Good Morning,
Every few years America convenes a panic about young people abandoning culture. Today’s stories suggest we’ve been watching the wrong generation. Since 2003, daily reading time among older Americans has nearly halved. BUT it’s the young whose reading habits are growing (New York Times). And they’re not just holding: Gen Z is choosing culture that puts bodies in rooms together, movie theaters included (New York Times), buying novels by the pallet because BookTok said so (New Yorker), and nursing a curious nostalgia for decades they never lived in (Big Think). The generation raised on screens turns out to be the one hungriest for what screens can’t deliver. That’s not a paradox, it’s a market opportunity.
Governments, meanwhile, keep confirming culture’s power by trying to control it. Hong Kong authorities delivered an unsubtle warning to the city’s booksellers (AP), while the White House’s fixation on the Smithsonian’s version of American history is less about museums than about who gets to narrate the country (New York Times).
Fitting, then, that a Warsaw exhibition argues the Surrealists were the original anti-fascists (ARTnews).
All of our stories below.
