Podcast Club ONLINE: Our "Post-Literate" Society & How Reading Changes Us
Details
PLEASE NOTE: We require that attendees listen to the podcast before the meeting to optimize discussion. (Podcast links appear when you click on "Read more" below.)
According to this week's podcast guest, Rose Horowitch, America is now a post-literate society. Clearly, almost all of us can read, and you're reading this now. So what she means by "post-literate" is that, although we're surrounded by text, a large number of us have lost interest in book-length text, which involves richer, more complicated content. Instead, we read short, simple text like emails, text messages, X posts, short articles, and summaries, and we check out videos on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. This, Horowitch says, has and is changing the way we think, our engagement with complex ideas, our ability to think for ourselves, our relationships, and politics. Beyond discussing these transformations, Horowitch also presents data related to reading, considers the history of information technologies, provides thoughts on where we may be heading, and much more. This week's podcast is The Gray Area, with guest host Jonquilyn Hill.
Rose Horowitch is a staff writer at The Atlantic and covers culture, higher education, and societal trends. She recently authored the widely discussed July 2026 cover story for that publication, which was entitled The End of Reading Is Here (see below for link to article). Horowitch is a graduate of Yale University.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/id1081584611?i=1000781906179
or
https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area (TO USE THIS LINK, GO TO THE BLACK-BOX PLAYLIST AND CHOOSE THE EPISODE ENTITLED "We're postliterate". ONLY PLAY THAT EPISODE!!!!)
(52 min.)
OPTIONAL READING: Here is a link to a Google Doc with the Horowitch's The Atlantic article. It is long but highly recommended!
What's a podcast club?
It's like a book club for podcasts. Each week we discuss an interesting and currently-relevant episode from podcasters like Ezra Klein, Michael Shermer, or Russ Roberts. We start off as a large group and spend most of the time talking in small break-out groups, which we remix 3 times during the course of the evening. Our conversations are casual and open. We ask that everyone speak respectfully at all times, and we encourage free and concise discussion relevant to the week's podcast topic. To do this, we try to adhere to Grice's Maxims: https://bit.ly/2p4uSQm
Ultimately, the idea is to help each other think a little differently, learn a thing or two and have some fun.