The National Endowment for the Arts just released a deeply grim report analyzing over two dozen studies on American reading habits. And the findings? Shocking to absolutely fucking no one: young Americans are reading less for fun, testing lower, writing worse, and growing into adults who can’t read or write for shit.
(Pride demands I interrupt to clarify that the grammar in the previous sentence was butchered on purpose. My own command of English remains unimpeachable, if occasionally ornery.)
I could mount the high horse and wax on about my lifelong love affair with books. But let’s not get precious—I read because there wasn’t much else to fucking do. My teenage options were: kung-fu reruns on UHF, a two-year-old VHS from the sticky end of Blockbuster, or listening to the same ten CDs on repeat. So I read.
But let’s be real: if teenage me had Wi-Fi, a phone, and a Spotify account, she wouldn’t have been curled up with Oscar Wilde and William Burroughs. She’d have been trolling eSpin the Bottle for eyelinered dirtbags, fantasizing about being a Suicide Girl, and pirating every moody band Pitchfork ever overhyped.
So yes, kids today don’t read. But it’s not because they’re worse than we were. It’s because they have better distractions.
