James Marriott

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[upbeat music] Today is August sixteenth, twenty twenty-six, and my guest is author James Marriott of The Times of London, where he is a columnist.

His Substack is Cultural Capital.

He was first here in July of twenty twenty-five talking about reading.

In some ways it's good that I think probably if it has a, that is, it does have some kind of future.

I, I guess it does still make me sad that it, you know, has to be, I think it's slightly more artificial and it will be less part of our inevitable lives in the way that it once was.

My guest today has been James Marriott.

His book is The New Dark Ages.

A third of British adults who used to read for pleasure don't anymore, and according to the OECD, literacy itself, not just the habit of reading, is declining or stagnating across most of the developed world.

In a new book, The New Dark Ages, James Marriott argues that we're living through a great unwinding of a retreat from the written word and the kind of rational, analytical mind that print culture built up over five centuries, back towards something closer to the pre-literate world, one dominated not by books, but by images, screens and short-form video.

I'm Tanjil Rashid and you're listening to The New Society from The New Statesman.

In this episode, I'm joined by James Marriott to ask, are we really heading back into the dark? You have just written a book, The New Dark Ages, which I have to say is quite a dramatic title.

I mean, the first Dark Age led to a contraction in literacy to a small clerical elite, basically monks in little islands of literacy, while the masses apparently lost the culture of reading that apparently flourished in the Roman world.

Now, is this what you're saying we're living through now?

But There is a rational, sober argument to be made here, as well as purely me

being an old man shouting at clouds.

More than half of American adults say they've not read a single book for pleasure in the past year.

The panic is summed up in The New Dark Ages, a just-published polemic by James Marriott.

He rounds up the evidence that reading is in decline, placing most of the blame on smartphones, which he calls predators of our attention.

Drawing on Walter Ong, a cultural historian, Mr. Marriott explains how oral delivery often employs a back-looping structure, where the speaker rambles and repeats as they hone their argument on the go.

SSE believes that more secure, affordable electricity starts at home.

Find out more at sse.com. [upbeat jingle] Hello, I'm Hugo Rifkind, and now we're unpacking the politics of the day, from Labor's continuing search for a way to block Reform's mega donations, to why Zak Polanski is campaigning in Urdu, and also we're gonna hear James Marriott reluctantly being forced to, forced to agree that reading is quite good.

Uh, joining me, two columnists that Donald Trump would probably refer to as, uh, well, a pairing that Donald Trump would probably refer to as one of the naturals of all time, it is Times columnist James Marriott.

Hello.

Reading is good.

Uh, on the topic of AI, James, uh...

Oh yeah, let's listen to Michael Gove once more.

And I think that one of the people who has diagnosed the problem best is the Times writer, James Marriott.

There's a book about cycling addiction from Phil Cavell.

There's the ever-present theme of AI, a book about her nobody reads anymore from the Times columnist James Marriott-

Yes

...which I think is probably something that, uh, certainly I can identify with as well.

On that basis, we have two prime candidates in the studio with me now.

James Marriott is here, the columnist from The Times.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

I worry that I'm too normal.

So yeah, if you think I'm a weirdo, that's quite helpful.

yes now let's start basically looking through what we have to cover most of it is all about james marriott so we have to start with as it should be that you have a book out called the new dark ages now i gather and i'm surprised by this because i didn't see the invite in my inbox but i gather you've had the book launch and it was a lavish affair is that right

Yeah, it was in the upstairs room of a pub, somewhat due to my disorganisation.

So I think there's been very interesting recently.

There's been a new book by a Times journalist in London called James Marriott.

There's been a very powerful article in The Atlantic magazine by Rose Horovich recently.

We

If you start out treating that like marathon running, you'll suddenly find that it feels like the most pleasurable thing in the world.

That's James Marriott, who's just released a book called The New Dark Age is the End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society.

And my joke about how many people will buy that is not based on the merit of the book, but just that if he's right that we're post-literate, maybe there would be many books to sell.

But he has also made a three-part series for Radio 4 called How Reading Made Us, which you can hear on BBC Sounds.

Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, literary editor for The Spectator, and this week I'm joined by the Times columnist and now author James Marriott, whose new book is The New Dark Ages, The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society.

James, that's a very alarming title and subtitle.

Are we doomed?