Worth listening - the slide into a postliterate age

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 12:25:58 +1100

“It’s hard to be an influencer via a newspaper.” That one line from James Marriott explains more about politics in 2026 than most of the punditry I have heard this year.

The New York Times podcast Interesting Times has handed its microphone to a series of guest hosts, and Mary Harrington’s turn is a cracker. She talks with Marriott, a Times of London columnist and author of The New Dark Ages. His case is that as short video displaces reading, we drift back towards an oral culture, where emotion, personality and tribe do the work that argument used to do. “Postliterate doesn’t mean illiterate,” he says. It means text is no longer central to daily life.

The detail that stuck is Harrington’s informal count on a flight: roughly one passenger in ten was reading anything long. Marriott is honest about the data. The American Time Use Survey shows leisure reading down about 40 per cent in two decades, but its definition of reading is broad. He is gloomy about reversing it too: “I don’t think communications revolutions get reversed.” The best turn comes late, when they ask what the medieval habit of storing scholarship in trained memory might teach a culture that remembers everything and nothing.

It is a 49-minute listen. Worth it.

Worth listening

That Daily Brain Rot Break Is Taking Us Back to the Dark Ages

Interesting Times, The New York Times
Guest host Mary Harrington with James Marriott
8 October 2026 · 48 min

Inside the episode

What "post-literacy" means and the data behind it
Why reading is hard, and Walter Ong on oral versus literate cultures
Literacy as an engine for democracy, and tribal politics without it
Medieval literary culture, and remembering everything and nothing online
Bukele's visual politics, monarchy versus dictatorship, and whether postliteracy is a right-wing phenomenon
Whether we can resist the slide

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NYT episode page and transcript

That Daily Brain Rot Break Is Taking Us Back to the Dark Ages - Interesting Times, The New York Times, October 2026

Rambling Rows

Worth listening - the slide into a postliterate age