Literacy is declining sharply across the West. In the era of vertical video, who has the time or concentration to read a long article — let alone a whole book?

As we lose the ability to read long-form text, we might also be losing the capacity for democratic deliberation and self-governance. That’s the argument this week’s guest, the Times of London columnist James Marriott, makes in his recent book, “The New Dark Ages.” He sits down with guest host Mary Harrington to discuss our return to oral culture, the political consequences and what we can learn from the medieval era about storing information in a digital world.

Note: As we work on relaunching “Interesting Times,” the show will feature a series of guest hosts in the coming months.

00:00 Intro
00:52 Post-Literacy
02:05 The Data Behind the Decline
05:13 The Shift Toward Video
08:48 Why Reading Is Hard
10:45 Walter Ong on Orality and Literacy
14:27 Tribal Politics and Emotion
17:16 The Reading Revolution
21:14 Literacy as an Engine for Democracy
25:15 Scarcity and Authority
27:27 Lessons from Medieval Times
30:13 Remembering Everything and Nothing
33:29 How Bukele Commands the Attention Economy
37:04 Monarchy vs. Democracy
40:16 Other Postliterate Leaders
43:29 Can We Resist the Slide?
46:33 Closing

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

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TikTok Is Taking Us Back to the Dark Ages

Interesting Times

TikTok Is Taking Us Back to the Dark Ages