“Ageists who want to fault millennials for the continual decline in literary reading are wrong to do so. Across the board, there wasn’t much considerable variation in the amount literature age groups read. Everyone is hanging out in the 39–49% range.” Is America in the midst of a literary recession? According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 2015 marked the first year in 33 cycles of research that the percentage of adults who read literature had dropped below 45% to a dismal 43%.
The Great (Literary) Depression
A Separatist Syllabus
How do readers recover from an abominable weekend but with a reading list, in this case one suggested on Twitter by Jay Varner, a writer and instructor based in Charlottesville. Varner links out to 12 articles about “why so many continue to believe an unequivocally false historical narrative surrounding the Confederacy,” including pieces by New Orleans’ mayor Mitch Landrieu, Slate‘s Jamelle Bouie, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose Between the World and Me made our roundup from last year of the best political fiction (yes, we do realize it’s decidedly not fiction).
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The Agony and Ecstasy of a TAL Fact Checker
Surprising news emerged today about This American Life‘s Mike Daisey episode on Apple’s Foxconn subcontractors (previously mentioned on The Millions here, and later here). Apparently portions of Daisey’s visit to Chinese Foxconn factories were fabricated, and TAL‘s producers failed to ensure factual accuracy because he misled their efforts. As a result, the show has retracted the broadcast (PDF), Daisey has issued a statement of defense, and the next TAL episode will cover the entire fiasco.
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Min Jin Lee Finds Her Voice
Min Jin Lee recounts how she found her voice, going from a young student struggling with the English language to a published author promoting her own work.
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Moments of Being
In an essay for TriQuarterly Lia Purpura writes about Virginia Woolf‘s “moments of being” and their importance for contemporary writing. “Woolf’s particular flavor of modernism is rooted in the drive to gather, hold, and deepen moments, to make the shimmering moment of perception the base upon which “reality” rests. Her sensibility honors the fleeting, fragile instances of a person’s life.”
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Moleskine’s Imminent IPO
A while back, I noted that Moleskine was preparing an initial public offering on the Italian stock exchange. Well, now the time has come. On April 3, you will be allowed to buy shares of the notebook company (and perhaps keep records of them within your Moleskine). If you’re interested, you might want to read up on the company’s history – and also on how to pronounce its name.
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“variation in the amount literature”
Perhaps the depression isn’t so much in reading as it is in readable materials?
Not only that, but my inbox is full or “watch this video”s–I’d guess 3-6 hours every day, because talking is faster/easier than typing, and bloggers/marketers think people like seeing faces enough to justify the extra bandwidth/buffering or posting a video rather than an audio.
“Ageists who want to fault millennials for the continual decline in literary reading are wrong to do so.”
It’s wrong to fault the afflicted for their suffering, to be sure, but anyone who hasn’t noticed the alarming rate of ADMVDD (advanced disjunctive monosyllabic video-dependent dysphoria), among the young and youngish, must be too busy with Facebook to care. The problem with books being that they’re powered not by ads, or lithium ion batteries or Google… they’re powered by the Reader’s intellect… soooooo…. uh….. yeah. Perfect Storm meet Vicious Circle. Because where is the intellect supposed to come from in the first place… Snapchat?
I sent a two-paragraph email to an under-30 colleague earlier this year and he still jokingly refers to this wild breach of protocol as “War and Peace”. Whereas I can still quite vividly recall a value system in which the longer the letter one received in the post, the happier one was to receive the letter… and we measured length in pages, not paragraphs (or characters). There’s a joke about size in there somewhere…