pleasant news for him, but no more representative of the population than a powerlifting gym proving that Americans are becoming physically stronger. He briefly recognizes the problem — “it’s possible I am just insulated” — and then simply decides that he probably is not.

The retro-consumption statistics, even if accurate, do not rescue him. Vinyl can grow for nineteen straight years and remain a niche product. Film cameras, dumbphones, classics clubs, and social-media abstinence can all become fashionable among minorities while the broader culture continues moving in the opposite direction. In fact, that may be the likeliest future: not universal postliteracy, but a barbell distribution in which serious reading becomes a cultivated subculture while the median person reads less and less. His own business may be evidence of precisely that development. When a practice ceases to be ordinary, enthusiasts gather around it more conspicuously.

There is also a faintly comic leap from “young people buy vinyl” to “Gen Z will soon be unable to stop reading Anna Karenina.” The first is a low-cost aesthetic preference. The second requires dozens of hours of sustained concentration. Buying a turntable does not demonstrate that one can read Tolstoy any more than buying a Moleskine demonstrates that one keeps a serious journal. Retro objects often flourish precisely because they can serve as badges without restoring the disciplines and effort once associated with them.

His treatment of literary style is worse. The claim that sentences are shortening “not because our attention spans are dropping, but because writers are getting better” is breathtakingly complacent, reminiscent of Richard Hanania’s infamous claim that he could dash off a superior version of Shakespeare in his spare time if he so desired. Sometimes compression improves prose; sometimes shorter sentences merely reflect diminished tolerance for syntactic complexity. Style cannot be reduced to a speed test.

The “paid by the word” explanation is the familiar half-truth elevated into a theory of literature. Serialization affected pacing and structure, but Dickens did not write elaborate sentences merely to pad an invoice. Nor does it follow that abridgments are “likely better-written stories.” They may be faster, simpler, or better suited to impatient readers, but that is not the same as being better-written. On this principle, a plot synopsis would be the perfected form of every novel.

And the French Revolution paragraph may be the most astonishing:

The French Revolution didn’t begin with people yelling on street corners to join the movement. They didn’t publish articles in the papers.

Pamphlets, newspapers, political clubs, public oratory, and the rapidly expanding print culture were central to the Revolution. He has chosen one of the worst imaginable historical examples for an “invisible” revolution that did not announce itself in print.

Beneath the bluster, he has stumbled onto something true enough: decline can produce countercultures. Reading may become rarer and therefore more self-conscious, attractive, communal, and prestigious among those who retain it. Plausible enough, but it doesn’t refute Horowitch. It describes how a remnant might form under the conditions she describes. A better formulation might be something like: “The decline is real, but decline is not extinction. As serious reading becomes less culturally normal, those who still desire it may gather more deliberately, build stronger institutions, and recover some of the communal energy that mass literacy had allowed us to take for granted.” That would be hopeful without pretending that a BookTube audience, a stack of vinyl records, and a TikTok hashtag have refuted the evidence. Reading is declining, however we choose to respond to that fact.