The stack of unread books beside my bed keeps getting taller and taller.

That’s mostly due to my habit of acquiring new novels faster than I can read the ones I already have.

Summer vacation is thus prime time to put a dent in the pile. Whether it’s on the beach, in the park or on the balcony, there’s nothing like getting absorbed in a paperback and losing all track of time.

But some of my other recent reading suggests this may soon be a relic of the past.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Rose Horowitch’s essay The End of Reading Is Here, published in The Atlantic.

No, don’t ask ChatGPT for a synopsis, allow me.

The article examines all the signs that the post-literate era once predicted by the likes of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman is upon us. Tracing the arc from the dawn of television to the arrival of the internet, from the ubiquity of smartphones to the spread of social media, from the popularity of visually driven platforms to the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, the piece examines how these technological shifts are changing what, how, how much and why we read. They’re even affecting our ability to read — or at least to comprehend complex written material, Horowitch explains.

This of course has profound implications for our brains and attention spans, for our children and society, for education and politics. But the very essence of what makes us human is being altered by our slow abandonment of this activity.

It may seem........

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