Does anyone read books anymore?
Pleasure reading among American adults is dropping every year. College students ostensibly can’t handle articles, let alone whole novels; shortform video is rotting our brains, and Walter Ong, famous for his theory on the transition from “oral” to “literate” cultures is having a moment — but only because we appear to be transitioning in reverse.
At Asterisk, we tend to be contrarians: We don’t really worry that we’re living through the wholesale collapse of literacy culture (our readers keep going up). Still, we can’t deny that the trends are in the wrong direction for sustained engagement with longform writing. As purveyors of such texts, this naturally makes us sad. But — as contrarians — we are also obligated to ask: Is this really such a bad thing?
Books are sources of great and enduring pleasure, but is it really a loss to society if people find their fun elsewhere? One can read for information, but — much as we hate to admit it — some of the best-informed people we know don't bother with full-length books. Too often modern nonfiction is more an excuse for a press tour than anything else. And sure: reading is probably good for our attention spans, but we don’t want to justify reading the same way doctors prescribe exercise.
And yet. We could debate the instrumental value of books until George R.R. Martin 1 finishes his series, but we hold it to be self-evident that something deeper — we would even say spiritual — is lost when we lose our love for long-form. We read books to be moved more deeply. We read to see the world anew, to spend time with and internalize those ways of seeing. We buy books to surround ourselves, physically, with lives and perspectives other than our own. Also: books are beautiful. Our bookshelves are windows into our minds and personalities. On a first date, are you asking about their favorite book, or favorite influencer? When we make contact with the aliens, are you giving them Substack, or Middlemarch?
As hobbies go, reading is a good one. More to the point, it’s ours. So whatever the rest of the world is doing, we’ve dedicated this issue to books and the people who love them. Alan Levinovitz, one of the foremost book-lovers of our acquaintance, brings us a story about the magic of old fashioned physical book collecting. (He also has a present for you if you're reading this in print.) If digital books are more your speed, librarian and book historian Monica Westin brings us an essay on the early promise of the universal online library, why it doesn’t exist, and what it would take to make it real.
You might have heard of the Silicon Valley canon. Afra Wang has the inside story on what tech giants are reading in China (it’s not as different as you might think). And Celine Nguyen weaves together W. David Marx’s Blank Space and Tricia Romano’s history of the Village Voice — along with the French new wave, html art, and much more — to explain the role of cultural criticism in the 21st century.
Some books are important as cultural objects. Others have a much more tangible impact on the world we live in. Of these, very few can match the impact of the DSM. Awais Aftab walks us through its role in shaping American psychiatric practice, and the debates which have dogged it for decades. Aaron Laboree brings us a book that couldn’t be more different while still technically covering the inner workings of the human mind: Carl Jung’s mystical, perplexing, and enduringly influential autobiography. And while Reputation and Power, Daniel Carpenter’s monumental history of the FDA, might not have the same cultural cachet, Adam Kroetsch demonstrates that it's an essential text for understanding the impact of drug regulation in America.
Bored of talking about Abundance? Try Democracy on the March, an account of the Tennessee Valley Authority by David Lilienthal, the man who ran it. As Kevin Hawickhorst shows, the book is a model for liberal advocates of material prosperity — but we have just as much to learn from what Lilienthal leaves out. Harry Law brings us another example of America's past looking towards the future with the book-length 1977 NASA report Space Settlements: A Design Study. If you’ve watched Interstellar or The Expanse, you’re familiar with the report’s legacy (picture a cylinder arcing through deep space, the interior carpeted lush greenery). What you might not know is what its life and death can tell us about the institutional pressures which have shaped the space program. And Karthik Tadepalli looks at two recent NBER papers that cast doubt on the premise that ideas are getting harder to find (fine, not books, but to be fair, they’re very long).
Finally, we're not completely over modern nonfiction. Clara reviews If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s not entirely successful attempt to update their argument for the inevitability of AI doom for the age of LLMs. We’ve also got an interview with Cate Hall about her upcoming book on Silicon Valley’s favorite buzzword: agency.
Literacy might be in decline, so we feel especially lucky to have readers like you. We hope you enjoy this issue. Take your time with it. And when you’re done, pick up a book.
