i, for one, welcome our illiterate overlords

things right now 61—week of 2.23.26

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first, the depressing part:

People like to say we live in a 'post-literate' society…

I'm not so sure. 'Post-literate' seems more like a polite way to say 'illiterate' than a description of a fundamentally new reality. In a viral article published in The Atlantic’s October 2024 issue, Rose Horowitch detailed the decline in reading whole texts (as opposed to excerpts) even in America's most elite educational institutions, the Ivy League.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Perhaps this is what 'post-literate' means: a person who should theoretically be able to read a book, but due to the attention-atrophying effects of technology simply cannot.

And this is, again, our most elite students.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a federal agency within the Department of Education, our literacy rate dipped from 82% in 2017 to 79% in 2023. By another metric, published by the National Literacy Institute, 54% of Americans read at or below a sixth-grade reading level. This translates to difficulty comprehending a newspaper article or following detailed instructions for medication.

Again, The Atlantic covered the matter. This time in their October 2025 issue. Idrees Kahloon writes:

We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is "below basic"—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992.

As AI doomposters keep reminding us on X, we only have three years to escape permanent underclass! Presumably literacy will be a requirement to accomplish that.

But who knows. Claude is perfectly capable of reading to its users.

Maybe that's what post-literate really means: rule by illiterate oligarchs.

I, for one, welcome our illiterate (or is it post-literate?) overlords.

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• The School for Kids Who Can't Read Good or Ivy League illiteracy

• Post-COVID Problems or the decline in educational attainment

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now, the silver lining:

Recently, I’ve noticed an uptick in must-read articles.