The Future of Reading, the Honest Broker, and Michel Houellebecq
Three podcast appearances
The Future of Reading in America
Everyone has an opinion about the reading crisis. Sunil Iyengar has the data. In this episode of my new joint podcast for The Pursuit of Liberalism, which I run with Rebecca Lowe, I asked Sunil—who heads up research at the National Endowment of the Arts—what we really know about the reading decline. I found this conversation fascinating: there are so many areas where we just need more and better data. No-one denies there is a decline in reading, but what is actually going on is quite hard to fathom. Sunil was admirably honest and objective, careful to stick to the data, rather than drawing larger conclusions that slip away from the numbers.
OLIVER: We don’t know if social media is taking away from time that would have been TV, right?
IYENGAR: That I don’t know right now.
OLIVER: It always seems to me that if you’re watching short-form videos on Instagram, you would otherwise have been watching Netflix or watching HBO.
IYENGAR: That’s what I want to go back and look at, is when they ask about TV, I can’t imagine it’s sitting in front of a TV set.
OLIVER: I think a lot of is streaming.
IYENGAR: Streaming or it could be in the middle of a social media post. It could be very much intermingled with social media activity. I don’t know how they ask that question. It’s easily discoverable though because it’s on their website and everything.
OLIVER: The basic takeaway from the research you’ve done and that you’ve read is that it’s not so much the internet that killed reading as television and radio?
IYENGAR: I don’t know. You look at the time use survey and you keep seeing this discrepancy of, on the one hand, TV and reading, maybe social media in there. You might conclude that that’s the big bear, TV. I think the reason I’m hesitating a little is because, again, this is all correlational, but when you look at the co-occurrence of this with the rise of social media, and particularly some of these declines happening and being accelerated during a period when social media is even more prolific, I guess we just question whether there’s any kind of relationship there because so many educators and others have attended to perhaps excessive social media usage, especially among the young, eroding certain patterns of cognition. If that’s the case, then we would assume that some of that is bearing out in these reading numbers as well. I don’t have a hard answer for that.
The Honest Broker
With Jared Henderson, I talked about everything from the Philistine Supremacy to The Oxford Book of English Verse, with discussions of scholarship and criticism, beauty, modern American novels, and more, in-between. This was the day I had vertigo, and I had to leap out of poor Jared’s car to be ill about half an hour before the recording, which will account for any lapses on my part.
Rasheed Griffith
With my colleague at the Meratus Center, Rasheed Griffith I discussed Submission by Michele Houellebecq. I am perhaps more of a sentimentalist when interpreting Houellebecq. Rasheed writes:
In this podcast episode Rasheed and Henry take Submission seriously as a work of literature, not merely as a provocation. They examine Houellebecq’s use of J.-K. Huysmans as the novel’s hidden key, the meaning of the epigraph from En route, and the book’s larger preoccupation with decadence, desiccation, faith, and civilizational exhaustion. The discussion moves beyond the usual journalistic reading of the novel as a simple warning about Islamization and instead asks whether Islam in the book functions as cause, consequence, mirror, temptation, or verdict.
This episode contains spoilers!