Rose Horowitch plagues my feed. I thought I was done with her when I canceled my subscription to her magazine, but she followed me, I suppose, to warn me. “Reckoning is upon us!” she warns as I scroll past her clickbait titles. The echo of her voice trails behind, even after her articles pass off the screen. Maybe I should be grateful; for now I know, in 2026, The End of Reading is Here.
Elsewhere on the internet, another literacy hellscape begins to take shape. The tone of these headlines warns of a considerably more dangerous doomsday approaching.
In the last couple of years, the United States has had a renewed interest in banning books. The thirst to take books out of schools, libraries, and even privately owned bookstores is eating away at state legislatures across the country. 23 states currently have book ban laws in hopes of saving children from the “rotten” contents of books. As a non-practicing librarian, I’m all for not exposing children to content that is not right for them. However, the benefits of reading far outweigh the “dangers of reading” explicit materials. I wrote about it in another post [find it here]!
S. 4925: Stop the Sexualization of Children Act (What a name!) was introduced to the House Committee in June of this year and is awaiting further action by the full House of Representatives. It may or may not make it to ratification, but it belies a hunger for federal restrictions on the written word. If it survives, previously blocked legislation across the country will automatically become law, criminalizing distributing some materials. This means individuals, not just their organization or business, can be held legally accountable for giving books to children.
But which books? I for one don’t ever want to violate the law and would be happy to prevent “inappropriate” books from falling into the hands of children! Despite the many librarians who would wish to know, lawmakers across the country can’t tell us. Arkansas Act 372 calls for jail time but has no guidance on what materials are deemed inappropriate or how to handle adult materials.
Would these books have to be locked away, removed from the library, burned even? Maybe booksellers will have to card for Chaucer, and maybe high schoolers can’t read Catcher in the Rye anymore. Then again, lawmakers may see themselves in Catcher in the Rye’s hero, Holden Caulfield. He is a dissociative liar, who is filled with guilt, confusion, and disrespect for women. “A real role model! Keep it on the shelves!” they may think.
Not knowing is the point. We librarians don’t have any idea what will be on the chopping block next. Will it be fiction, political, medical, or women’s health? Books will get banned as their whim blows.
One pattern has emerged, however. Bans have hit materials with LGBT and BIPOC themes with suspicious disproportionality. Imagine a librarian sentenced to jail for lending Tango Makes Three, a book about penguins, family values, and yes, two dads!
Book challenges don’t stop at penguin dads. Harriet the Spy (challenged 2014), Bridge to Terabithia (challenged 2017), and even, Where’s Waldo? (challenged 2011) could land a librarian in trouble! Serving time for peddling brain teasers and puzzle books is currently unlikely, but the frightening reality is, if S. 4925 is signed into law, it will be possible. And most importantly, these would-be laws are profoundly disruptive to information institutions. Regardless of the likelihood of punitive punishment, purveyors of books have to take this very, very seriously. These laws are a scare tactic, and they are threatening to cause an honost to goodness literacy crisis.
Which brings me to Rose and her “literacy crisis.” BookTok is in love with her article “The End of Reading is Here,” and Rose has been invited to talk about her piece on multiple national time slots. I just happened to see her interview with PBS news hour the other day.
To summarize her argument as best I can:
In the indeterminate far-past, people enjoyed much greater levels of literacy, but also, she points out, reading is a modern phenomenon. She says that despite recorded literacy rates increasing, reading is getting worse; we are entering what she calls a “post-literate” era, which will be characterized by a society of the literate, who are also the worst readers yet. “Reading is over!!”, she has written…for us to read. For such a frightening realization, I can’t help but notice how she doesn’t seem too worried about it. Actually, she seems quite smug about the vast majority of Americans descending into a drooling trance. I wonder, with so many readers among the intellectually impoverished, would Rose consider herself post-literate? Somehow, I know she wouldn’t.
During the video interview, Rose is cool and collected. Her voice is so smooth that she must have ironed it along with her collared poplin shirt and cute middle-parted hair. Nonetheless, she seems nervous. I don’t blame her, defending a weak thesis on a nationally-viewed program is bound to give anyone a few butterflies in their tummy!
The biggest flaw in her argument is that the world she writes about, the world in crisis, holds a rather large contradiction. In our world, more people can read today than ever before, and this results in documented growing literacy rates. Which makes a lot of sense, actually.
In Rose’s world, documented literacy rates don’t mean a thing, and she doesn’t say why. Her argument comes off as “if more literacy -> then less literacy,” and she just charges ahead, changes her terms, and glosses past the inconvenience of numbers not supporting her thesis. She liberally uses the term “post-literate” but never addresses what the concept of literacy means to her (or the term “illiteracy” for that matter), a definition that is key to understanding a her term “post-literacy.”
She doesnt really have to make it work though, the meat of her writing, the real draw is the drama! “Post-literacy crisis” sounds like a real humdinger of a problem and you’ll find that Rose is more than happy to sprinkle the word “crisis” over any of her work. Math crisis, attention crisis, staff-at-university may-or-may-not suck crisis. It’s a wonder Rose gets any sleep at all with all these crises swirling around on the horizon.
It’s not just her use of embellishment that causes me pains, the whole “nobody’s literate enough” argument is just so skin deep. It proves to be completly inadequate at reaching anything real about education, literacy, and threatened access to information.
More education improves literacy, and funding improves education. We don’t need fancy coinages to understand this. Wagging one’s finger at some “less-than-literate” class of people is not helpful. Rose might try fundraising instead, now that she has a platform! And while she’s at it, she can speak out against the country’s hobby of taking books out of libraries.
So, you may be asking, why would so many people fall for this kind of story? Why is Rose’s article so popular? Sometimes it is vanity; people want to be the smartest person in the room, and Rose’s articles give the reader a chance to fantasize that they’re in the running.
It’s a nice idea that reading a book is all it takes to get ahead. Some people feel that those who can’t do things as well as they can don’t have the same advantages (some seem to want it that way). These people must feel that, if Rose’s grim predictions come to pass, they will end up on top. I suppose they think zombies, real or metaphorical, can be destroyed by a vigorous rendition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Silly, of course! Any sort of end-of-all-times party event will be sure to smite readers and non-readers alike. Be real! I can honestly say I have never seen a zombie turn down a brain! Honestly!
Aside from an unearned sense of grandeur, some get pulled in by their own reactionary nature. They fear change and worry for their children’s future. Interestingly, these are all some of the same reasons people support book bans. Vanity, fear, and reactionaryism fuel these laws and the lawmakers too.
I question the wisdom of feeling literate, among the illiterate, of thinking “the kids” are dumb or believing things will never get better than they were yesterday.
I recently watched a 6th-grade student enjoy their first recreational book. He excitedly told me about the plot and characters and then pointed out all the puns I had missed. Will he ever read another book for fun? I don’t know, but he may just be the smartest person in the room someday.
And when the zombies really do come, it will be his generation of young readers who must solve the problem. Perhaps we should be a bit more circumspect about our criticisms. If we call “the kids” stupid, lazy, and inattentive too many times, they might just believe us, and then who will save us from the apocalypse?
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