A third of British adults who used to read for pleasure don't anymore.
And according to the OECD, literacy itself, not just the habit of it, is declining or stagnating across most of the developed world.
In a new book, The New Dark Ages, James Marriott argues that we're living through a great unwinding: a retreat from the written word and the kind of rational, analytical mind that print culture built over five centuries, back towards something closer to the pre-literate world: one dominated not by books, but by images, screens, and short-form video.
In this episode, Tanjil Rashid is joined by James Marriott to ask: are we really heading back into the dark?
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