The New Dark Ages: How Screens Broke Our Reading Brains

A review of James Marriott’s new book The New Dark Ages, framed by a parent’s mounting dread over children who no longer read—teenage boys in particular, whose media diet has narrowed to low-grade YouTube stunts. What began as scattered anecdotes from friends in academia has hardened into data: measurable declines in reading comprehension among students and an even steeper collapse in reading for pleasure among adults and children alike.

The obvious culprit is smartphones, but Marriott argues the real inflection point came decades earlier with television, echoing Neil Postman’s 1985 warning in Amusing Ourselves to Death that a medium biased toward triviality and charisma corrodes the reasoned discourse democracy depends on. He traces literacy’s long arc—its collapse after antiquity, revival from the 12th century, acceleration through printing, Protestant Bible-reading, and the Enlightenment—and credits sustained reading with expanding empathy, letting readers inhabit the inner lives of a servant girl or an enslaved man and, in doing so, quietly undermining rigid social hierarchies.

The peak came in the early-to-mid 20th century, just as television arrived to unwind it. US household TV ownership jumped from 1% in 1948 to over half by 1954, reorganizing homes and social life around the screen and steadily devouring leisure time—40% of it by 1995, per Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. The piece ends on the ominous note of the ‘reverse Flynn Effect,’ the broad IQ declines now showing up across Western countries, suggesting the shift from page to screen carries cognitive costs we are only beginning to measure.