Osita Nwanevu’s review of James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages separates a real concern—sustained reading under pressure—from a much shakier story about civilization becoming illiterate. The lost world of literary prestige was also a world where many more people were excluded from reading altogether.
- The much-cited decline in pleasure reading draws on survey categories that do not explicitly count online reading. That is a serious limitation, not proof that digital reading and reading a novel are equivalent.
- Professors were reporting students unable to absorb books in 1991. Today’s complaints need historical comparison, not just a smartphone-shaped culprit.
- Shorter sentences can reflect modernist style and broader audiences, rather than declining intelligence. Mass competence with written language is an achievement, even when it doesn’t produce a nation of literary critics.
- Nwanevu argues that personalized feeds hook us through comforting consistency, not merely chaotic fragments. Their illusion of completeness can hide how much we don’t know.
- Digital writing is precarious: corporate servers lose or erase material, undermining the fantasy that the internet automatically preserves everything.
The strongest distinction is between nostalgia for an elite literary culture and defending the capacity of ordinary people to read seriously. Nwanevu does not excuse the business of addictive attention capture; he asks for a more accurate account of its harms.
Reading matters not because it guarantees rationality or makes life orderly, but because it complicates our picture of the world. The task is to cultivate that difficult, questioning practice on screens as well as paper—not declare the battle lost because print no longer dominates.