Descending to a post-literate culture

Those who most need to grasp this message will find it too long. They won't read it.

"…For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.
The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold's famous phrase, "the best that has been thought and said".

The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposelessness afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative…"

https://open.substack.com/pub/jmarriott/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Dark Academia: A Starter Pack

The genre — characterized by Gothic intrigue and a liberal arts aesthetic — grew out of Donna Tartt's cult favorite campus novel, "The Secret History." Here's where to start.

Dark academia exploded like a firework from a single book: Donna Tartt's 1992 debut "The Secret History," a classic campus novel with the murky atmosphere of the Gothic tradition. When it became clear that a follow-up would not be swiftly forthcoming, a whole array of books — plus a thriving digital subculture (R.I.P. peak Tumblr) — appeared in Tartt's wake, striving to recapture the magic of reading "The Secret History" for the first time.

Dark academia is neatly summed up in the first chapter of its founding text, when the protagonist identifies his fatal flaw as "a morbid longing for the picturesque." Put those three elements — morbidness, longing, the picturesque — in a jar, shake 'em and dump the contents into a school setting: That's dark academia. Characters in chunky cardigans contemplating murder in cold, musty archives. Intimidating cliques of hot people in secret societies. Queer longing sublimated into Latin translation (and vice versa). Here, across genres and age ranges, are some of Tartt's worthiest successors...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/books/dark-academia-books.html?smid=em-share

2025 National Book Award finalists

Today, the National Book Foundation announced the finalists in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People's Literature for the 2025 National Book Awards.

https://lithub.com/here-are-the-2025-national-book-awards-finalists/