Why Americans Stopped Reading Books

The kids can’t read. Such has been the implication, even the declaration, made by a wave of articles in recent years. But the statement needs some qualification: the kids in question are American; what they can’t read is entire books, especially literary fiction; and it isn’t just the kids in the first place. It would be the rare reader, especially of a site like Open Culture, who could resist feeling any despair when confronted with, say, a study finding that only five percent of college English majors tested could understand the opening of Bleak House. But the real problem is...