There's nothing new to say in any of these "Americans Can't Read" pieces, yet still I read them with morbid fascination. To zoom through the typical argument: if you count subtitled TikToks and Temu product descriptions, everyone still reads. It's just the novels and newspapers that are suffering. A literary elite reads more than ever thanks to e-readers and substack, but the global median trends downward. This is bad for our brains and our university professors' sanity, and portends a post-literate, thoughtless society. If we've passed peak literacy, we're still literate enough to consider this a universal problem. We still...