The latest from storyteller James Tucker!

Doom is here, according to The Atlantic’s recent article (linked below), with fewer and fewer people reading so much as a newspaper or magazine, let alone a novel or a book of history.  Failure to learn to think, to know.  Brief videos popular.  Television shows too long for today’s attention spans.  Articles about a professor at Brown University who essentially proved that nearly all his students cheated on their mid-term exams by using A.I.

What to make of all this?

Are the people who read and learn, and writers who make storytelling (fiction and non-fiction) an essential part of their lives, wasting their time?  There’s no payoff for all that time, all of that reading and writing, is there?  Do these art forms of the past have nothing to do with today?  Do they accomplish anything or have any utility?  Do they help the reader or writer make money and gain fame?  Can you know nothing and use A.I. tools to get through life, outsourcing critical thinking to a machine, and still be “successful”, however that word is defined?

While there are many ways to answer these questions, I’ll say only that the people who read, write, and seek knowledge understand why the message of doom doesn’t apply to them.  The riches are too obvious to ignore, to regret, to turn away from.  As critic Jerry Saltz said about art, it’s for anyone, but not for everyone.  All of us make the choice, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

And the others, who don’t have the time or the patience to read and learn?  It’s for them that doom is waiting.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618