“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
Read Sugar?
Who is Sugar? Have you read her? Go Behind the Scenes of a Regular Sugar Reader.
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In the Future, All Art Historians Will Work 20 Hours a Week
A couple of contrarian views on the current job market and its woes: “How Art History Majors Power the U.S. Economy” (at Bloomberg, no less) and “Cut the working week to a maximum of 20 hours, urge top economists” (sign me up).
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Since You Asked
Recommended Reading: On terrible writing advice from famous writers.
Generally Five Stars
“Even weeks after its publication, no one agrees on What Happened and Clinton’s ability to assess her own past. But in post-truth America, the truth that becomes history may well be decided by star-rating.” The Guardian considers how Amazon reviews became the new battlefield of US politics. Namechecked in the piece: Nancy MacLean, whom we interviewed about her new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, here.
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RIP Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez has died at the age of 87. The Colombian writer was a prominent novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He was most famous for One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Autumn of the Patriarch and won a Nobel Prize in 1982 for his work.
The Process
We write a fair amount about book covers here at The Millions, but one thing we have yet to write about is the drafting process endured by designers. Herewith, a selection of book covers that didn’t make the cut, juxtaposed with covers that did.
Figuratively Unbelievable
Getting sick of people who overuse the word “literally”? A new browser extension kindly replaces instances of the word with “figuratively.” At Slate, Will Oremus tries out a godsend for pedants. (A Millions piece by Fiona Maazel nicely complements his article.)
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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…