Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Rose Horowitch:

People who read are more invested in reading than ever before. When there was no TV or radio even, and there was no other way to get information, if you knew how to read, you had to read. There was no other option. If you could read, you were just reading.

Preet Bharara:

Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara. My guest this week is Rose Horowitch. She’s a staff writer for The Atlantic where she covers education. As recently as three years ago, she was the editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News. She joins me this week to discuss her latest article, which has gone viral, The End of Reading is Here. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Rose Horowitch, welcome to the show. It’s great to see you and great to meet you.

Rose Horowitch:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to talk about the piece.

Preet Bharara:

So you wrote a piece that has a provocative title, like The End of History, except the ending you’re talking about is the end of reading. And you say, “The End of Reading is Here.” I found this article endlessly fascinating. It’s gotten a lot of attention. A lot of people in my world texted it to me or asked me about it. I think you’ve done some media on it. And I said to the team, “We have to have a conversation with Rose,” because there’s a lot of history in here. There’s a lot of analysis. I don’t know that I understand all of it. Why don’t you give us, A, the reason why you thought this was a worthwhile topic to write about, and B, what the basic thesis is?

Rose Horowitch:

So I started writing about this topic two years ago. I wrote a piece about students arriving at universities, even top universities in the country, unprepared to read full books because they hadn’t been assigned them in middle and high school. And so my editors asked me to revisit that topic, look at, okay, if this is happening, if we know that there’s a change happening in schools and in colleges, what does that look like more broadly? And so in this piece, I really looked through a lot of data and interviewed so many researchers. And the story that emerged was that Americans just read much less than they used to. The share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day declined by 40% over the past two decades. As of 2022, which is the last year that we have really great data for, fewer than half of all Americans read a book on-

Preet Bharara:

A book. A book, you said.

Rose Horowitch:

A book, yes, in the past year. And what I argue in the piece is that this shift has a significance even more than what we can see right there in that data that when reading first appeared in society, it fundamentally transformed the way people thought, their politics, and their culture. And that now as reading disappears, we can expect changes of the same magnitude, like changes in our consciousness, in the candidates that we elect, in what our culture values. And so that was what I was trying to get across.

Preet Bharara:

I want to quote from your article and cite some other statistics because they’re very alarming in some ways, depending on your perspective on books. As you said, “Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022.” But you go on to say, “Only 38% read a novel or a short story.” This is an interesting fact. “Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book. Last year, 57% of Americans placed a bet.” You also say, because usually we’re talking about young people, how young people suck so much, which I don’t agree with, but that’s usually the storyline. As you write, “The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most, retirees, women, and college graduates, have seen a collapse.” And then you also say, “The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be.” Do we have more illustrated books now than we used to? Is that part of your research?

Rose Horowitch:

Well, so what I found is that, yes, the books that people read are simpler. We know that New York Times bestsellers have sentences that are about one third shorter than they were a century ago. And what I was finding was really just a burgeoning popularity of young adult novels. The head of the New York Public Library was saying that young adult fiction is their most popular offering even among people who are not young adults. So I think we’re just seeing a real change, when people do read, in the kind of books that they’re choosing.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve got a series of questions in which I want to take a step back and have you explain or have the audience understand why we value certain things in the first place rather than just assuming that a book of length has value. You said a second ago that the New York Times has sentences that are shorter. I have discovered over time that the difference between amateur writers often… And it depends, because there are different authors of great repute who like long sentences. I had a guest on recently who talked about a new trend of books, not a lot of books, but some books that consist solely of one sentence. It’s a complex, long sentence. That simpler writing and simpler vocabulary and simpler sentence structure and maybe even shorter sentences, why is that necessarily a bad thing?

Rose Horowitch:

So I think that’s a good point that we don’t want to be romantic about a specific type of writing or a specific time period in the past. My editors certainly would often say that my shorter sentences are better and that I should not be writing longer sentences.

Preet Bharara:

I think writers learn that a variation in sentence length is the best.

Rose Horowitch:

Right. And so what I think was the statistics are showing, and as we look at bestseller lists in the past compared to today, is that it denoted a time when people had the interest and ability to make it through long, serious works of literature. We do see a real change in the types of books that people are buying today. Children’s books are much more popular and young adult fiction, as I said, is much more popular. And so that’s not inherently a bad thing, but it is a real change to take note of and a real shift.

Preet Bharara:

Going back to first principles, how are we distinguishing among types of reading? Because at one point in your article, you do say that in fact, people are reading more words than they used to read because there’s text, there’s email, there are other things, they’re on social media, et cetera. So the eyes and the brains of people in 2026 are actually doing the act of reading as much as or more than they have before. So it’s a difference in quality, I take it. What is the highest quality for purposes of the values we’re trying to pursue and what’s the lowest?

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah, so you’re right that I talk about in the article how we might be reading more words than ever. And so I don’t think this is a literacy crisis. We clearly can still read. But I think that the shift that I was trying to point out is that as we’re bombarded with so many snippets of text, it makes it very difficult to focus on any one thing for an extended period of time. So I think that’s the type of reading that’s going away is just the more extended focused reading. And that was the shift that I was trying to point to.

Preet Bharara:

So what’s causing this problem?

Rose Horowitch:

My reporting showed that this is something that’s been going on for a long time. Started with television it seems as television just crowded out the amount of time that people used to spend reading, and by 1985, the average American household spent seven hours a day in front of the TV. So that’s a lot of time.

Preet Bharara:

I’m sorry, how many hours?

Rose Horowitch:

Seven. But that’s for household.

Preet Bharara:

I think I spent 14. I think I spent 14 hours-

Rose Horowitch:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

… in front of the TV.

Rose Horowitch:

So that’s just a crowding out time that people might previously have spent on reading. And then we see with smartphones and broadband internet and streaming, it’s all just more seductive, interesting, engaging than television is. So that further crowds out the time. And we also see that we just become more accustomed to shifting our focus between different things. It’s not necessarily that we can’t pay attention, but we aren’t used to paying attention. And so it just feels very uncomfortable to do that and to not flip over your phone or look at something else. So that’s the shift is first the change in how we spend our time, and then in how uncomfortable it feels to focus on something for an extended period of time.

Preet Bharara:

What distinction do you draw or did the experts you spoke to draw between the decrease in reading of fiction novels versus the decrease in reading of non-fiction? Is there a difference to our brains, to our minds, to our society? Are those things equivalent or different?

Rose Horowitch:

The research seems to suggest that in some senses they offer similar benefits, but fiction would obviously be exercising empathy much more, whereas nonfiction would make you more accustomed often to going through a logical argument, really attending to different facts. The Wall Street Journal had a recent article about how dad books are dying out and how that-

Preet Bharara:

Wait, what are dad books?

Rose Horowitch:

Dad books are the kind of-

Preet Bharara:

Civil war?

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah, the heavy non-fiction history books that your dad gets on birthday or Father’s Day.

Preet Bharara:

I’m one of those dads.

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah. So those books are definitely finding fewer readers. Obviously romantacy has seen a huge surge in interest. So that’s-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I don’t even know that category. What did you call it?

Rose Horowitch:

Romantacy. So that’s romantic-

Preet Bharara:

See, I read so little-

Rose Horowitch:

… fantasy.

Preet Bharara:

… that I don’t even know what the books are called anymore.

Rose Horowitch:

That’s a lot of… It’s like fairies and relationships and dragons. And so those books are really popular with TikTok and everything, and they’ve been real bright spots. We’ve also seen that self-help is really popular.

Preet Bharara:

So romantacy, people might guess, is not my cup of tea, but true crime I’m always told is very popular. New forms of it on television, miniseries and podcasts. How’s true crime doing in the bookstore?

Rose Horowitch:

Oh gosh, I would have to check. I would imagine that podcasts had crowded out the books because there are so many good true crime podcasts, but I’m not sure if people are still buying that. It wasn’t showing up on the bestseller list that I was looking at, but it’s possible that it never reached those heights, but it’s still been very popular.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s take that example, and I have a few others that I may ask you about. Let’s say you are listening to a high-quality, intelligent, articulate true crime podcast versus reading a mediocre or even a good true crime book, or you’ve elected to watch on the History Channel, if the History Channel shows history anymore, some people think it doesn’t, but you’re watching a high-quality, intelligent, articulate series on the Civil War, and you’ve left the Civil War book that you got for your birthday on the shelf. What are we losing or gaining by doing one versus the other in your research?

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah, so it’s a really interesting question because in one sense, sometimes video and audio are better ways to take in information. I was speaking to people who were saying it’s way easier if you’re trying to follow directions or something to be watching it if you’re looking up WikiHow or something. So I don’t think we want to be precious about text in and of itself. The shift that I was trying to point to is that writing and reading are a fundamentally different delivery system for information. When you write something down, it takes longer than when you’re speaking. So you are forced to slow down and think about it more. It separates you from what you’re writing. And so you’re able to look at it from a more detached way, go back to it, and it’ll be there, and you can look at it and get new understanding. It’s just a really different way of sharing information.

And so that was what I was trying to point to is it’s not that watching a podcast any one time is a problem or anything at all, but that overall, as our society shifts to doing that more and more and away from reading, that that will lead to big changes.

Preet Bharara:

But just so I understand the point that you were making a second ago about the process of writing, you’re talking about the author.

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Right? Are we to infer from your point that a book can be more likely to be superior because the act that the author has to go through and detach it from the subject matter makes it something of higher value than a TV show or something different?

Rose Horowitch:

I was more meaning to say that when people are writing, that’s something versus making a video or speaking. And then when you’re reading, I think one of the real differences is that, one, we know people tend to use more complex language and sentence structures in their writing compared to their speaking. So you would be taking in more complex language. And then I think real differences are that video is self-paced. It just keeps going. Obviously sometimes people speed it up or slow it down, and you could technically rewind it, but you’re much less likely to go back 10 seconds and make sure that you didn’t miss something than you are when you read. Our eyes just naturally go back a paragraph. We review it. You don’t even really notice you’re doing it. So you’re more likely to take in something. It’s easier to take in something that’s a little bit more complex if you’re rereading it.

I spoke with a researcher who took images of children’s brains as they took in a story first when they were looking just at static pictures and listening to an audio recording, and then as they were watching an animation. And what he found is that when these kids were watching an animation, they used the parts of their brain associated with learning and with imagination much less. And his thinking there was that because so much is already there for you in video, it has the sound, it has all the action, it has the tone of my voice, it has just everything. You don’t have to do as much to create in your mind to imagine what the author or actor or speaker is intending as you do when you read and you have to visualize it all, which I found interesting. It’s why I think when you watch a movie of a book that you read, you can feel like it was casted wrong. That’s because you’ve imagined something and you’ve created your own movie in your head.

Preet Bharara:

My daughter does not like a lot of movies for that reason, and she’s always been a voracious reader. But just so I understand more, and I’m asking a lot of maybe dumb questions, the problem here in the reduction of reading is either or both of the following is the question. Is it A, that we are learning more and getting less knowledge? Or B, the reduction in reading is causing us to lose some skill or cognitive faculty? Or is that not the right question?

Rose Horowitch:

So I think it’s more B, it’s definitely an area still of active research. But when I was talking with-

Preet Bharara:

Are people writing books about this?

Rose Horowitch:

People are writing books about this. And people-

Preet Bharara:

Well, who’s going to read them?

Rose Horowitch:

I know. And people are constantly doing studies.

Preet Bharara:

They should do podcasts about this stuff, not books, Rose.

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah, it might get more views. So I think what we know with our brain is that it gets better at what we spend time doing. That’s the whole practice makes perfect. And so the more accustomed we become to reading, it’s just going to be easier. It’s going to feel easier. We’re going to have more background knowledge to aid in comprehension. We’re going to be more used to reasoning through something, doing that logical deduction. And whereas if we aren’t really asking ourselves to do that, it will be harder. It’s not to say that we can’t. I don’t think anything is permanent and it’s not like we’re losing the ability to read it all. But as we don’t practice, it just feels more of a strain and is more difficult. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

How’s The Atlantic doing? It is a long-form publication that has been around for a hundred and how many years?

Rose Horowitch:

169 years, I think.

Preet Bharara:

You’re always bragging about that.

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

And your article is extraordinarily good read, smart, informative, but not short. And-

Rose Horowitch:

It’s not short.

Preet Bharara:

… aren’t a lot of people reading your article?

Rose Horowitch:

Yes. As the writer, I can say that it is not short.

Preet Bharara:

Right. I don’t mean to give an anecdotal silly rebuttal, but it’s a lot of interest still in long form. It may not be War and Peace, but these are substantial writings that you’re involved with and that your publication is involved with. How do you think about that trend in either direction?

Rose Horowitch:

Right. I think it’s such an important point because if you look, there are all these positive signs for reading. New bookstores are opening all the time. Last year print book sales were higher than they were a decade ago. You’re right that people read this 8,500 word article about how nobody reads. But what-

Preet Bharara:

I was wondering that. Yeah.

Rose Horowitch:

Right. So if you look at all of these anecdotes or selective data points, I think you can really make a picture that, okay, reading is not in trouble. But I think as I was digging into this more and looking at the data, what we find is that the people who read are more invested in reading than ever before. When there was no TV or radio even, and there was no other way to get information, if you knew how to read, you had to read. There was no other option. And so it wasn’t really possible to be a reader or not be a reader because if you could read, you were just reading.

And so now as it becomes something where you don’t have to read, you could get a lot of your information through video or audio, the people who read are really leaning into that identity more. They actually spend more time reading each day than they used to, and they seem more devoted to text. I note in my article that it’s probably going to be people who would feel that they fall into that category who are really making it to the end. And I thought that was a really interesting dynamic to think about, okay, as we have this smaller and smaller minority in society that’s really dedicated to text, what happens to them?

Preet Bharara:

So there are a couple other theories that I think you referred to. One is a broad-based theory. People are just too busy to read now. People have multiple jobs, people have to make ends meet. There has been a trend over the last number of decades for both parents to do more parenting. People trying to get to the gym, I think, more. So there’s just less time to read. So that’s point one. And then somebody once told me, a serious person of letters who is and was himself a publisher, said that when Donald Trump became the president, he began reading less fiction and other stuff because he was too consumed and upset about the news. Do either of those two things ring true based on your research and reporting?

Rose Horowitch:

So I think with the second one, it’s something that I’ve heard anecdotally, but I didn’t see it showing up in the data so much. People are definitely getting less of their news through reading, and I think we see higher rates of news avoidance or getting news on social media. In terms of the first one, I definitely think getting busier is an element of it. And that was what I was trying to get across with the new technologies, that it seems to be that those were what was crowding out reading. But of course, for every person it would look very different of what they’re devoting their time to.

Preet Bharara:

I was thinking when I was reading the article, and then you reminded me when you talked about characters that are imagined in someone’s head and the difference in quality and the intellectual experience or cognitive experience versus the entertainment experience of one form versus the other. And the example, as a dad who gets dad books of my vintage might not surprise you would point out, you could choose to read The Godfather or you could watch two of the three Godfather movies.

Rose Horowitch:

But not the third.

Preet Bharara:

Not the third. I think this is not a controversial position. And this is usually the reverse of what is normally true. The delta in the quality of the book versus the movie is quite large. Do you have advice, Rose Horowitch, on whether or not someone should rather read The Godfather book or watch the movies for their brain?

Rose Horowitch:

Well, okay, so I’ve seen those two movies and I’ve read the book, and I agree with you that The Godfather movies are better than the book, though I did really like the book.

Preet Bharara:

The book is page turning. But what did you do first?

Rose Horowitch:

I watched the movies first.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So did I.

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

They made the author a lot of money.

Rose Horowitch:

And I mean, they were fantastic. And so I think that cognitively, it doesn’t really matter in that individual time which one you do in terms of a long-term effect on your brain or anything. I spoke with one cognitive scientist who was like, “Everything that happens to us changes our brain.” So if you watch The Godfather movie or you read the book, that’s not going to be a huge effect. And as I said, there are times where it makes much more sense to get information from video or audio. But I think that it’s more on a societal level, on a continual level, what are we doing day in and day out? And that switch from books and articles to movies and just short form videos and everything, that is the big change. But yeah, definitely everyone should see The Godfather I and II.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So here’s my non-serious question, just taking apart the pieces of your research. Could one solve the problem a little bit by watching foreign films in languages they don’t speak or understand so that they have to watch the film but read the subtitles? Is that reading?

Rose Horowitch:

That’s interesting. Well, I mean the challenge with that is that you just are constantly flicking between two things. That is hard in terms of shifting your attention. Not sure that I asked-

Preet Bharara:

Does that make the brain dexterous? I don’t know. I have no idea.

Rose Horowitch:

I think… You’re asking questions that I didn’t even think to ask. I think the attempted multitasking does not tend to be the best. It is interesting that people actually seem to use subtitles even on not foreign films. I do this when I watch Netflix, I always have subtitles even when it’s in English, which I know is-

Preet Bharara:

No, that’s an increasing trend because it’s hard to hear.

Rose Horowitch:

It’s a Gen Z thing. I don’t really know why we do it, but I think that maybe it’s because I’m also scrolling on my phone or something and it’s a second screen situation, but I don’t think that would solve the issue because that distracted reading is what I think we actually are doing. We are reading on our phones while we’re also seeing a caption as we look at a reel or seeing subtitles or something. So I don’t think we need to practice that. It’s more the undivided attention rating.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Rose Horowitch after this.

It strikes me from this conversation and then from some other anecdotal things, one of which I’ll mention, it’s an attention problem. It strikes me that the difference between, and you tell me if I’m wrong, the difference between reading a very long pulpy beach novel versus reading something short like The Stranger by Camus who won the Nobel Prize, we’re not so worried if you’re reading that short thing versus that long thing, and maybe it’s preferable, maybe it’s not. But the problem is not only in the world of books. I don’t know if you saw this. Matt Damon talks about how at production meetings for movies, but I think more even for miniseries on streaming networks, that the writers have to build in more than they ever did before repeated explanations of what just happened in the plot because people are watching the shows while also scrolling on X or TikTok or whatever and they can’t follow the… I mean, they’ve literally, to use a phrase, lost the plot. Is that phenomenon related to this phenomenon or are those two different things?

Rose Horowitch:

So I think it definitely is. We know that the average attention span on a screen 20 years ago was about two and a half minutes and that five years ago it was about 47 seconds. So I definitely think this is in large part a problem of attention and people just aren’t accustomed to paying attention to one thing for an extended period of time. At the same time, we do have some evidence that American adults’ ability to answer logic questions and answer reasoning questions has declined over the past 20 years. So I think that that’s also a factor that we don’t know the exact causes of, but that we are seeing some reversals in scores on some of those IQ tests and as we go between generations.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I just think about the attention issue. If your mind is wandering while you’re doing a thing, does that make you less smart? Does it make you not want to do the reading because it takes too long to get through it? And is the attention problem solvable in some way based on your research or are we just toast?

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah, so I think it’s a couple of things. Definitely you would find that if you aren’t paying attention or don’t want to pay attention, you’re not going to obviously take in and comprehend as much. So then it’ll be a self-fulfilling cycle of it will be harder to comprehend more over time because you just really need that background knowledge to be able to understand things. So that’s one challenging element of it. I think the positive thing about attention is that it doesn’t seem like it’s something where there’s a change in our brain and we physically couldn’t pay attention. It’s more just what we’re used to and how it feels. And so that’s heartening that it’s definitely something that could be reversed. It’s not like there’s been an irreversible change that’s taken place in our brains or anything.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Again, to this further point talking about the visual arts, movies and such, I think there’s a scene from Scent of a Woman. So Scent of a Woman came out a long time ago, before you were born.

Rose Horowitch:

My parents are obsessed with it.

Preet Bharara:

Are they?

Rose Horowitch:

And they really want me to watch it.

Preet Bharara:

Is that the one… Scent of a Woman, Al Pacino plays a blind former military guy, right?

Rose Horowitch:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

And he says, “Hoo-ah,” a lot, right?

Rose Horowitch:

I haven’t seen it, but that checks.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. You got to see it. And at one point he makes fun of the younger character in the film, whose name I’m now forgetting, and says something like, “You and your MTV generation, you have no attention.” So he was not talking about reading as stealing our attention, and this is before smartphones, but I think he was talking, not to overly intellectualize it, but talking about fast editing. And then my other anecdote about that is I have two boys that I tried to make watch The Godfather I and II with me during COVID. And they were teenagers at the time. The older one watched the first one and said, “That was awesome,” and continued the marathon and watched the second one with me. My younger one dutifully and politely watched the first one, and then was like, “I’m out of here,” for the second one. And I don’t think it was because he didn’t like the plot, although I’ll ask him.

It was just the editing was very slow. It was very slow. So this idea that you have to figure out a way to keep people’s attention is not just one about books, which is why I’m wondering what you think about the larger question of attention deficit and whether or not that portends your next writing assignment.

Rose Horowitch:

No, it’s funny. I’ve actually written a piece about film professors finding that their students really don’t want to sit through films or really struggle to sit through films. And so it definitely I think is a broader thing. And I mean, you find that with older movies and you also find that with older books. If you read it, it’s like the pastoral scenes go on for so much longer than people would have them do.

Preet Bharara:

I skip the scenes. That’s not uncommon, is it?

Rose Horowitch:

I don’t know if there’s data on that. People are skipping the-

Preet Bharara:

Well, let me ask you, do you skip the descriptions?

Rose Horowitch:

I don’t skip the descriptions.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Do you skip anything in books?

Rose Horowitch:

Only if I was in school, had to have a reason that I had to get through it and finish it by a deadline. But if I don’t have a deadline for reading, I wouldn’t skip.

Preet Bharara:

So if there was some unimportant or not central subplot that you found tedious, you’d be diligent enough and read it anyway. No skipping for Rose.

Rose Horowitch:

Well, this is why it takes me forever to read anything because I’m slow. So that’s, I guess, the trade-off that I have.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s talk about that for a second. I have done pretty well professionally. People are surprised to hear. They must be surprised to hear you say it and we’re many decades apart in age. One of the reasons I started reading less, you become busy, I am very slow also. And although I will sometimes skip the descriptive scenes of novels, and I don’t read nearly as many novels as I used to, there’s close to zero novels, but for me to undertake a thick volume is a huge commitment of time. And I have always envied people. So my daughter, I also have a daughter who’s an incredibly fast reader, and in multiple years when she was in high school made the commitment that she would read a hundred books in a year, a hundred non-school books in a year, and she did it.

Rose Horowitch:

Oh my gosh.

Preet Bharara:

I could never…

Rose Horowitch:

I could never do it.

Preet Bharara:

I would be in the grave. Is there anything to the idea that we’re not teaching people to read quickly enough because we’re trying to teach them to read slowly to take everything in and that’s counterproductive? Does that make any sense? What’s the relationship to ability to read quickly and reading?

Rose Horowitch:

We definitely find that I think things get easier the more you practice them. And I think in my life when I read slowly, a lot of that is that I am getting distracted. And so after I read a couple pages, I’ll just turn over my phone, just make sure that I don’t have any new emails that I have to answer or something.

Preet Bharara:

Something more interesting.

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

You’re trying to see if there’s something more interesting going on in my phone probably.

Rose Horowitch:

I know. So I think that for me is the real hindrance. I mean, we know that if you know more, you’ll be able to read faster because you’ll just have more fluency. But in terms of training people specifically to read faster, I don’t know that that is… I mean, I guess it depends on what you want to select for, but I don’t know that that has been the thing to select for or even who’s to say what’s better if you read something and it takes you a long time and you feel like you really get more out of it versus if you’re rushing through something. I know a lot of times when I had to finish a book in a couple days for school, I didn’t take in as much. So I think it just depends on the context there and what is important to select for depending on what you’re hoping to get out of the book.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

So I’m not sure how I feel about predictions about the bad things that arise from adults not reading as much or not reading as well or all of that. The one thing, and I’m not a scientist and I’m not a reading scholar, but I have taken as an article of faith based on myself, my own household, and anecdotal experiences of other people is that for children, and I mean toddlers even before they’re toddlers, infants, and I’ve seen a number of studies on this, although I don’t know them off the top of my head, that one of the single greatest determinants of how they will do in school, what their economic mobility will be, and all sorts of other things is were they read to when they were even in the crib? Did they have picture books? Did they read along? Did they read at a young age beginning at a few weeks old into I guess maybe toddlerhood and beyond?

And then people who are children when they become a little bit older who read prolifically all end up doing better in many, many other ways. It strikes me that the synapses are functioning better. They’re likely to have better vocabularies. And most importantly, although maybe this is not going to be important for much longer, the direct link between quantity and quality of reading as a child and ability to write well is a very strong one. Does all of that make sense and compute based on your inquiries?

Rose Horowitch:

That definitely does. I think the research suggests that being read to as a young child pays dividends down the line. I know that with the researcher who I spoke to who was doing brain imaging with young children, he found that children who had been read to more and had spent less screen time in the house, they were more accustomed to using the parts of their brains that were associated with executive function and with language. So we definitely know that if you are read to more, you’ll know more words, you’ll know more just background knowledge and that’ll make it just much easier to go through school and everything. So it definitely is something that is very advantageous.

Preet Bharara:

So you’re not a lawyer obviously, but I am. I am. And literally the practice of law, almost no matter what subdivision of law you’re in, even if you’re a transactional lawyer, then you’re reading hundreds and hundreds of pages of tedious, sorry to my transactional partner friends, but complicated, difficult, non-Shakespearean, non-Hollywood type, plot-driven reading. And if you’re a litigator, you’re reading cases. I mean, when these Supreme Court cases come down, for example, that I on this podcast more normally than this kind of discussion, we try to break it apart. They go on for scores of pages. Some of them are the size of books or novellas at least. Is this going to affect people’s ability to do their jobs that they don’t read as well and they have attention problems in areas like the law or otherwise? Is that one of the concerns we should have about the economy and about the labor force?

Rose Horowitch:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean it’s an interesting question. We do find that reading, particularly when people are older, it’s really important as a way to maintain cognitive faculties. It can be very useful in that. And certainly when reading scores go down, there’s some research suggesting that that has an economic cost later on. And I mean, don’t we already see with people relying more on artificial intelligence to read or write for them in the workplace? And that can obviously have a lot of effects. At the same time, there are still people who read and everything, so we could see a greater division there.

Preet Bharara:

So when was Gutenberg? Do you remember off the top of your head?

Rose Horowitch:

The 1400s, I think.

Preet Bharara:

So that’s not that long ago because we, and I think in our current species form, have been around for a couple of hundred thousand years.

Rose Horowitch:

Mm-hmm.

Preet Bharara:

And obviously there was reading before Gutenberg, but not widespread reading. Is there any comfort to be taken from the… I guess not, as I’m about to say this out loud. If we go back to the reading levels of the Middle Ages, is that so bad? Because Gutenberg is fairly recent. And as you write, super fascinating part of your article about cognition and about how we’re built and how we’re hardwired. We’re not hardwired to be readers. Talk about that for a minute.

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah. No, I think that’s a really interesting element of it is that people often think, oh, literacy and reading is innate or inevitable, but actually it’s this aberration. It’s weird that this happened 6,000 years ago in human history. And as you say, that is not very long ago that reading was first invented, and an even shorter time period since it has been widespread with the printing press and once literacy rates got higher. So it’s actually something that’s quite unusual. And that was the point that I was trying to make in my piece. I think there is comfort. It’s more just that there are things that we can learn from what the world was like before and that we can see ourselves going more towards now, a more oral society and a less literate one. I think that that was the point that I was trying to make was that we really could see this age of reading being just a blip between oral and digital ages and then some new technology.

Preet Bharara:

Does any of the blame belong at the feet of the authors of some of the things that we are saying we’re supposed to be reading? And in particular, I’m very directly pointing a finger at academia.

Rose Horowitch:

Do you mean because it’s just so it’s too convoluted or something?

Preet Bharara:

It’s convoluted, it’s jargon-y, and often not well-written. It’s often not well-written. Should we try to help the authors of the world write with greater clarity and brevity, and not just cause everyone else to have a greater attention span and get off their phones? It’s not quite a serious question, but indulge me.

Rose Horowitch:

Right. Well, I mean, I’m sure my editors would demand that I say that yes, people should write with greater clarity and brevity, myself included. So I think that certainly there is an element that there’s a lot of bad writing out in the world. But at the same time, what’s so funny about this age is that we actually have unprecedented access to written works. You could read things that were written at any time period and you can just pull it up on your computer or phone. And so there certainly are options if we so desire to read. There’s enough good books and articles out there.

Preet Bharara:

So you talk about post-literacy, post-literacy world. What do you mean by that?

Rose Horowitch:

So what I meant by that was a world where writing and text is not really a primary way that people spread information, derive culture, entertainment, news, meaning. That will be something that’s done much more through video and audio. And so that was what I was trying to get across, just more of a societal shift in how we share information and how we communicate.

Preet Bharara:

What’s the level of concern? People hate it when I do the following. On a scale of one to 10, about these conclusions that you’ve drawn from talking to a lot of experts, should we be highly alarmed, like a seven or an eight because the trend line is bad, or is this, as you very honestly point out, that at the advent of all sorts of technologies, AI is the latest? People say the world is about to end, and that was true with television, that was true with radio, and that was true with movies. And people were afraid of the book. Speaking of Gutenberg, lots and lots of people thought that that was going to be terrible. And so maybe this will pass. Where are you on the scale of assigning worry to this issue of nobody’s reading anymore?

Rose Horowitch:

Yeah, no, I mean it’s funny. I quoted in the piece an article The Atlantic published 126 years ago where the author was really nervous about what the rise of the newspaper was going to do to people’s willingness and ability to read books. So I definitely wanted to be cognizant that in 126 years, I could look very silly.

Preet Bharara:

No, you were very honest about that. I thought that was good. So what do you think about that?

Rose Horowitch:

So I think I’m more optimistic probably than people might think. I don’t think we’re going to go back to a reading age. I don’t see people actually reading, those rates going back up just because they have been declining for so long. But I don’t think that we should inherently be worried about it. I think that in a more optimistic, the world is always changing, these things have changed before. And so it should more be like, let’s go into it with full understanding. That was what I was trying to get across. There’s always this period when there’s new technologies of upheaval and revolutions and confusion and we have to get a handle on it. And then how do we figure out what we want the world to look like with this new one? And so it’s not inherently bad, but we also shouldn’t shy away from it or pretend that it’s not happening.

Preet Bharara:

And what’s your concern level about AI specifically here and then generally otherwise? And your generation. You’re a recent Yale grad, so I can infer your age a little bit. And I’ve been reading, not with delight, but with some bemusement about commencement speakers who start talking about AI and people start booing them. And I have a kid in law school and a kid in college and I haven’t really talked about this at any length with them. So let me start with you before I venture to talk to them about it. How are you feeling about it?

Rose Horowitch:

Well, I think there’s so many different elements of the question on a employment level and an existential risk level that I think I’m less equipped to answer. But I guess from reporting this story, I feel that I can talk more on a cognitive intellectual level. And in that sense, I think I’m of two minds about artificial intelligence. I note in the piece and we see in early studies and from speaking with experts that generative AI use without a lot of guardrails and intentions with using it, it can very easily, you can become overly reliant on using the AI to write for you and then to do your thinking for you when you don’t go through the effort of figuring out what you think. And so I think that that is a big concern, just that people won’t develop their powers of discernment and form their own opinions quite as much.

At the same time, I think we do see a lot of important scientific and intellectual advancements in AI. So I don’t want to sit here and say that it’s wholly bad. I think there could be opportunities, but it’s again, where it’s we don’t exactly know how to use this technology and there are certainly risks that we have to get a handle on.

Preet Bharara:

So I couldn’t tell from that answer. Are you more bullish or bearish on AI?

Rose Horowitch:

Well, I always worry about everything, but I don’t know. I can’t put it into one. I think I’m split. I think it really depends on how people use it.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think people understand how good, and by good I mean just how articulate if we’re talking about the world of writing, whether it’s a legal brief, maybe a poem, maybe not a poem, but at least a legal brief or a summary document of a deposition speaking for my profession… When people point out flaws in it like hallucinated cases, I always want to say this is the least good it will ever be. And to me it’s like so people who poo-poo it and are not thinking about the consequences have their head in the sand a little bit. I’m sure there are people, this is well before your time, but video games have been around not quite as long as Gutenberg. And I was a young person when video, and there was this, I think it was the first or one of the earliest video games called Pong.

And it was basically table tennis and it was a very simplistic screen. And I think back on that, because there are certainly people like, “Well, this is stupid. This is not very interesting. This is not very challenging.” Yeah, this is the worst it will ever be. And now you have whole incredibly complicated CGI and now AI video games. I don’t have a question there.

Rose Horowitch:

No, but I-

Preet Bharara:

Just commenting on how good… I mean, I’ve tried this a couple of times. I don’t know if AI, if you tell it to write a novel as good as The Old Man and the Sea, can it do it? No. Can it do it in 10 years? I don’t know. Probably not. But what do I know? But if you tell it to write a paragraph describing a street that your character walks down in Tokyo, and you give it this, I’m guessing because I’m not writing such a book, and you give it the surrounding style and details and you give it a lot of information about how you want that paragraph, it will write a very, very, very good paragraph. Is that good or bad?

Rose Horowitch:

Well, so that was what I was trying to point out in my article is that there’s an irony that so much of AI’s output, at least currently, is text, and that it is very convincing to us. It’s often better than what a human would just write. There was a study where MFA candidates were choosing between human text and AI text that have been trained on an author’s corpus, and they preferred the AI text in many cases. And as you say, we’ve seen it improving so quickly. So in that sense, that was what I was really nervous about is that AI is almost creating this super abundance of really pleasing polished text that may be wrong, contain mistakes buried deep in it. It could be inaccurate or misleading or something, but it’s also looks so nice to read that we actually need our powers of discernment and comprehension even more than we might have previously. And so if we become too reliant on AI, we won’t develop those. And so that’s the kind of concern that I have that I try to point to in the article.

Preet Bharara:

So I’ve kept you long enough. Congratulations on the article. To the audience, I will say, remind them again, it’s called The End of Reading is Here. Wait till you’ve read this before you end your reading. It’s in The Atlantic. Rose Horowitch, thank you so much and good luck. And I wish you the best in your career.

Rose Horowitch:

Thank you so much for having me.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Rose Horowitch continues for members of the Insider community. To try out the membership, head to staytuned.substack.com. Again, that’s staytuned.substack.com. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about the recent arrest of Andrew Tate and what the extradition process looks like. And I hope you’ll stay to the end when I pay tribute to someone who did as much for justice as anyone I’ve ever known.

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes as a Substack comment from Christian. “Could you talk about the Tate brothers and the process of extradition to foreign countries?” Christian, that’s a very interesting question. I will say that I’ve made it this far on the podcast without having to talk about the Tate brothers, but I guess that had to end sometime. For listeners who may not be familiar with Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, they are two of the most polarizing social media personalities in the world.

Andrew first gained public attention as a professional kickboxer and a contestant on the British version of Big Brother. He later built an enormous online following by flaunting his wealth and promoting an intensely misogynistic brand of masculinity. But even worse, according to prosecutors in Britain and Romania, the allegations against the Tate brothers go far beyond their online rhetoric. Romanian authorities have accused the Tates of human trafficking and forming an organized criminal group to sexually exploit women. That case is currently still pending. They also face a separate and growing criminal case in Britain. British prosecutors had previously authorized 21 charges against the brothers involving three alleged victims. Recently, the Crown Prosecution Service announced 38 additional charges involving four more alleged victims. Andrew now faces 32 additional charges including rape, facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation, assault, and offenses involving child pornography. Tristan faces six additional charges including rape, sexual assault, and facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation. That’s a lot of counts.

And now Britain, of course, is seeking to extradite the Tates from the United States. Last Saturday, US marshals arrested them in Miami pursuant to a federal warrant connected to the British request. So per your question, what happens next? Well, first, a federal judge must determine whether the brothers are legally eligible for extradition. A magistrate judge in the Southern District of Florida will consider whether a valid extradition treaty applies, whether the alleged offenses fall within that treaty, and whether Britain has presented enough evidence to establish probable cause. So there’s a substantial amount of due process that’s afforded people in the extradition process. In this case, the first two considerations seem to be met since the US, of course, does have an extradition treaty with Britain and these offenses would fall under it. The real debate will be over the third prong, probable cause.

If the judge concludes that the requirements have been satisfied, the judge will certify the brothers as extraditable, but even that does not automatically place them on a plane to Britain. The case would then move to the second stage, which is a little bit unusual where the final decision on surrender rests with the Secretary of State, currently Marco Rubio. The secretary has broader discretion than the judge and may consider diplomatic, humanitarian, and foreign policy concerns in deciding whether to surrender an extraditee. In this case, the brothers. And that’s where the situation could become politically complicated. Andrew Tate has been an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump and has cultivated relationships with people in Trump’s orbit. Donald Trump Jr., for example, has publicly criticized the legal proceedings against the brothers in Romania. President Trump himself has not publicly offered a clear opinion about the brothers, but the lawyer for the Tates has denied all the allegations and expressed confidence that they will not be extradited.

He recently posted on X saying, quote, “We are confident that once a competent judge sees the facts and once the Department of Justice confronts this egregious abuse of its own authority, Andrew and Tristan Tate will walk free. America does not do Britain’s political dirty work.” End quote. So what Secretary Rubio will do is anyone’s guess, but the case has not reached the State Department quite yet. The Tate brothers remain in federal custody in South Florida. They made their first appearance before a federal magistrate judge last Monday and will be due back in court next week. So for now, we’ll have to wait and see how the extradition proceedings unfold. Stay tuned.

I want to end the show this week to talk about a man who I loved and admired and who passed away last week. His name was John O’Malley. Now, if you’ve listened to this show for a while, you have heard me tell his stories. If you’ve read my book, Doing Justice, you have read about him too. John was a legendary NYPD homicide detective in the Bronx, and then a legendary investigator in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. He was 73 years old. And if you do know his name, it’s likely because of a singular story of heroic exoneration, a story I’ve been telling for 10 years. John was born on October 20th, 1952 in the Bronx, which tells you a lot about him. He spent more than two decades as a detective with the NYPD, most of it working homicides in the Bronx, and he was widely known as a detective’s detective.

When he retired from the NYPD, he came over to the SDNY as a criminal investigator in the 1990s, and that’s where he stayed for the rest of his career. Countless prosecutors, myself included, became better lawyers, better investigators, and frankly better people because we got to work alongside John O’Malley. John died after a long and tough illness. But how do you suppose a man like John O’Malley found out that he was sick? Well, I’ll tell you. One day, as was his practice, because this was the kind of guy he was, he was once again at the doctor’s office donating blood. By his own rough count, he had donated 103 pints of blood to that point. 103. And on pint number 104, they rejected him. Now, who rejects a pint from an Irishman? But there was a problem when they tested John’s blood, and that’s how he learned that he had leukemia.

That’s how a man who had spent his entire life giving, giving to the city, giving to victims, giving to cooperators, giving pint after pint of his own blood, found out he was sick. But he fought hard, and at first he beat the cancer. John was nothing if not tough. In fact, about a year ago, he was declared cancer-free, but the cancer came back last December. And by this spring, just a few weeks ago, John was in hospice care at his home. I had more respect for John O’Malley than for almost anyone I ever worked with in law enforcement. I had complete faith in his judgment, in his instincts, in his sense of right and wrong. John did a lot of extraordinary things in his career. He put away some of the most violent people in New York at a time when the violence reigned.

He built cases against gangs and shooters, and made this city a lot safer. But probably the most important thing John O’Malley ever did was to free innocent people from prison. Not what you usually think of when you think cop. I wrote a chapter about a case in doing justice. Dateline did an episode about it called A Bronx Tale. It’s the case of Eric Glisson and five others. It’s worth a minute to remember. In 1995, a livery cab driver named Baithe Diop was shot and killed on a street in the Bronx. The NYPD arrested six people for that murder. One of them was a young man named Eric Glisson. Another was a young woman named Cathy Watkins, a mother who did not even know her co-defendants. All six were convicted on the shakiest evidence and sent away for 25 years to life, but all six were innocent.

Years later, John was at SDNY sitting across from two cooperators who casually mentioned that back in the mid-’90s they had shot and killed a cab driver in the Bronx. John filed it away in that legendary steel-trap memory of his. Then years after that, a letter arrived. It was a letter Eric Glisson had written from prison at Sing Sing addressed generically to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. In the letter, he pled his innocence. And that letter by some small miracle somehow wound up on John O’Malley’s desk, and John connected the dots that nobody else had connected in 17 years. So what did John do? He went to Sing Sing to see Eric Glisson, he looked him in the eye, he shook his hand, and he said, in effect, “I know who did this and I know it wasn’t you.”

In 2012, Eric Glisson and Cathy Watkins walked out of prison. The rest of the Bronx six were freed as well. 17 years gone, but they got their lives back because a Bronx detective named John O’Malley refused to let it go. As I wrote in my book about the case, quote, “It is inspiring that a person would take the time to read a letter that wasn’t addressed to him, would open his mind to believing what was in the letter, would have the wherewithal to connect the assertions to things that he personally knew from years earlier, would visit the letter’s author, would personally research the case, would read the trial transcripts, and would be aggressively headstrong about the release of these convicted people, even if it meant casting aspersions on fellow investigators, fellow cops, and a fellow prosecutor’s office. I’m not sure how common it is for someone to become so personally invested or how common it is for someone who has dedicated his life to coloring bad guys and supporting fellow law enforcement officers to be just as adamant about getting someone sprung from prison.” End quote.

That case had a big impact on me. It’s the reason for a mantra I have repeated many times since. “You must run just as fast or faster to exonerate the innocent as to punish the guilty.” So I don’t know anyone who ever did more for justice than John O’Malley. When I heard that John had gotten sick again, I found myself scrolling through my phone looking for old text messages from John, and this one struck me. It was after John listened to the podcast we did about the Glisson case, and he wrote, “I’m blown away how Bronx-y my accent is. I had no idea. I have to work on that.” That made me laugh out loud. That was John O’Malley, pretty Bronx-y.

A couple of weeks ago, just a few days before he passed away, I went to go see him at his immaculate home in Pearl River with my friend Mimi Rocah. And though he was a little weaker and a little thinner, to us, he seemed like the same old John. He told a lot of old war stories about good guys and bad guys, and we laughed and we tried not to cry because we knew that we were saying goodbye. Towards the end of our visit, John said to me and Mimi something about going to heaven just in passing, but then he paused as if he were being presumptuous, and he joked, “At least I hope that’s where I’m going.” Well, I will say this, brother John. I’m not Catholic. I’m not Christian, and I may have a quibble or two with God, but if there is a heaven and people get to go there when they leave this place, then that’s where you are and that’s where you’re sleeping tonight. May you rest in peace, John O’Malley.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Rose Horowitch.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. You can reach me on Twitter or BlueSky @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes, and more. That’s staytuned.substack.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The audio and video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy, and the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.