By Yuval Levin
(Basic Books, 352 pages, $25)
An important conservative intellectual was here teaching an attentive post-graduate audience about the contributions of a dozen intellectual leaders of the early conservative movement. But it soon became obvious from the questions posed to him that the students were confused.
After a bit of further discussion, one of the youngish audience’s brightest intellectuals blurted out to the speaker: “The problem is that your generation read serious books and ours has not.”
While a decades-old Pew study suggested that the young still read books, the more detailed studies show that most of this is light reading. Indeed, the more academic studies suggest that reading serious books has declined markedly. Today’s “reading” seems to be “all about the screens.” There is reading, but it is short texts required at school and Instagram captions, rather than long-form…
